GearWERKZ TechBlog

Every once in a while, I have written up a chunk of content in my attempt to help someone out in a public forum, and think that it might be worth something to readers of the 'WERKz who may not subscribe to the same forum. Over on the TabletPCReview.com forums, a poster asked a few questions and my own thoughts on the topic are detailed below. This particular line of questions may be of benefit to people considering their first purchase of a TabletPC.

Follow up:

Their questions, while not verbatim, were along these lines:

* should you wait until 2010 to buy a TabletPC in order to take advantage of Windows 7's native support of multi-touch?
* Is an AMD processor going to make a TabletPC too laggy?
* Should you consider buying a used/refurbished TabletPC cheap for your first Tablet?
* Are there tablets with embedded scanners?

My response follows:

So, I hate to plug my own website, but I do post there so I don't have to rewrite stuff a lot. First off, if you are inquiring as to how you might wind up using your tablet, you can check out one of the posts here.

Second, as to waiting until 2010, my cut would be "no". I will admit that I personally refresh my own tech kits so frequently that waiting never makes sense, but in general that holds for everyone else, as well. There is always something better coming around the corner. If you buy now, you will get access to a free or reduced cost upgrade to Windows 7. As far as other manufacturers jumping into the TabletPC space, I would not hold my breath. Even if they do, you will always be able to recapture some level of your buy-in costs by selling yours and upgrading to something better.

Buying cheap now, I would say yes. In the post I linked above, I recommend that for first time TabletPC buyers who are not certain of their needs or intended uses, they should go cheap in case they decide to bail. Given the targets you have prescribed, I would look at a refurbished Dell Latitude XT from the Dell outlet. A refurb'd Lenovo X61 might be another good choice.

I have never seen a Tablet with an embedded scanner. I will say that you can take pics of documents with the webcam and store them. Given that most cell-phone cameras are of better resolution these days than laptop webcams, you could also do that. I use my camera to take pictures of hand-written notes and business cards at work all the time for storage on my TabletPC. You could also buy a higher resolution add-on webcam.

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