Toshiba M400 Tablet PC - Thoughts
It has been about four days, two rebuilds, using my M400. At first I thought I would take a ride on the wild side with Windows Vista 5308. Many of the Toshiba features didn't work properly, Bluetooth, fingerprint logon, Hard drive accelerometer to name a few. The most annoying of the bunch was the inability to be able to use DUN with my Windows Mobile 5 EDVO phone. Bluetooth wouldn't work and the USB DUN required a reboot every time I disconnected the phone. Lucky for me I had made the recovery DVDs before I actually took the walk =).
Occasionally after an install, the Tablet hardware buttons didn't work. I don't know what the cause was but all I had to do was reinstall the driver. One other thing, if you office uses Citrix, don't install the password manager. It replaces the windows logon GINA and your fingerprint logon will no longer work. A quick uninstall of this remedied the problem.
Anyway everything is back to defaults, Windows XP and all the Toshiba drivers. For the most part I have to say everything is working as expected. I did have to hard boot a few times since the screen would turn off and I could not get it to turn back on. (I found that I had to update a bunch of the drivers from the Toshiba site. The weird problems disappeared after doing so.)
The one feature I am really happy with is the fingerprint reader. Since it is a pain to enter my password in through the virtual keyboard or switching to the keyboard (When I have the screen in Tablet mode), I was happy that I didn't have to disable the normal security features of the OS just so I didn't have to be inconvenienced.
Some other things that I really like, are the dedicated page up and page down keys on the keyboard. On my Dell 700m, you need to press the function key to utilize page up/page down. The high resolution screen, SXGA+ , is a dream for reading those e-books in portrait view. The keyboard is nice and comfortable, a little soft compared to the IBM Thinkpads.
For all those Photo enthusiasts, the high res screen in conjunction with a digitizer makes those retouching jobs a breeze. Since most graphics cards do not accelerated 2D actions as done by most graphics programs, the dual core processor makes many of these operations fast! An now you can do it anywhere you can take your Tablet!
In my last post, I mentioned that the Core Duo's seem to have Virtualization turned on. It seems that Intel has updated their processor feature set silently. Kudos to Intel. Now we have to wait for Microsoft or VMWare to get on the hardware virtualization bandwagon. There was a write-up on this feature as related to the Intel iMAC.
So far the handwriting learning curve has been relatively minor. I am really impressed with how good the handwriting recognition is. So the lack of people using a pen will decrease and good legible penmanship will rise. So have written this whole blog entry using the pen.
I don't have that much negative to say about the tablet, however I wish the default battery life was a bit longer and the cost of the accessories were much cheaper. Why would anyone spend $200 for an external charger?
A recommendation would be to make the screen a wide screen and move the battery to the rear like the Dell 700m. This will also allow you to slim down the chassis.
But in summary the Toshiba M400 is really in a class by itself. It is the only high resolution (1400x1050) Core Duo tablet on the market.