Adios, Tablet PC

On Saturday, I took my Acer C102 Tablet PC back whence it came. I bought it in late July, so it had almost a month (including two trips to Redmond and one to Salt Lake) to win me over. The bottom line is that it’s not enough of a laptop for my needs. When in Redmond, I made a point to take it with me to every meeting I attended– but I never used it! The relatively slow CPU and limited RAM had a lot to do with it, too, as did the fact that I can type way faster (and more legibly; just ask my high school English teachers) than I can write. I still think the Tablet PC form factor has a lot of potential, especially as more customized applications like Classroom Presenter and TabletPlanner come out, and I would have liked to try using the Tablet as a presentation machine. However, all was not lost; my spiffy new ThinkPad T40 is almost as thin as the C102, and it’s hella fast, with great battery life and 1GB (expandable to 2GB) of RAM. I guess I’ll keep tabs on the Tablet world and see how it’s doing next summer; by then, there should be machines with better screen resolution and more CPU horsepower.