College-kid looking at Q550 and MSI 110w

[sakana-rin]

Hello,
I've been lurking through this forum for the past couple weeks before joining, and figure to just go for a tablet instead of livescribe pens or digital clipboards.
I like the tweaks and experience provided by the community regarding the Fujitsu q550 and am pretty settled for that, while I'm leaning to something like the MSI WindPad 110w.

I'm looking at the q550 as a college student. I'd like to ink 5-10 pages of lecture notes per class into OneNote instead of pen and paper, and to also record the lecture within a classroom setting that holds about 30 people.
The 110w with a wireless keyboard could be like a new notebook for me, actually, but I want to hear more user experience about it or similar things to come.

Thank you very much for your input I'd also be interested in links out to user experience.

Regarding the tablet sticky...

General Questions.

1. What is your budget?

I don't want to pass $900 usd per tablet.

2. Would you consider purchasing used/refurbished?


3. Do you prefer a Slate, Convertible or Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC)?

4. What size Tablet PC would you prefer?

* Small and light ~ 5" to 8.9"
* Compact ~ 10"
* Mainstream ~ 12.1"
* Large ~ 13.3"

I'd like a recent or upcoming model, and prefer a slate that is compact and light... ideally something to replace pen and paper with hand-written notes or annotations.

5. Which country do you intent to purchase from?

There is a good reseller in my Canadian city that can special order, but US is fine too.

7. How many hours battery life do you require?

Needs to be long- I'd like at least five hours with my typical usage.


I wouldn't be far from an outlet to charge up but I'd like to be unplugged through a class lecture.

8. What will be the primary usage scenario of this tablet? (Email/Web Surfing/Drawing/Word Processing/Entertainment/Notetaking etc)

Notetaking- I want to write my notes as I would on paper(not converting handwriting) and write on and on while recording a lecture,and annotate powerpoint and pdf files.

I don't know how that might affect battery life, and I may be using the tablet's wifi occasionally or using a d-link dwa-130 if battery life makes a difference.
I also don't know about bluetooth's affect on battery life if I were to use a bluetooth keyboard, but a wireless keyboard with a usb receiver is also fine by me.
Using an old music player's recording function and keeping the device in a charging state has been great and I like the idea of OneNote's feature.

9. Do you have an OS preference?

Windows 7 is looking pretty sturdy, but I'm open to hear about ideas with an hp touchpad and WebOS.

10. What software and tasks do you intend to run? (Microsoft Office or other Word Processing Suite/Photoshop/3D Studio Max/Autocad etc)

Microsoft Office Suite (student version), FileZilla. Some Portable Apps and tablet-pc software for configuration/productivity.
I'd like a 3.5mm audio jack which I'd plug an iLuv bluetooth audio transmitter into since it'd usually be paired with a headphone or speaker, which I'd also use with my music player or another computer.

In the q550 area, a big thing I'd like to do is use OneNote with voice recording, to write out lecture notes.
I'd like to use Log Me In hamachi as a web-interface way to control my desktop at home if needed;
at least an old windows xp 1.73 GHz intel m processor laptop of mine is good for that. PDF annotating could come in handy.

For something like a msi 110w I'd like to use a programming IDE like Eclipse and mount a virtual disk and also use VMware.

I'll also be starting CompTIA certification in the next couple years and a tablet would really cut down on fat books.

11. Do you intend on playing Games? If so please list.

Just small games like Dots or Solitaire come to mind for the Fujitsu choice, and I have a gaming pc.

Screen Specifics

3. Do you prefer your display to be glossy or matte?

Matte sounds good but I don't have a problem with it being shiny. I want something that I can read notes off or write more.

4. Do you require Touch? (without pressure sensitivity) (Which one: resistive or capacitive)
See the above linked FAQ for guidance

5. Do you require a Pen? (with pressure sensitivity) (Which one: Wacom or N-Trig)
See the above linked FAQ for guidance

Capacitive touch, requiring a pen. N-Trig looks good.

Component Specifics

1. What size Hard Drive and Memory do you require?

I'd like the model's best option, like 62gb over 30gb.

2. Do you require an Optical (CD/DVD) Drive to be built in?

No.





Misc

1. Other non specific items ~ please add other items you require not covered above?

2. Additional requests ~ anything other you wish to take into consideration?

I'm curious about buying online- I tried Datavision- entered in a credit card, and got no mention of an order id or receipt or a phone call or note about a processing error. My shopping cart didn't empty.

There's plenty of time between classes to recharge a slate if needed.

