First Impressions of the HP 2710 P

Beautiful, sleek, stylish, well-constructed, solid, light. Inking in OneNote is so fun. More fun than writing on paper, plus I can clip stuff and save it with my notes. I downloaded PDF annotator from Grahl software too, so I can mark up PDF files. The tablet metaphor is just so cool. I am still secretly hoping that Apple's mystery product will be a tablet.

Mehs: This is my first computer running Vista. Some things take forever, like installing Adobe Acrobat reader. I click on icons and nothing happens. Hello? I mean nothing. Then, after I've moved on to some other task, whatever I was trying to launch does so numerous times, then starts being "unresponsive." Another meh is that the screen rotation is a bit wonky in slate mode. I push in the pen into the little hole in the side of the bezel. Sometimes it rotates and sometimes not. Oh, and fingerprint reading? My fingerprints aren't that good, apparently. It's currently taking me more strokes to read a fingerprint than it takes to type in my password. The seller upgraded the machine to 2GB ram, and I'm grateful for that. Mostly, I'm pleased with the user experience. Maybe some "tweaking" is needed to make it more "snappy."

All in all, this is going to be my carrying around computer for awhile. HP did a fantastic job on the look and feel of this device. It reminds me very much of my old 12" Powerbook, and that's a good thing. It's not a powerhouse, but it does what I need it to do, which is mostly web and office stuff. I did install Band-in-a-Box and Powertracks and they both seem to work just fine.

I bought my first real tablet pc

I've owned a Samsung Q1 and that's the first exposure I ever had to Windows XP Tablet Edition.  I was very impressed by how the tablet pc features enhances the functionality of Microsoft Windows.  I loved Windows Journal and OneNote.  I've lately been puzzling over whether to buy a real tablet with an active digitizer.  I puzzled and puzzled until my puzzler was sore (h/t The Grinch) between Dell Lattitude XT, HP 2710P, Lenovo X61T and even HP TX2510.  I almost pulled the trigger on refurbs by each of these manufacturers and I even made several visits to Microcenter that almost resulted in my buying a computer.  Then, "Fries With That?" offered his gently-used HP 2710P for sale on gottabemobile.com.  (At least I hope it's gently used).  I'll report when I get the goods, but I'm excited about adding this device to my quiver of tech tools.