Important Notice: I am not interested in what Cory Doctorow has termed “helpiness” (in analogy with Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness”) namely comments that have the general syntactical form of useful advice, without the content of useful advice. I don’t want to hear about how I really should’ve bought a Mac, or ought to be running Linux, or whatever. This is commentary on the specific Tablet PC that I purchased recently, and nothing more.
As noted here a few times, I recently acquired a Lenovo ThinkPad X61 Tablet PC, which does, in fact, have the touch screen option, though I didn’t think it did. I’ve been using it fairly regularly for a couple of weeks now, and I thought I’d post a few impressions, on the off chance that they might be useful to anybody thinking about buying one.
I had previously used an older Toshiba tablet that I borrowed from ITS at work, and this is a definite step up from that. It’s lighter, the screen is sharper, and it’s generally more responsive. I wish the screen were bigger, as at the maximum resolution, I can’t fit as much onto the screen as I would like, but it looks good, and doesn’t usually require me to tap the pen nine times to get it to register. I can actually key in passwords with the pen, and have some confidence that they’ll work.
In the laptop configuration, the keyboard is smaller than I would like, but there isn’t a laptop made that has a keyboard I find comfortable to use. It’s got a “Fn” key where “Ctrl” ought to be in the lower left, which is somewhat maddening, but again, inescapable with laptops. The pointer control is one of those ungainly little stick things in the middle of the keyboard, which doesn’t work terribly well, but at least it’s not a touch pad. Anyway, it doesn’t really matter, because I can just use the tablet pen to click where I want to be.
In tablet mode, I’ve been very impressed with the improvement in the handwriting recognition. I still haven’t figured out how to get it to consistently recognize a lowercase “L,” but it’s way better than on the older machine. The extra button controls are also well placed and useful– I like the fact that the button to change the screen orientation just toggles through the four possible orientations, unlike the Toshiba, which used some sort of flaky sensor to try to guess how you had it tilted. I would prefer to be able to set the default configuration for the different modes to sensible values (for whatever reason, when it goes into tablet mode, they have the screen upside down from what I think it the correct arrangement), but at least it’s easy to fix.
Battery life so far has been very good– 3-4 hours of continuous operation. I haven’t timed it exactly, but it’s basically good for an entire NFL football game, which is about as long as I’m likely to sit in one place using it around here.
Of course, there are glitches, and it’s hard to tell which of them are hardware and which are software. It’s running Vista, so I’m inclined to put a lot of my troubles at Microsoft’s feet.
The biggest problem by far that I’ve had is that it doesn’t always come out of sleep mode correctly. There have been occasions where nothing I did seemed to wake it back up, and others where it has come partway back up, and hung up on some Windows splash screen or another (usually “Locking Your Computer,” which you would think it would’ve done before going to sleep, but whatever). I’ve had to do a hard power off several times, roughly every three days. This is sub-optimal, and I’m not sure whether to blame Lenovo or Microsoft for that.
Other glitches are more obviously the fault of Vista. I downloaded and installed the Corel Grafigo demo, but when I try to run it, it tells me that I don’t have sufficient privileges to be able to run it, and should open it from a system administrator account. Which is funny, because I am an administrator for the machine… I’m almost positive that this will turn out to be a matter of the software not being updated to work with Vista, when I get around to contacting Corel.
There’s also the charming way that Windows emulates that “You are coming to a sad realization” Mac commercial. Essentially any non-Microsoft product you attempt to run triggers a “A program is attempting to do something, will you allow it?” dialog box. It doesn’t seem to learn, either– I’ve gotten the same dialog about some Lenovo application that runs at start-up the last five or six times I’ve started the machine. When I fire it up this afternoon, I’ll be looking into how to turn that off.
And, of course, there’s the charming way that Windows handles updates. I was playing around with it the other day, testing out a drawing program demo, and when the battery started to run down, I switched it back to the laptop configuration, but it didn’t change the aspect ratio of the screen, so I couldn’t see the Start menu to shut it down. It eventually popped up a dialog box informing me that it couldn’t switch to the landscape display mode while the WAN was active, which seemed a little improbable. Hitting Ctrl-Alt-Del to bring up the Task Manager just cause the whole machine to freeze up.
Hard power off, re-start. It comes up, and immediately announces that Windows has downloaded critical updates, which it would like to install. Install those, re-start, and it’s worked fine since. This is a consistent feature of Windows in my experience– when it finishes downloading new updates, it just starts breaking stuff at random until you re-start, and then it installs the updates. It drives me up the wall.
Other than that, and the flawed design paradigm of the new Office, I’m very happy with it. I’ll be spending the afternoon using it to mark up the latest draft of Chapter 7 while watching football, and occasionally surfing the web.