In late November, seeing a need for portable computing capability, I placed an order for a new notebook.
Basically, work was ramping up. Working at home is great, but sometimes you’ve just got to get out of the house. If you put in enough hours working and then don’t go out in the evening, you can run a whole week without stepping foot out of the house. As a matter of fact, I haven’t put gas in my car in a month. (Although I will admit that we usually take Berta’s car out when we go out for family trips.)
In any case, my desire was to take a PC to the Starbucks or some other WiFi-enabled location, turn on, and work for an hour or two in a different locale. I looked over my notebook options.
Notebook number one was an older, but ahead of its age, Fujitsu P2120. The reason I bought it was, in my opinon, very forward-thinking. It was small - about as small as you could get at the time and still have an internal removable optical drive. It also had excellent battery life, using the relatively new Crusoe processor. And this was really the issue with the P2120.
The long battery life was at the cost of a significant amount of computing power. The battery may last twice as long as anything else, but it would actually take twice as long to do anything that really required some processing power. I don’t mean to completely disparage the P2120 - it still is an amazing machine, but even for the “lightweight” development I was planning on doing, it wasn’t enough power.
The second notebook was an iBook G3 that I got from eBay. It was a good price for a large monitor on a notebook. I bought it with the express purpose of testing web development in Safari. It seemed like I was always asking someone to look at something, or paying Browsercam for access. With all of the single-day passes I paid them for, I probably could have bought a much better G3. I probably should have, really.
Once again, a significant factor in deciding against the iBook was the power of the machine. It’s a couple of generations behind, and with most things I do on it, you can watch them happen. I paid for a system with some upgrades - more RAM, more CPU - and I’m sure it made a difference, but not that much of a diference. Plus, it’s a Mac, so I would have to get replacements for all of my Windows-based development tools. I’m not yet convinced that Mac development tools are everythin I would need, and I doubt that I could be convinced.
Should I even mention the old x486 I have sitting around? So it was time to buy a new notebook.
I decided straight away, as I did with my other notebook purchases, that this would not be a “skimp for price” system. I don’t want to upgrade, and I don’t want to buy a new system in a year because the one I just bought became suddenly outdated. After poking at some of the options, I decided to narrow down my options significantly by buying a tablet.
Why a tablet? Well, I can’t really tell you. I’ve always thought that tablets were cool. I like the idea of drawing web design sketches directly on the screen. Plus, the tablet form factor means a couple of interesting things about the size and content of the notebook.
One thing that tablets require is that it be small. Gateway builds a pretty big machine in their “convertable” notebook, but that’s about as big as it gets. Being a tablet also implies that the machine isn’t going to be sitting in a clean desktop environment every time it is used.
Let’s face it - people have been buying these monster “laptops” these days that are designed to supplant a desktop PC. I don’t really see the point in that. If you want desktop power, you should also want desktop upgradeability. Powerful PCs are expensive; you should be able to exend the life of your investment with upgrades. This is so much harder to do with a notebook. And then you end up with a monolithic slab of heavyweight PC, monitor affixed and unmovable unless you spend another chunk of change and hook up a port replicator. It’s just not what I’m into.
A tablet implies mobility. Not just that you want to move the PC from desk to desk, but from a desk to a car to a Starbucks to some open field somewhere. A bit of ruggedness is required.
I spent a lot of time ogling the Gateway Convertable. It’s a pretty slick machine. I think there were a few other small details that had be decide against it, but the primary reason I didn’t decide on it was because I went back to look at Fujitsu’s latest offerings.
I didn’t give a great impression of my P2120 above, but it really is a great little machine. It was perfect for what I wanted it for at the time, and I simply grew out of it, as I suppose I might have with any other notebook of that time. I feel bad that I didn’t even consider Fujitsu until well into my search.
In any case, that’s how I ended up at the Fujitsu T4215. The specs of my machine are pretty crazy of a notebook of its size. It sports an Intel Core 2 Duo 2Ghz processor, 2GB of RAM, and a modest 80GB hard drive. I opted for the high-resolution screen at 1600x1200 pixels, which is not supposed to work well outdoors, but I haven’t really had a need to test it.
It has crazy connection options, with both 802.11a/b/g and Bluetooth wireless (which I can use with my Treo to get a connection virtually anywhere) along with the standard modem and ethernet jacks. A handful of USB ports are nice, but the really neat expansion port is the full-sized PC Card slot, which is hard to find in a notebook these days (since most opt for the PC Express card slot), but is the only size that wireless modems come in these days.
Of course, there is a removable dual-layer CD/DVD+/-R drive, but I ordered a bay battery with it, which is primarily how I have been using the machine. With the bay battery installed and charged, I get 5-6 hours of life while on the road.
And the tablet features themselves are pretty handy. It’s nice to be able to take some written notes with drawings instead of having to describe everything completely in text. The handwriting recognition features are pretty slick and accurate. I haven’t trained the dictation enough to get decent accuracy from it, but there’s this whole noise-reducing microphone array built in.
The security on this thing is crazy, too. There is a built-in fingerprint scanner and smartcard reader. There’s even a BIOS-based setting that allows you to lock the PC until you dial a certain combination of button presses using the quick-access keys on the monitor panel. There are a few other security features in there that I don’t even understand.
And it has stupid little niceties, like a multi-card reader for the camera cards. The touchpad is pretty snazzy. There is a slot that holds the stylus so you don’t have to wonder where it got to in the case. The latch that holds the cae closed or the screen down (it flips around backwards in tablet mode) is pretty crafty.
I’m very happy with my notebook choice. Everything in it seems to be working quite well, too. I’ve only been using it to write blog entries, do some design sketches, and playback movies so far, but I’m anxious to load some real software on here and get some development done out of the house. That should be very liberating.
