My laptop, a circa 2002 Sony, pretty much died yesterday. I love my Mac, but I liked having a laptop that ran Windows also. To make a long story short, I bought a HP tx2000 for an excellent price, open box. I really liked it for its size - I thought about getting a netbook and this is just a bit bigger.
It has a swivel screen that functions as a tablet. If you have one, what do you do with it? I would have loved to have one of these when I was a student, but I’m done with school for now.
Walk around your office with it. Look at people doing work with critical expression on your face, say “hm” and then write something and walk away.
For added effect lift things up to look underneath. And check for dust on top of monitors.
You could just web-surf while reclining on a couch, holding the tablet PC like a hardcover book. I find it much more comfortable than having a notebook/netbook on my lap.
I think the tx2000 has a pressure-sensitive active digitizer? If so, you can use various painting software (e.g. Corel Painter X) to make drawings/paintings.
If you ever need to edit or proofread documents, PDF Annotator is a very useful software. You can also use Word and highlight sections that you want to come back to later.
Microsoft Office OneNote is a great software for taking handwritten notes of all types.
At home or office, you can connect it to an external monitor and keyboard. A big advantage of tablet PCs is that you can swing the display around, so the keyboard is behind the screen and out of the way. Put it next to the external monitor and you have a dual-monitor setup.
I don’t have a tablet PC but this sounds like it would be a nice way to use it. Too bad there’s no tablet PCs available for cheap (like the $300 netbooks) because I’d buy one for this purpose.
This is the reason that I’d consider buying one. Being able to draw directly on the tablet is a huge advantage to a graphic artist. For some reason, HP has a lock on the low end of the tablet market. I suspect they must have some critical patents on the technology. I don’t much care for HP computers, but I’d make an exception in this particular case.
A couple of companies recently announced tablet netbooks, including ASUS. Not sure when they’ll be available though, or how much they’d cost, but should be cheaper than “real” tablet PCs, and ligher too.
Sadly these all seem to use passive touch-sensitive screens, not Wacom-style active digitizers. Touch screens are fine for navigating (clicking on icons and web links) but not very good for handwriting or artwork.
I have often thought that if I had become a professional storyboard artist, a TabletPC would be an ideal way to draw them, and then if I hook it up to another computer, the Director can watch and comment as I go.
Maybe.
Lobsang, I love your idea. The couch surfing sounds great, too. I don’t draw much but maybe I’ll start. Thanks.
Mine was actually not much more than that - $424, open box from Sam’s Club. I found printouts from whomever had returned it showing competing tablet PC’s so it looks like this one was only used to take a test drive and then returned to Sam’s. I had been eyeing them there at $899 but didn’t need a new laptop at the time, so when I saw them on the Sam’s site for $530 I ran over and the electonics guy said they’d be even cheaper - $424. It’s pretty much last year’s techology, but I don’t care for that price. Still has 3 GB RAM and a 250 GB HDD.