Acer TravelMate Tablet PC C102Ti - Get One Now!

[Jason Dunn]

<a href="http://www.handheldcanada.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Screen=PROD&amp;Store_Code=H&amp;Product_Code=AC0001&amp;Affiliate=ppcthoughts">http://www.handheldcanada.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Screen=PROD&amp;Store_Code=H&amp;Product_Code=AC0001&amp;Affiliate=ppcthoughts</a><br /><br />The official Tablet PC launch isn't until November 7th, and OEMs aren't supposed to release their devices until then, but Acer did just that. The Acer TravelMate Tablet PC C102Ti is a "covertible" Tablet PC, meaning it functions in both the standard laptop mode (keyboard and screen) or the slate mode where the keyboard is folded behind the screen. Although it only weighs in at 3.1 pounds, the TravelMate has some decent specs - 800 MHz Intel Pentium III CPU, 256 MB SDRAM, 30 GB hard drive, built-in 10/100 Ethernet, 802.11b, 56K modem, external 24X CD-ROM, 10.4" screen at 1024 x 768 resolution, and 3.5 hours of battery life.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.handheldcanada.com/Merchant2/graphics/Acer/tablet100.jpg" /><br /><br />"Acer's TravelMate C100 Tablet PC design is distinctive in that it's one of the world's first convertible notebooks. This lightweight, ultra-portable laptop converts from a traditional "clamshell mode" for keyboard input to "tablet mode" for using a pen. To convert the TravelMate C100, simply press and release the two side catches holding the LCD panel in place, rotate it 180 degrees, fold it flat over the keyboard, and secure the side and front catches to hold the screen steady. Acer has put the converting mechanism through their quality and reliability tests to ensure it's long term durability. The Acer TravelMate C100 Tablet PC offers the best of both worlds and allows the users to convert from keyboard to pen input at their own pace."<br /><br />The Acer TravelMate Tablet PC C102Ti <a href="http://www.handheldcanada.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=H&Product_Code=AC0001&Affiliate=ppcthoughts">can be purchased for $2490.18 US</a> ($3879.99 CND, 2532.47 Euros) from our affiliate partner Handheld Canada.

[szamot]

I guess the difinition of a Tablet PC can be stretched to include laptops with swivable screens which is exactly what this looks like to me. I am still waiting to see what the Viewsonic and Panasonic will put out.
T

[Jason Dunn]

The "true" definition of a Tablet PC is one that can:

a) Be put into slate mode
b) Includes the Tablet PC version of Windows XP

Without "b", you don't have much of anything special. :D

[mookie123]

the price is 25 big kahunas???

ehrr... I'll pass thanks.

[toshtoshtosh]

Next time I need a laptop, I'm willing to pay an extra 10-20% to have the tablet software and hardware design. The added $$$ on this one though seems to be a little bit more than that (not much more).

[Timothy Rapson]

And of course, it needs a touch screen. Most notebooks don't have that key feature.

[dreampages]

I though this was already "officially released" weeks ago. For you USA'ers, we've had this for 3 weeks. The affiliate link to these are on our site at

www.dreampages.com?aff=pocketpcthoughts&page=tabletpcs.html

[ECOslin]

This time next year, I figure they'll be gone or in the discount bin.

Cost is everything. Would you spend as much on yourself, or outfit an office staff with them, pretending you had the budget strings.

A lot of the businesses where I get involved in their IT work, mostly seem to go with last years model.

Of course, one guy, who I advised on which product to buy, for his own use, went and bought the bigger more expensive model at the showroom than the do the same job with more features model for cheaper model. His money.

Is it easy to clean the screen of the fingerprints and food stains of a busy 'eat while you work' office? Can it survive coffee sans cup? Will the cost of my replacing the LCD be less than buying a new one?