This might just be an odd thing and it's just specific to being at home after a day where I might've carried 4 litre jug of milk or brought in groceries.
I have a physical issue with weight and I want to pack as lightly as I can, so slates seem to be the way to go. Carrying an lcd monitor to the next room would bother some of my bones, but there's nothing
out of the ordinary that would actually cause injury.
I like laying back on the carpet to type to my desktop as I'm doing now; a wireless keyboard/mouse gives me a lot of flexibility to do a sort of yoga. A TV here has a vga port and a couple hdmi ports
and I might occasionally like to connect a slate to it. Needing to lay flatly back and work to a monitor with my neck angled as little as possible is also a plus which my desktop setup lets me do.

[mittmark]

Hi,
Glad to see your interested in a slate tablet with a pen digitizer. There are several out now and a few more coming soon. I don't think the MSI Winpad 110W has a pen or Ntrig digitizer.

I have the Q550 and the inking experience is great for notetaking, but the processor single core Z670 Atom is very slow. You'll find it lags on web searching and the touch is not nearly as good (fast and responsive) as android or IOS tablets. The Q550 has excellent battery life (8 hours).

The ASUS EP121 is a very good tablet, larger screen, pretty light and thin. Only draw back is the battery life - only 2-3 hours. The processor is an I5, I think. My fried loves his, but he's constantly looking for a recharge plug.

Look seriously at the new Lenovo Thinkpad Tablet coming out any day now and available for preorder. It's android based but it's fast, has a tegra 2 dual core processor, Ntrig pen digitizer, and business class security. It's a very good looking tablet and I might switch to it. If your in school, MS Office probably isn't very important to you, Android might be the best choice of OS. It also comes with an attachable keyboard just like the Asus Transformer (The transformer is a great tabllet but no pen/digitizer!).

If I was in school, and wanted a slate tablet form factor (thin and light), and didn't care about Microsoft windows or Office, but needed a pen to take notes, I would go for the Lenovo Thinkpad tablet.

One last thing to keep in mind, newer quad core tegra processor is coming out in a few months. It will really make the difference on speed for all slate tablets. It you can, it might be worth the wait. Don't count on Apple IPad getting a pen soon, or they would be selling them by the billions, not millions. (The pens you see adveritsed for the IPad are not true digitizer pens.)


Good Luck and let us know what you decide and how it works out for you.
MM

[sakana-rin]

Thanks, mittmark : )
I'm seeing how my studies can get along with pen and paper. Seems the longer I wait the move things improve.. I've been thinking how nice the day will be when I could project a tablet environment against something like a table, dragging any virtual paper or stack of, heh : p

Do you have experience using Office One Note with the q550? The ThinkPad looks beautiful and then there's a Samsung Series 7 slate... ah long decisions. I want something to last a while in terms of tablet life and battery life, and I'm mostly going for a note-taking environmental, using pdfs and ppts.

[sakana-rin]

If this thread's still active I have more thoughts to chew on : )
I'm typing at school, where computers are connected to some network there are no chassis/box towers around here... or whatever it is i'm just seeing a sun microsystems monitor, keyboard, and mouse.
It's running over 300 processes, and when firefox was loading a 11mb pdf file, it froze firefox that was stuck loading 5mb's worth for a few minutes, until it realized it has a problem reading that file. On the other hand IE opened that in seconds without a problem.
It's a Xeon E5410 @ 2.33GHz with 24gb of ram.

I'm curious about an issue like this between the fujitsu q550 and that samsung slate and more to come in the future. I have a couple online classes so having 3 tabs of pdfs open, a powerpoint running, 2 flash windows open, and microsoft onenote seems like a good case scenerio for 3 hours. onenote would run voice-recording for 20 minutes. Maybe a slate is yet to come for me : p
I'd settle for under 3lbs, as light but as powerful with as long a battery life as possible.

EDIT: I'm really out to buying it again. Something I can use as an ereader for e-textbooks, scrawl out notes as I study, read through lecture notes. I started this tablet hunt for a digital clipboard/light computer thing and will just read around more to be sure. Q550 with a new Fujitsu-preloaded Windows, a HUGE difference in performance << That post is encouraging = )

[sakana-rin]

Anyway, I bought it and am halfway through my first 24 hours of using it.
I ran through new device drivers and handwriting teaching and am happy.
For the moment I have a makeshift case : p

Some old leather zipper cover and a plastic cover over the screen.. then I'd put a little foam layer on top just in case of scratches.



Especially handy to have not needed paper for my fat long class yesterday.