Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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© Copyright 2010, Omar Shahine
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It’s kind of sad, but I’m no longer a Tablet PC Owner. I had a Toshiba Potege 3500 and then a Toshiba M200 for the past 3 years. I truly believe in the tablet platform, but not in convertible notebook designs. I ended up getting a regular old non-sexy boring looking laptop and I could not be happier (well I have some problems I need to blog about later).
My #1 reason for getting a normal laptop? The Screen. I stare at a Laptop for way to many hours. I need a bright, high resolution screen that is beautiful. The Tablet screens have an awful plastic coat to them and are not very crisp. Also I found that I would use the pen stuff about once every 2 months. I now have a Moleskine to write in, so I stopped using digital ink. Instead I copy relevant notes to OneNote later on. Finally, I CANNOT take the thousands of Toshiba processes that run on these things. I don’t need a stinking process for each hotkey on my keyboard. I hope people at Microsoft realize that the OEMs are destroying the user experience for end users. It's my belief that our platform should have all the "hooks" necessary to make OEM customization and expansion of hardware a consistent and seamless process. If I have to install 15 things from a clean Windows Install to make the laptop work, then we have failed. This is not tablet specific, but Laptop specific, and the Tablet just makes the problem worse since there is even more custom hardware.
Here are my other reasons:
Toshiba Tablet
Dell Latitude D610
When I do get another tablet, it will likely be very small, and dedicated for just using a pen. I would love one of these OQO devices as a Tablet PC or this Motion if it weren’t so expensive.
Now this Dell is not without it’s problems. I hand picked it and the only choices I had were a Toshiba M4 (bigger M200) or a Tecra M3 (I’ve heard they are noisy). So I had a Dell custom built and ordered. So far, the big problem I have with this Dell is that it’s worthless for listening to audio with headphones. There is some nasty white noise that I’m guessing I’m stuck with as Dell is silent on the issue even though numerous folks have complained about the problems in their forums. The good news is that a $20 USB Gizmo from Turtle Beach is an adequate work around for when I actually use headphones on my laptop (I have a portable audio player, so not often, maybe for watching movies). I’m beginning to wonder if I should have gotten a Thinkpad, but I can’t deal w/o a Windows Key on the Keyboard.
Anyway, I’m sad to say goodbye to the Tablet, but hopefully it’s only temporary. I hope my tablet fans don’t take this the wrong way, but the reality is, the screen thing was just a deal breaker.