Edward

[Janak Parekh]

They need to get the price point down under $2k, and the battery life up a bit. It could be a big, big hit for college students entering next year. Just think: no more notebooks for class! In fact, every college student should be drooling... :)

--bdj

[Jason Dunn]

Maybe it's me, but the cost doesn't seem that outrageous to me - I paid $3500 CND for my laptop in April 2001. Laptops seem to have gotten cheaper, so that's good, but first-generation products are always expensive...remember it's us early adoptors that pave the way for others with our VISA cards. :lol:

[ECOslin]

Buy more stuff Jason!

Edward

[szamot]

I wonder if any Tablet PC's will come with Bluetooth, that would be very very cool, or at least easier to justify the cost. Don't get me wrong, I, work shelled out $5500 2 years ago for Stinkpad T20 with all the toys on it, it seemed like a lot but it seemed justified. If I had to buy one today I would most likely get a Tablet instead of a laptop it just makes sense. Dell by the way is giving away free Palm's with their laptopts - most likely paving the way for their PPC.

[mscdex]

i'll be going into college next year, but I doubt many will be purchasing tablet PCs instead of laptops or pdas (maybe). I'm not one that is "with" the Tablet PC scene, but if a majority of the tablet pcs out have roughly the same specs as this tablet pc, you wouldn't be able to use it for very long. Battery life is everything. Personally, I use my ipaq to take notes and pass time (turjah2 :). Of course I use a stowaway, but overall it works good enough throughout the entire day. Although it seems i may not be getting the battery life i'm supposed to be getting. i have the pc expansion pack and the batteries just don't seem to cut it as much as i thought it would. Maybe i need to replace the battery/batteries.

But anyway, if a majority of the people haven't even heard of the Pocket PC, then how would they know about tablet pcs? Since about 90% of people associate all PDAs as being Palms (which really irritates me... especially when people notice my ipaq and refer to it as a palm pilot... :roll: ).

[sweetpete]

I think most people are missing the boat on the TabletPC. This is targeted at some specific sets of users with functionality in mind. Examples include (but aren't limited to):
Students
Medical Profession
Office/Meeting warriors

You have to keep in mind that the input method is key. As a student I had a laptop and a PDA, but neither ever served me really well. For note-taking, the keyboard in the laptop (or a keyboard attachment for PDA) are a must to maintain speed and efficiency. The biggest thing that lacked for me was being able to doodle in my notes, make diagrams, and input notes that couldn't be easily done with a keyboard. I tried with my PDA, but the screen real estate is just too small. This is the perfect solution and I would have easily dropped the cash to have this at school.
Same goes for the other uses.

Now, I find it difficult to justify the cost given the specs an my needs. I don't have as great a necessity for making custom digarams and notes in my handwriting (though it is still useful for me). I much prefer to spend the money towards a decent screen and lots of processing power. You can get a pretty nicely loaded Dell with most bells and whistles for the price of the Acer.

Right now, it boils down to usage and need for the input method. This is a new category of product that combines the best of 2 others. As the products and technology matures, you will see it tickling into mainstream laptop models with more processing power in the next 1-2 yrs. I'm a gadget freak like most in here, but my approach is different. I prefer to wait for 1 generation of products to pass and get cheaper and better 2nd releases. Gives me time to see who's products are hits and which are misses!

[Deslock]

It's a cool idea, but as others have mentioned, it's (1) expensive and (2) needs longer battery life.

I don't understand why they went with the 800 MHz Pentium-M instead of a 933 MHz Crusoe. The Crusoe is slower (trust me, you won't want to run new games or Mozilla), but it provides good enough performance for most things. More importantly, it does provide a significant boost in battery life (20%-50%, depending on what your're doing with the laptop).

As it stands, if I were a student, I'd get a Fujitu P-2000 series laptop with dual capacity and bay batteries. The lack of a touch screen makes it unsuitable for taking notes in certain classes, but its 12 hour battery life makes it far more functional overall. It comes with an internal DVD/CDRW and is much cheaper than the Acer. There is also the Fujitsu P-1000 series, which does have a touchscreen (but does not swivel into tablet mode), weighs 2.2 lbs, and costs only $1100.

Still, TabletPC looks *really* cool and it's only a matter of time before someone comes out with a better one.

