Tablets, the lease of these

May 27, 2008 7:27 PM

How might I lease a tablet PC, and will it change my life?

I've been envious of my friends' tablets for quite some time now, but don't quite need to throw out my laptop yet (bought spring 2006) and upgraded my PC this fall as per my alternating cycle.

I've been putting off a lot of real work/understanding for a while, and think a tablet might be a useful tool in completing it (science grad student. lots of equations. Basically, I need to finally master my lab's genre.). When I normally work through something like this I use printer paper and fill out inch high stacks of scratch-work, refining derivations, often re-copying them to condense them. I think quickly creating a connecting web of hand-written notes might help me tackle this project, and if money spent would mean I accomplish this, it's worth it.

On the other hand, maybe I'm just using this as a reason for procrastination, maybe an actual tablet in my hands will be more cause for distraction than assistance.

So, I was thinking of leasing a tablet. Last time I looked into it, I wanted either a Toshiba Lifebook or Lenovo tablet--though, rationally, anything that gets the job done works. Since I'm not a company, can I still lease these (or "try" them for a month or two?) With the option to buy? What is a typical percentage of price I might expect to pay? Are there any problems or catches with this plan?

Have you been here, or has a tablet PC fulfilled your needs?

posted by gensubuser to computers & internet (11 comments total)

I got a tablet last year and never looked back. Note-taking is so much easier: an infinite amount of paper and colored pens are at my disposal. In fact, when I had to hand-write notes, I sorely missed Edit Undo.

Two downsides I've found: battery life and noise. But those vary among device and personal preference.
posted by Monochrome at 7:39 PM on May 27, 2008

I had an HP TC1100, and while it had its share of technical problems, it was really really awesome. It was great party because it was really small, only a 12" screen, with a detachable keyboard to shave even more weight off. I loved it, it really felt 'right' browsing the web. It had a nice thick pen too, and a wacom tablet surface that worked really well. I'm all for tablets! Sorry I cant help you with new models, but yeah, tablets are the future.
posted by Mach5 at 7:48 PM on May 27, 2008

I'm not sure if you're interested in alternatives, but it might be worth trying a Wacom tablet (as in, not a touch screen, but a little black surface that you can digitally write on). It's a lot cheaper and it might give you a better idea of whether a tablet laptop is useful.

For the record, I love my Wacom Bamboo, which I use for editing photos.
posted by carpyful at 8:09 PM on May 27, 2008

The tablet didn't change my life. I have the Toshiba M400 and I work in a corporate environment. This machine was given to me so that I'd have a clean box to use for a project, not because I specifically asked for a tablet. I was initially excited about the tablet functionality but the novelty wore off and I never use it that way. Here's why:
- Handwriting recognition in OneNote sucked for the stuff I worked on (describing code, writing variable names, etc), so it wasn't easy to condense. You might encounter the same problems when documenting equations, unless there's a magic plug-in I don't know about.
- I regularly use my M400 for presentations. It's impractical to take notes on the tablet while you are presenting in a meeting. This means I need a paper notepad anyway (to take notes during the presentation), and I'd rather centralize all notes in one place.
- I am usually at home at my desk, at my office at my desk, or at a meeting with my tablet. In the first two scenarios, it is much more practical to dock and use multiple monitors and a proper keyboard and mouse. I am so much more productive in a multiple monitor environment. See above for the issues I had with the tablet at meetings.

It all depends on your use scenario. Mine doesn't justify a tablet. A regular laptop would be fine for me.
posted by crazycanuck at 8:30 PM on May 27, 2008

I also have a Toshiba M400. I hardly ever use it as a tablet, and ultimately I'm really disappointed with the state of tablet software. YMMV.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 9:47 PM on May 27, 2008

I used a tablet for a semester before going back to my Mac + piles of hole punched printer paper for my notes and work. I am a biochemistry and molecular biology undergrad, so I was using it for science stuff as well.

I loved the organization of OneNote and having everything in one tiny tablet, but a variety of issues killed it:

1. I like to spread out papers when I'm working. Even with a large external screen I felt that I never had as much flexibility with the tablet compared to paper.

2. I found things could either be well-formatted for the screen or for printing, not both. For the screen using OneNote, for printing by annotating PDFs and the like.

