Weblog 2004-10-31

I finally got a chance to briefly try out two tablet PCs, and the experience was not that good. In fact comparing with my experience with my clie, the Tablet PC Experience was much inferior.

I tried out two tablet PC, one from Toshiba and one from Fujitsu.

- Prot?g? (not M200, but the one I tried is the PIII model and weight even lighter (1.8Kg) than M200, 2kg)

- Fujitsu ST4110, $13980.

My first impression when I picked them up was that they are both heavy. No way can I single hand holding the machine and then the other hand sketch draw or write with it. Even as a portable media player, they are simply way too heavy. In fact, I got tired just 3 minutes after I left them up. In contrast, I have not problem holding my Palm up and spent hours to write notes.

My complain is the tiny space the stylus and the screen. On both tablet PC, I realized a tiny space between the tablet screen and the stylus which makes it hard to draw at the exact spot. This creates a big problem when I try to select item on the screen, something that I do almost half of the time when using A PC.

There's also some delay between each stroke when I used Paintbrush. May be the application is not optimized for Tablet PC' but I doubt that there may not be too many apps that I constantly used being updated or optimized for Tablet PC.,

The heat is also a problem. And once again, comparing with Clie, Tablet PC is like a mobile egg frier.

The Toshiba one costed HK$14000, while the Fujitsu one costed HK$15000. I am not going to spent $14000 or about and still needs to spend hours or even months to adjust myself for the tool. The fact that Tablet PC requires a special pen is also a blow.

I finally understand why Tablet PC didn't take off in HK.

I also found that those so called ultra lightweight notebook is still a burden on my bag. Even a 1Kg one can be too heavy to hold by one hand and being used as a portable media player. I think I really should wait for the maturity of those portable media player.

I said ��wait�� because I also spent some time today to check out two media players:

- MPM-201/202 (http://www.nhhongkong.com/), HK$3999.

- Creative Lab Zen Portable Media Center, HK$3998

I don��t like MPM-201 because it only supports MPEG4, but even bigger problem is that it has only 3 hours of battery life when watching video.

But the truth is that I don��t like both because of the weight. They weight twice as heavy as my IRiver IHP-140, and I consider that weight standard for any portable device that I can tolerant.

I spent $80 on a new screen protector for my Clie, and I found one very positive effect: I can write faster as the screen is free of scratch at the writing area and thus make each drawing strokes much smoother. On the other hand, I did something sort of stupid: I tried to remove this protector and stick it on again so that I can get rid of some tiny hair underneath the protector, which I consider an inferior job done. Now I actually got slightly more hair and then one or two tiny bubbles underneath the protector. They were, though, not very annoying, but so does the screen before I created these mess to myself.