Uncertain Want
My tablet pc has been acting up lately. Blue screens of death with cryptic stop errors on them that don't stay up long enough for me to try to figure out what caused them, mostly. Something about an IRQ, but it's beside the point.
The point is, the tablet may be dying.
This is unfortunate, as I have been using it for note-taking and homework-doing in my comp sci courses and it has been magnificent and I don't want to lose that ability. So I've been poking around a bit to see what a replacement would cost me.
For an actual tablet pc, it looks like it would cost me between $500 and however much I was willing to pay.
And then I found this: The iRex iLiad
And I'm not sure what to make of it. It seems really shiny from their website, and most of the reviews back it up, and I swoon at the idea of writeable e-Ink. But at the same time, the reviews also had a couple of things that were so-so and I can't tell what the impact would be on my studies, since I'd want to be making heavy use of the note-taking functionality and want about the same if not better responsiveness than I get from my tablet. Also, that $700 price tag seems like a bit more than it's worth. That's really the question for me. I can see myself getting it and if it works the way I want it to--or close--I would probably consider the money well-spent... but if not, that's a little more money than I want to spend on something that'll mostly just be sitting on a shelf.
(The other thing I can think of is that it's _not_ a laptop and doesn't support a lot of laptop-y things, but the main things that I used my tablet pc for were notetaking, reading, surfing the web/e-mail, and a little bit of development work. It looks like it does a good job of the first two and might even support the third, but probably not the fourth. It would be a bit of a disappointment, but I could get used to it--especially if I could get software that would convert my writing to text and therefore I could still write code on it and just copy it to the target box when I got back. Wouldn't allow for debugging, of course, but I could still get the major framework parts in place... and it's also a Linux-based operating system, and has at least something of a homebrew community, which seems like it has a _lot_ of potential.)
Anybody out there have experience with this?
The point is, the tablet may be dying.
This is unfortunate, as I have been using it for note-taking and homework-doing in my comp sci courses and it has been magnificent and I don't want to lose that ability. So I've been poking around a bit to see what a replacement would cost me.
For an actual tablet pc, it looks like it would cost me between $500 and however much I was willing to pay.
And then I found this: The iRex iLiad
And I'm not sure what to make of it. It seems really shiny from their website, and most of the reviews back it up, and I swoon at the idea of writeable e-Ink. But at the same time, the reviews also had a couple of things that were so-so and I can't tell what the impact would be on my studies, since I'd want to be making heavy use of the note-taking functionality and want about the same if not better responsiveness than I get from my tablet. Also, that $700 price tag seems like a bit more than it's worth. That's really the question for me. I can see myself getting it and if it works the way I want it to--or close--I would probably consider the money well-spent... but if not, that's a little more money than I want to spend on something that'll mostly just be sitting on a shelf.
(The other thing I can think of is that it's _not_ a laptop and doesn't support a lot of laptop-y things, but the main things that I used my tablet pc for were notetaking, reading, surfing the web/e-mail, and a little bit of development work. It looks like it does a good job of the first two and might even support the third, but probably not the fourth. It would be a bit of a disappointment, but I could get used to it--especially if I could get software that would convert my writing to text and therefore I could still write code on it and just copy it to the target box when I got back. Wouldn't allow for debugging, of course, but I could still get the major framework parts in place... and it's also a Linux-based operating system, and has at least something of a homebrew community, which seems like it has a _lot_ of potential.)
Anybody out there have experience with this?