3. Rearranging things isn't quite as easy as I thought it would be (still far easier than paper though, I guess) but I discovered that I actually get quite a lot of value out of manually condensing, rewriting, and reorganizing things. Both from the whole rewriting memorization value perspective and because rewriting notes provides another chance to think about material, how to more clearly state it and synthesize information from multiple sources, etc.

4. I found that there's some fundamental aspect of paper that I'm used to that I just like better than a tablet. Before trying a tablet out for myself, I would have thought this was BS. However, even though I can write pretty much as quickly and comfortably on the tablet as paper, something still feels very natural about a blank sheet of pencil and a pen or pencil, and in a very subjective/personal way, I prefer the experience of writing on paper to that of writing on a screen... YMMV.

I still hate paper from an organization perspective. I have access to a Fujitsu Scansnap S510M (amazing fast duplex sheet-fed scanner) so whenever I'm done with a pile of stuff it comes out of the 3-ring binder, gets run through the scanner, and I throw it away and keep the PDF.
posted by david06 at 10:03 PM on May 27, 2008

Instead of a tablet, I'm waiting for Mac compatibility for the livescribe smartpen [link includes flash intro with audio] for this kind of note-taking.
posted by umbú at 11:14 PM on May 27, 2008

As to leasing, just check return policies between vendors. Try one, don't like it, use the "restore" option, and send it back. Or keep it. Or try another. Just say some essential feature didn't fit with you.
Nothing's ever going to beat paper for many things. Sigh. (At least do your scratching on the unused blank side of everyone else's photocopy paper, etc. and save a tree or two.)
But Tablets are good for many academic areas, provided:
1) you don't mind paying extra (sometimes a lot extra) for a screen you can "draw" on
2) you get OneNote, use it constantly, and love it
3) you rarely if ever re-copy what you've written into some other more keyboard-friendly format.
The time spent transcribing handwritten notes, either paper or electronic, into something else is completely wasted if you could've captured the same inputs via the keyboard in the first place. You might want to try a $20 USB 10-key numberpad attachment for your laptop for a quick life-change test - I once saw someone literally unplug a graphics tablet from a laptop, drop it on the floor, and lunge at a 10-key saying "THAT's what I wanted, not this stupid screen pen!".

If you need to make and organize a web of linked documents, might I suggest something like FreeMind? It's free any-platform software that lets you make branching/interlinked tree diagrams that can be re-ordered visually and/or exported to other useful formats, and any node can be made to link back to some other file or document. Might help, especially if you want to do things visio-spatially while still using a keyboard.
posted by bartleby at 2:10 AM on May 28, 2008

Oh, and forgive my mathematical illiteracy, but would something like the Math component of OpenOffice help? I have often wondered who to recommend it to.
posted by bartleby at 2:27 AM on May 28, 2008

one thing that hasn't come up yet: i use my tablet in tablet mode almost exclusively in meetings, where the tablet mode lets me see/take notes while not having a laptop blocking me from the rest of the meeting. having laptops up and open in a meeting is useful, but really turns the group dynamic into something like playing Battleship.

also, to have hand-writing recognition for non-English alphabets rocks. I use mine for Chinese, Japanese, but assume others are also available (e.g. Korean, Cyrillic).
posted by whatzit at 6:08 AM on May 28, 2008

I just use mine as a laptop with better interface and ergonomics, but still just a laptop - I don't use the tablet functions much, but even so I don't ever plan to go back. I use the keyboard over handwriting because I type much faster than I write, but the pen is eternally great - for art and photoshop, and for not needing to carry a mouse around, and not having to use those stupid fingerpads.
I wouldn't count on it changing your life though, but you're right - you need to try one and find out. It could hit the spot.

Unfortunately, I don't think carpyful's suggestion will really work very well - I find that handwriting where the pen is on a digitizer and the text appears onscreen, more difficult, slower and messier. It's not the same as writing onto the screen (which in turn is not the same as writing on a pad of paper). It does have the advantage of being fantastically cheap though.

If you're handy, you can get the second generation of tablet-PC very cheap on ebay as parts, and partially broken ones, then (re)assemble yourself.
posted by -harlequin- at 9:24 AM on May 28, 2008