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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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We tested and evaluated each of the tablet PCs based on the following criteria:
- Standard performance and compatibility benchmarks.
- Display quality including evenness, clarity, colours, and resolutions supported.
- Audio including the audio chip used and sound quality, volume level, speaker/s location, I/O and ease of use.
- Keypad including key size, spacing, layout, travel, feedback, support, and colour differentiation.
- Stylus including tips, button size, and functionality.
- Workmanship and design including ergonomics, robustness and durability.
- System expandability including the number of I/O ports, CPU, memory and hard disk size.
Business Winstone 2004
Business Winstone is a system-level, application-based benchmark that measures a PC's overall performance when running Windows-based 32-bit applications on Windows XP. Business Winstone doesn't mimic what these packages do; it runs real applications through a series of scripted activities and uses the time a PC takes to complete those activities to produce its performance scores.
The list of ten business productivity applications includes five Microsoft Office applications (Access, Excel, FrontPage, PowerPoint, and Word), Microsoft Project, an e-mail application (Lotus Notes R5), a compression program (NicoMak WinZip), an anti-virus program (Norton AntiVirus), and a Web browser (Netscape Communicator).
Business Winstone 2004 BatteryMark 1.0.1
BatteryMark measures battery life on notebook/ tablet computers running Windows 2000 or Windows XP/ Windows XP Tablet.
What to look for
- Convertible or Slate
Convertibles tend to be heavier but have larger displays and built in keypads. - Communications
Does the tablet have an integrated modem and Gigabit Ethernet, what wireless networks does it support -- 802.11 a/b/g, Bluetooth? - Battery Performance
Anything over four hours is quite good, above five hours is excellent. - Shortcut buttons
These are handy to perform several functions that you'd usually need a keyboard to perform.
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 .