The new HP Tablet PC (from: Pete Wright’s Radio Weblog)
http://radio.weblogs.com/0137893/2005/02/04.html#a243 | Comments
Loren Heiny (Tablet MVP and sibling to Lora Heiny, also a tablet MVP - I’m told by Lora that her parents have a warped sense of humour and named all their kids with very similar names) has put up a page on his blog with links to all the media and blog reaction to HP’s new TC4200 Tablet PC. What a thoroughly nice thing to do.
The big deal with this new Tablet, for those that haven’t heard, is that it’s the first notebook, with tablet features. It’s not designed from the ground up to be an ultra portable Tablet PC. It’s designed as a low cost, entry level notebook that just happens to also be a Tablet. Ultimately this is the way the Tablet PC domain is sure to go, with a handful of dedicated, highly mobile tablet devices, but with the industry as a whole providing tablet functionality in most of the mainstream notebooks.
First impressions of the machine, from the links I’ve read at Loren’s blog, are that HP have done a good job of keeping the price point low, but that does mean compromises that many people just won’t stomach. A slow Celeron based processor for example, and a somewhat limiting 1024x768 integrated screen resolution, for example. Still, it is priced well, it does compete with Averatec (the other “cheap” tablet maker), and it is sure to attract a lot of interest from new notebook buyers who hadn’t before considered Tablet PC as a platform.