[Take1]

It'w wierd, but I always imagined tablet PC's as simply a larger PPC where you get a portrait display (like a clipboard) rather than landsccape . I don't know how comfortable I'd be using it in landscape mode. Can these units rotate the screen like PPCs?

[Venturello]

Thursday here in Barcelona there we had a big fair called Hostelco. Not much tech there, mostly things related to the food and hotel industry. Anyway, next to our stand, some guys where demoing some Acer´s tablet PC´s. This where lot more cooler than the ones in this article. I think they where, sometime ago, featured on this site, but I am not sure. Specs similar to these, they featured Tablet PC XP, 800Mhz, 256Mb RAM and 20Gb HD. They had no built-in keyboard, just a touch screen and nice text entry software. The keyboard, really small but good enough for fast typing, worked through infrared and used no cables. The pointing device is built in at one edge of the cable, and is similar to a pointing stick. I prefer using the touchscreen of course... At the back they had a small extensible arm which allowed to stand the device on a table. You could switch between horizontal and vertical (landscape, portrait) viewing with the click of an icon, and the arm was designed such that it would keep the unit standing on either position. Very lightweight, more than my lightweight sony portable. Built in wireless, and very fast browsing. Felt very well for its 800Mhz, it was slow by no means. 1 PCMCIA slot, unused. Battery life is 4 hours. The screen was not very large, but worked at 1024x768, which should be enough for most users. All in less than 1 inch thick (didnt measure, but it was less than 1 inch). The docking station had a DVD-CD combo drive on it, and also supported the unit upright so you could use it as a laptop.

There was also a Windows XP embedded tablet pc, but this is not a real pc... VERY nice OS, very complete, with more features than CE, a much better navigator, fast, rendered all pages much much better than CE´s crippled navigator, and I would imagine, very stable given it was clean of much junk included on the desktop version. 128Mb RAM, 1 PCMCIA slot and 1 CF slot for more memory. Also built in wireless. Lighter than the real Tablet PC.

This was a very nice experience, and I felt very comfortable with both devices, but more amazing than the embedded device was the tablet pc. The concept is so powerful!!! Prices where high, 3000 euros for the tabletpc, 2000 for the xpe device (what, should I call this computer? It is one, no doubt, albeit no hard disk...). 4 hours battery time is great, enough for most applications IMO.

I am very excited about this new platform, and really wish it is succesful - so I can buy one the day they come down in price :)

Jason thanks for the tabletpc news, I like them and I am grateful to you and staff for my daily pocketpc-and-more-thoughts :)

Best wishes,

Juan Miguel Venturello


pd. Yes, they can rotate, much more faster and easier than on a PPC. No reboot required, just click on a tray icon and choose 'rotate'.

pd2. Battery life is compromised by it being a 'real' pc (with a fast spinning hard disk). The one with XP Embedded has a 206 ARM CPU (sounds familiar??) and runs 10+ hours on battery. Great but, you cant run your favorite apps on it. In my case, I prefer the real pc. Need more battery time? Heh, 4 hours is a lot, but carry another battery and 8 hours should be enough for the most extensive road warrior.

[mookie123]

with 3 hrs battery live and $2500 price tag. It's not student friendly.

-3 hrs won't even get you pass 3 classes, let alone doing a whole day computing. That would require at least 10-12 hour battery life for everything (work, fun, data retrieval etc)

there are only 12 electric sockets in a hall for 300 heh...
as of now the few laptop owners already staking their spots.

-$2500? gimme a break. make it $8-900 than maybe somebody will start considering it as notepad replacement. Cheap celeron laptop and legal pad are WAY smarter spending.

-Is it REALLY as good as notepad? (yes yes, you can do database archieve, but big deal. Ring binder and smart organizing only cost $2.50 total) Even a slight uncomfortable pen can ruin a lecture speed note taking. Nevermind if it can make pretty doddle diagram like in Microsoft ad.

---------
as of now it's only a laptop with cute electronic pen toys. Some app maybe truely functional like filling up standardized form with checkmark.

