I want a Tablet PC

HP just announced the new TX2000 series tablet at CES the other day. (review) This thing looks sweet.

It has an AMD Turion X2 CPU, Wacom active digitizer plus touchscreen, DVD burner with lightscribe, LED lit screen, comes with a remote control (probably not as cool as the one that comes with Macs now), and is cheap! Basic configs (Vista Home, 1GB RAM, etc.) are booking at $1300, whereas the new Toshiba Portege M700 starts at $1500, and configs for the Dell Latitude XT are starting somewhere around $2500.

The TX2000 is essentially a refresh of the TX1000 - the main difference being the digitizer. The digitizer in the TX1000 (which is being fire saled by HP right now) was a passive digitizer, similar to what you would find on a PDA. There’s no pressure sensitive writing, and if you touch the screen while you’re writing (which is easy to do in tablet mode), you screw up your input. One of the big problems I have with tablets is that they’re all so ugly looking. Not the HP. I saw the TX1000 in person at Best Buy last year, and was wholly impressed.  The only thing that made me not buy it was the passive digitizer. Now that the TX2000 is out and has all of the looks (if not more) of the TX1000, plus the Wacom digitizer, pretty much all of my wishes have been granted.

Before the TX2000 came out, I was really excited about the Latitude XT. The specs on it, though, are underwhelming. The Core 2 Duo ULV processor is slow, and while it’s in a really kick-ass form factor, and is one of the few tablets that you can get with on-site support. It’s just really, really expensive. The Toshiba M700 looked great until I saw that it was thicker than my E1505! No way would I want to carry that beast around in tablet mode! The TX2000 seems to be a good compromise between the two.

I really want to get it, but I’m holding off because I just hate to spend the money. I wouldn’t be able to sell my Inspiron E1505 to recoup some of the cost because Dell is/was selling them for dirt cheap recently, and after a year or so of use it’s looking a little worse for wear. So my wife will probably inherit it, and her Mac Mini may turn into some sort of other node on my home network, or get sold.