a blog by Peter Leonard
I have to admit, this is a might tempting price on a refurbished TabletPC. These are a new class of laptops which have touch-sensitive screens and special versions of Windows designed to support handwriting recognition. This review on Cnet does a good job of showing the machine from a variety of strange angles - TabletPC's often consist of a variety of different components such as a screen and keyboard which swivel and connect to each other in non-traditional ways.
What's holding me back from pulling the trigger is the knowledge that this first generation of TabletPC's is built around an older generation of hardware, including the somewhat pokey Transmeta Crusoe CPU. They have much shorter battery life than the new Centrino chipset which powers newer laptops and tablets. Because so much of the appeal of a TabletPC is in the portability and wireless nature, it seems a shame to get into the market segment with last year's power-saving technology.