Tony’s well-written blog post tells how and why he transitioned from a 17″ “Lapzilla” to a Toshiba M200 Tablet PC, which he calls the “The Consolidator”.
What did he gain by going mobile?
* He lost several pounds to lug around
* With a smaller form-factor he regained space on his desk
* He doubled his battery life
* The Consolidator was much quieter when running
* He enjoyed working at the coffee shop
* He uses the Tablet to hold his notes
* He added a sync utility to keep files synced
* The Tablet is great for those moments of artistic inspiration.
Tony has run across some rough spots. He says the reco isn’t perfect and it can be time-consuming to handwrite things or use the speech recognition. And he misses a DVD.
The reco isn’t perfect for me either. I’ve gotten use to it. In fact, most of the time I just leave ink as ink. Programs, such as OneNote, reco the handwritting in the background and so my words are searchable. Yes, its reco isn’t any closer to perfection, however, its searching algorithms make up the some of the difference. Actually, my reality is that I often don’t search much either, but that’s another story.
I also don’t miss the DVD that much. Most of the things I install come from the Inkernet. I have noticed though that now that I’m using a Gateway M280 for Vista development–which has a built-in DVD reader/writer–that I’m beginning to enjoy it being there. The difference in experiences is that with Vista things are still very much in flux so a built in drive is good.