... but that's about it.

digital Ink it isn't. That's just digital crayon, it can't do what an engineering pencil can do yet. They need at least 5-10 times pixel resolution per square inch before it can be taken seriously as pen and pencil replacement.

So this digital ink thing is a dud. It won't take off until battery and screen resolution achieve that criteria. Give it up. It's good idea but the technology isn't here yet.

[dochall]

It'w wierd, but I always imagined tablet PC's as simply a larger PPC where you get a portrait display (like a clipboard) rather than landsccape . I don't know how comfortable I'd be using it in landscape mode. Can these units rotate the screen like PPCs?

Yes the rotation of the screen can be rotated, an unlike the PPC it is built into the OS.

The tablet pc is a very exciting development as far as I am concerned. It is just what I have been waiting for.

What will I do with a Tablet PC:


- NOTE TAKING
Most meeting warriors, as 'sweetpete' put it, carry around a hardback A4 pad in addition to any PDA. This is actually the life blood and acts as a repository for all that information.

I have such books going back to my first job. I've met people in meetings with companies which I have met say 5 years later when I worked for another company and been able to review the previous notes. I needed to look through an awful lot of notebooks to find it though.

Journal should make this so much easier and make the PC work in a far more natural way then either using a laptop or PDA for the meetings. Also I spend a lot of time in meeting copying down architecture diagrams, the tablet PC will be ideal for this.

- E-books.
While I do read novels on my PDA the Tablet PC will make a far better ebook reader and starts to make reading technical manuals far easier. The tablet PC could well mean that the acres of shelf space I have taken up by technical books could be liberated and I could carry my entire technical library with me and read it in a far more natural manner than I could with a normal landscape laptop.

- Reviewing Documents

I spend a fair proporition of my time reviewing documents, specs, process maps, etc. Some of this I do at my desk but a lot of it I want to find a quiet location and just leaf through the document. Being able to display the document with the proper orientation and make notes straight onto the document will actually save me a good deal of time. It will also save a few trees as a lot of the reviews I do end up with a printed copy because it is easier.


Those are probably the main specifics of what I use a tablet PC for. I will of course, be using it for the other stuff I do with a normal laptop. (I am far more interested in a convertible that a simple slate)

Of course I battery life to last the working day would be great but I don't actually mind that it doesn't. I'm based at a desk and so will be plugging it in whenever I'm there anyway. 3.5 hrs does limit the usefulness in all day meetings but I can't think of a situation where I couldn't plug it in.

I would however be willing to have an additional battery for longer plane journeys etc. - a la the Tosh portege range.

So yes I can see a lot of corporate people going for it and actually finding it better for stuff they are trying to do on their PDA's at the moment. This is outside any of the specific verticals which will see the slate machines as ideal solutions.

[Paragon]

It'w wierd, but I always imagined tablet PC's as simply a larger PPC where you get a portrait display (like a clipboard) rather than landsccape . I don't know how comfortable I'd be using it in landscape mode. Can these units rotate the screen like PPCs?

The screen rotates automatically when you rotate the screen. So when you have the screen in a position to use it like a laptop it is in landscape. When you have it in the tablet position it is in portrait.

Dave

[mscdex]

Another thing that seems like a disadvantage for the Tablet PC, unless you somehow plug in an external keyboard, you'd have to use an on-screen keyboard, which is not efficient at all when typing notes (let's say), or you would have to actually write out the notes on the screen, which kind of almost defeats the purpose. If you're going to just write the actual words with handwriting, you might as well get a notebook and pencil/pen. I think a keyboard would be a must. Text could be entered so much more quickly with a keyboard than with an onscreen keyboard or handwriting recognition. And taking into account the battery life and price.... people would most likely rather buy a top of the line laptop instead. The price for this tablet PC is just wayyy too high. (Not everyone has the kind of money to waste on something that has the disadvantages I mentioned above)

Just my thoughts..

