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Contents 
Introduction
Fujitsu Stylistic T4020C
Lenovo ThinkPad X41
Acer TravelMate C310
Toshiba Portege M200
Hewlett-Packard TC4200
How we tested
Specifications
Editor's choice
About RMIT |
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The ThinkPad X41 tablet was the only sub-2kg tablet we reviewed. It's very thin but doesn't include a built-in optical drive -- since you can always go back to your work desk and plug in an external USB optical drive, how important is an optical drive when you're on your feet?
The ThinkPad featured the slowest processor out of all the units tested. It contained an Intel Pentium 1.5GHz M processor and featured 512MB of memory, Intel 915 graphics, and a 60GB drive. The 12.1-inch screen was very sharp and the colours were good. The brightness doesn't go up that much but it's still more than acceptable.
This tablet has good connectivity options with both wireless and wired networks with a, b, and g supported, as well as Bluetooth and Gigabit Ethernet. It doesn't offer FireWire or S-Video.
It has a fingerprint scanner like the Fujitsu but what separates these two scanners is where they are located. On the ThinkPad it's on the LCD itself, rather than on the keyboard like the Fujitsu. This is a much better idea because being a tablet PC you're going to be using it in tablet mode alot of the time and you don't want to be flipping the LCD constantly to get at it. The scanner uses a similar process to the Fujitsu when enrolling a finger.
The ThinkPad's keypad also deserves a mention -- it separates the functional keys from the standard keys and the buttons are a nice size. The only thing it's missing is a glide pad. Most standard ThinkPad notebooks feature both a trackball and glide pad but we suppose, with the form factor used here, it can only fit one mechanism.
This tablet is not a speed demon. It was the slowest, and that's because it features the slowest CPU and graphics processor of the review models. Unfortunately, at the moment you can't upgrade to a faster processor but generally speaking it is really still quite fast. The combination of a "slower" processor and small screen made this tablet run for 5.5 hours, which was a fantastic result.
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When it comes to high resolution (ie DPI, not total pixel dimensions) LCDs, I fail to see the problem. Just turn up the font size, or inform Windows that it has a high resolution display in the display control panel.
This should be done automatically by any OEM with half a brain. I would think that enabling "large fonts" is simply not that big a deal.
With that setting, you can get lots of screen "working area", plus readable, smooth, clean looking text.
There are a few broken apps out there that can't cope with non-default font sizes (this appalls me) but they're not that common, really. The worst problem with Windows its self seems to be somewhat ugly quicklaunch icons and the XP Pro login screen background image being too small for the dialog. An OEM could trivially fix both of these.
I'm one of the frustrated community of users who /want/ high res LCDs, because I like smooth readable text and the option to fit lots on the screen when I need to. It's frustrating to see reviews like this panning a laptop for having a good display.
I'd be happy to hear from you if you have any particular views on this - craig@postnewspapers.com.au .