This Week at Mobile Tech Manor #57: Touching the Tablet

mobile-tech-manor-large-21Another week, another column sharing that week with you. Mobile Tech Manor had a lot of activity this week, with lots of gadgets leaving and some new ones taking their place.  I had the chance to get back in the Tablet PC swing and it felt great. Come on in and let’s jaw.

Gadgets in Hand

This week saw the arrival of a few new gadgets, some small and others not quite as small. The Viliv S7 UMPC hit Mobile Tech Manor early in the week, and I spent a lot of time trying to find the best usage scenario. It is as small and portable as can be, and therein lies the problem.

I write for a living, it’s what I do more than anything else in front of a computer. I don’t always need a keyboard, that’s why I like Tablets, but I absolutely have to have one to do my job. The little keyboard on the 7-inch S7 is just too small to allow touch typing. I can almost do it, but not quite. It doesn’t help that in addition to having such a small keyboard, Viliv chose to make a number of keys smaller than other adjacent keys.

This causes me to mis-type constantly, as these undersized keys are too small to hit consistently. I tried and tried but I can’t use the S7 to do any work at all, and that’s a real shame. It’s a nice device otherwise, and I did use it a lot as a slate with the screen swiveled around. It has a good touchscreen and makes a great slate device, much like the Viliv X70 that I have been using.

The X70 is a better slate than the S7 because it has no keyboard adding bulk and weight. If the UMPC can only be used in slate mode, there’s no need to have the keyboard. I will continue to give the S7 a try as time goes on, but that keyboard is making it hard.

Also arriving this week was the Lenovo ThinkPad T400s with the new multitouch feature. It had Windows 7 preinstalled and is designed to take full advantage of the new touch capabilities in the OS. I have to admit the ability to use 4 fingers on the screen simultaneously to manipulate things is cool, but I found these features to be hard to use on a laptop. I found the ergonomics to be uncomfortable for touching the screen.

Lenovo heard my complaints about multitouch notebooks and sent their x200 Tablet PC, also with multitouch. It has both an active and capacitive digitzer, so it can handle writing on the screen as well as manipulating the interface with touch. The x200 only arrived yesterday, and I haven’t put it down since it got here.

The x200 is easily the best Tablet PC I have used, and I’ve used many Tablets. It is small and light, and using the pen to write on the screen works perfectly. Microsoft has done a wonderful job with the Tablet functions in Windows 7, and I am getting great use out of it.

The addition of touch to the x200 is icing on the cake. Working the interface via touch is a natural in the slate configuration, unlike in notebook mode. Windows 7 touch features go a long way to making touch useful, and Lenovo has also done a good job integrating it with the ink capability.

Windows 7 makes it possible to pan in most windows, and sitting with the slate in my lap using my finger to scroll around the screen is simply awesome. The intellligent way that Win 7 switches between the big touch keyboard and the Tablet Input Panel (TIP) based on whether I touch the screen with my finger or the tablet pen is the way things should work.

That touch keyboard was pretty handy, and I liked the way the keys highlight when pressed. I also installed the uBoard keyboard that I have installed on every touch device I’ve used and was happy to find it works well on the x200. It stretched to the width of the screen automatically which made it nice and big for easy tapping of the keys.

I have been using Opera 10 on quite a few mobile devices since its release and I am thoroughly impressed with how well it runs. The Opera Turbo mode made it run so fast, especially when I was connected over 3G. Opera didn’t knock my old favorite Firefox out of default browser status, but it earned my respect more each day of use.

I have been overwhelmed by the sheer number of notebooks in MTM lately, so this week I had to clean house. I returned five laptops to the folks who loaned them to me, and the FedEx guy was impressed. Going back to their origin were the HP Mini 5101, Lenovo S10-2, S12, and the T400s. The T400s returned was the original model without the touch features, and it went back since the touch version came this week. It was nice getting some space back for use; every surface was covered with gear prior to sending these back.

e-Books of the Week

I finished the J. P. Beaumont series by J. A. Jance this week, and it’s amazing that I have read all 18 books in the series in just a few weeks. It was a bit sad to reach the end, but fortunately Jance has written another series involving Sheriff Joanna Brady of Arizona. Brady made an appearance in Fire and Ice, the 18th book of the series just completed. Jance wrote one novel , Partner in Crime, that stars both Beaumont and Brady, so I’m reading that now to seque between the two series.

Wrap-up

That’s the way my week was spent. New gear, and gear going away. I enjoy sharing each week with you and look forward to next week’s chat.

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