[Underwater Mike]

I'd pay US$3000 for this machine IF it had:

1) FAST (at least 2GHz) P4-m and matching 1GB DDR
2) FAST graphics adapter with at least 64MB DDR
3) 40-60GB drive
4) Slim, slot-loading DVD/CD-RW like in the Apple Titanium
5) USB2.0 and 1394 ports
6) At least one PCMCIA slot
7) Options for add-on battery

I gotta say, if I was ever interested in going back to a Mac (small chance), the Titanium Powerbook is the portable to beat.

[Master O'Mayhem]

It'w wierd, but I always imagined tablet PC's as simply a larger PPC where you get a portrait display (like a clipboard) rather than landsccape . I don't know how comfortable I'd be using it in landscape mode. Can these units rotate the screen like PPCs?

The screen rotates automatically when you rotate the screen. So when you have the screen in a position to use it like a laptop it is in landscape. When you have it in the tablet position it is in portrait.

Dave

Umm On my acer it really doest rotate automagically. You have to do it through a UI or hardware buttons. :)

[Paragon]

Ummm.. Dale lied to me :) When I tried to spin it I was afraid I was going to break is so I stopped.....I thing Iwould owe you more than a few beers if I broke it......Geeez apprentices what do they know:-)

Dave

[Janak Parekh]

with 3 hrs battery live and $2500 price tag. It's not student friendly.
::snip::
So this digital ink thing is a dud. It won't take off until battery and screen resolution achieve that criteria. Give it up. It's good idea but the technology isn't here yet.
Absolutely true. I am hoping, though, that mass market exposure will push manufacturers to improve battery life and reduce cost. I just got a double-capacity battery for my Sony SR17K, and the battery life is now pretty decent (5-6 hours if I'm doing heavy work, more if I don't keep the hard drive swapping away.

Another thing that seems like a disadvantage for the Tablet PC, unless you somehow plug in an external keyboard, you'd have to use an on-screen keyboard, which is not efficient at all when typing notes (let's say), or you would have to actually write out the notes on the screen, which kind of almost defeats the purpose.
Huh? That's why many of them, including the Acer, flip up to show the keyboard, or flip down for tablet-only. You can continue to use the tablet even when the keyboard is shown.

--bdj

[disconnected]

I'm definitely going to get some form of tablet.

Currently, if I'm watching TV in bed or on the couch, and want to be on the internet at the same time, I can use my iPAQ (but the screen is too small), or my laptop (not comfortable to hold). If I plan to be mostly reading sites, rather than typing, I think the tablet will be great for this.

[sweetpete]

Another thing that seems like a disadvantage for the Tablet PC, unless you somehow plug in an external keyboard, you'd have to use an on-screen keyboard, which is not efficient at all when typing notes (let's say), or you would have to actually write out the notes on the screen, which kind of almost defeats the purpose.

Umm ... have you looked at the Acer. It has a keyboard :? Plus, on the other versions that aren't hybrid laptops and are just the screens (ie. Compaq), why not have a bluetooth keyboard and mouse at your desk so when you're working at a desk, it's a normal PC and when you're away, it's a tablet.

[Kre]

I'd pay US$3000 for this machine IF it had:

1) FAST (at least 2GHz) P4-m and matching 1GB DDR
2) FAST graphics adapter with at least 64MB DDR
3) 40-60GB drive
4) Slim, slot-loading DVD/CD-RW like in the Apple Titanium
5) USB2.0 and 1394 ports
6) At least one PCMCIA slot
7) Options for add-on battery

I gotta say, if I was ever interested in going back to a Mac (small chance), the Titanium Powerbook is the portable to beat.

It does have one PC Card slot, FireWire, and two USB (although I'm not sure if it's 2.0 or 1.1). But I agree with the rest. Currently, at $2500, it doesn't have the specs to support its current price. This Acer, with its current specs, should sell for around $1200 max. No more.

The only main difference between this and any other laptop is the touchscreen (the OS shouldn't command a premium), but it can't sell for this much. I, too, am going to wait for the next version. No early adopter here.