A year of the tablet
So, it’s been a bit over a year with Yakumo, my 14 inch tablet PC. It’s been an odd ride, as it’s my first laptop. But, really, I love the thing. So, let’s review the thing with some 20/20 retrospective!
In 2007, I bought myself a nice Christmas present: a Gateway C-140XL tablet PC. It was on sale for about $1000, a damn steal compared to tablet PC prices before. I’ve been in love with the idea of one for years, going back to when they first came out. I had long lusted after a Toshiba, but after they stopped making the model I wanted, I looked around elsewhere. The Gateway was, at the time, a rather interesting beast. It’s 14 inches, which used to be one of the two standard sizes for these things, but now most are 12. It also had an option for a real graphics chipset (as opposed to one of Intel’s utter shit built in graphics chip). While the ATI X2300 isn’t real great, it was miles and miles ahead of what was available at the time. These three things were what sealed the deal.
After getting the item, I was enthralled. The love affair lasted quite a while, actually. But, over time, I started to notice the little things. The fit and finish isn’t fantastic, but is pretty good. The screen hinge is very sticky and I swear I’m going to break it sometimes. It is also a bit heavy; not noticeable until you hold it for a while, really. The heat exhaust port is on the right side, which is really annoying for a right handed person like me using a mouse next to it. It can also get rather hot when the graphics and CPU are wound up to max, but it’s not any worse than any other laptop in it’s size.
The screen itself has some issues. It’s 14 inches at 1280x768 resolution. It’s not too bad in the pixels per inch way, but it really, really feels cramped in some applications. It’s also a TN panel; a good, 8-bit TN panel, but still it has horrible viewing angles and discolors and fades at oblique angles. It does hit the sRGB color space well enough, so at least after calibration it’s not too off in color. I’d love to have a better panel in this thing, but it isn’t horrible or painful to use.
The inbuilt keyboard has been OK. It’s not great and I can’t really type on it all day like my desktop’s clicky board. But it’s consistent in action, doesn’t bind up, and hasn’t faded in time. The trackpad is … like any other trackpad; I hate the things, but it works well enough. My main gripe is that it’s too close to the keyboard and my thumbs occasionally tap it, moving the pointer and/or clicking things on me. The tablet buttons on the screen are pretty fair. I don’t use them at all except the arrow keys when I’m in slate mode, mainly because they do things I just plain don’t need. I’ve hacked things in Windows to allow me to customize them all, but just never found much use in them.
Connectivity is pretty fair. Like just about every other PC laptop, it still sports an analogue VGA monitor port; this is just plain annoying for me, since I can’t drive my big ass screen from the laptop. I don’t really see why we can’t move on to DVI or Display Port (which are fully backwards compatible via adapter to old VGA). Most of the time, though, you’ll never worry about this. Another annoyance is the Firewire port: it’s the four-pin i.Link style, not the six-pin powered type. This matters for anything that needs power and doesn’t have another way of getting it except the Firewire port. This is only a subset of external hard drives, I think, but the small fiddly connector is still annoying to use. Three USB ports, SDHC card reader, PCMCIA slot, gigabit Ethernet, and a freak 56k modem round out the rest of the ports. There’s also a Bluetooth and 802.11g wireless network radio inside. Most everything of this is Intel made (thus both solid and having drivers in Windows by default). The only thing that Vista doesn’t have drivers for off the bat is the SDHC and modem, and only one of those is likely to be of use to most anyone. It might also be a good idea to install an updated Bluetooth stack in Vista, but that’s a major pain in the ass to get your hands upon.
The onboard sound chip is, well, passable. No major hang-ups, no crazy system extensions, but it’s stuck with only headphone output and microphone input. The built-in microphone is workable but pretty lame. The speakers, since they face down from the front, sound very crappy most of the time. Good for Windows beeps and boops, but that’s it. I’d have loved to see some more ins and outs (like a line-in or digital in/out), but it’s good enough for general work.
Now, how about that part that made me want this thing at all, the Wacom pen and tablet behind the screen. It’s an active (meaning that the pen plays a part in making it work) screen digitizer with 256 levels of pressure sensitivity. Now, yes, the Intuos and Cintiqs have more, but the difference isn't that great in practice. The pen itself isn’t as nice, though. The default nibs are hard, so I replaced it with one from my Intuos. It also lacks an eraser and only has one side button. I plan to pick up a compatible pen that has these things sometime, but finding older, compatible Cintiq pens isn’t easy. The pen also lacks the real fancy features (like tilt, rotation, and such) that the real high end 6D Intuos pen offers, but for 98% of my Painter work, this doesn’t even come into play.
Now, this little beast has proven itself rather apt to just about anything I’ve tossed at it. It’s not as fast as Pai, my desktop. But it handles almost everything normal without a sweat. It isn’t a gaming monster, but can still play some fun ones at full resolution. It can also trundle about in Maya without much effort, so long as the model complexity isn’t too high. Of course, working that hard kills the battery in no time flat. Kept in lower gear, the battery lasts about 4 to 5 hours, which is pretty fair.
Overall, I’m rather satisfied with the thing. I wouldn’t really recommend trying to buy one, since Gateway has discontinued their entire line of tablets. You can still find them on sale here and there, though Gateway’s support is rather questionable. But, then again, mine has been solidly working the whole time, so I’m not too concerned. At this point, if the thing goes belly-up in a totally unrecoverable way, it’s gotten enough use that I guess replacing it with something new isn’t that bad a deal.
Sadly, there isn’t anything out there that really is enticing. It seems that the Tablet PC market is shrinking into supplying the exact same thing from everybody. There aren’t any new models that have over 1280x800 resolution and only one that has a larger than 12 inch screen. There’s only a couple models that has a real GPU (and both use AMD CPUs, which are still a bit hotter running in mobiles). Everything else is 12 inches, 1280x800 resolution, and use Intel’s decent GMA 4500MHD. Well, ignoring that retarded expensive modded MacBook Pro anyways. As things stand, the only thing I’d consider for replacing Yakumo with is the last generation Lenovo ThinkPad X61 Tablet with the SXGA+ screen (1440x1050 resolution); it’s sadly only running the Intel GMA X3100, which is a notch below my current ATI X2300. Sadly, that screen is totally not made anymore, so finding one is a fun hunt. My only hope is that the future yields something new and exciting.