My Review Of The Acer TravelMate C303 Tablet PC
I recently needed to buy a new machine for personal and business use, so I figured I’d share my experience. Since I tend to have a lot of meetings I decided that I wanted a tablet. My experience with OneNote in the past had been very positive, and I find that I’m much more likely to take notes if I’m using it. However, I also consider a DVD drive to be crucial to my non-work PC experience.
When checking the usual vendor sites for possible tablets, I found that there were no tablets that came with built-in DVD drives. While I’m not usually picky, I can’t stand using external drives. On a lark I decided to check out Acer’s site, even though my experience with their TravelMate 100 prototype from 2 years ago wasn’t great.
I was pretty impressed with their recently launched C300 line, so I decided to pick one up. The rough specs are:
• Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005
• 1.7 GHz Centrino
• 1 GB RAM
• Built-in DVD-RW
• Built-in 802.11b/g
• Built-in Bluetooth
• PCMCIA smart card reader
With an extra battery, the total cost came to around $2,500 on buy.com with shipping, tax, etc.
I will admit that my out-of-box experience was less-than-stellar. If you buy one of these, be sure to disable the smart card reader as soon as possible. Also make sure to turn on the Windows firewall since they don’t come with SP2 installed. Before doing these two things I was crashing in under 5 minutes from boot. However, once I got SP2 installed, everything ran like a dream.
I bought a copy of Office Pro and OneNote, which work beautifully on tablet (now). Unlike the older OS, this release has great support for writing sentences that are longer than the width of the screen, which makes using Word very possible. I’ve actually written this entire review using ink in Word. It’s not quite perfect, but I’ve found it relatively easy to adapt to the little idiosyncrasies.
I’m very impressed with the battery life so far. Although the Acer site says something like 7 hours, I never believe the hype. Instead, I’m happy if I can get over 2 hours per battery on a plane while listening to music. I’ve had a bit of time to test this tablet out on a flight from New York to Seattle (6 hours) and have listened to over two hours of music while using Word and PowerPoint, which is after watching over an hour of Ali G on DVD. The battery claims to have 28% left, so we’ll see just how far it will go. By the way, be sure to turn off your wireless card when on a plane to avoid the waste of battery!
The biggest complaint I have about this tablet so far is the screen resolution. Since the monitor is XGA, it tops out at 1024x768. I’ve heard that the new Toshiba tablets will be able to go higher, but not having a built-in DVD is a deal breaker for me. I tend to only code at home, so attaching a full secondary monitor supports my high-res needs. On the road I’ll have to deal with big, fat curly braces :-)
There are a ton of little features that I’ve noticed since using the last tablet years ago, so many of them might just be common across all. For example, when I rotate the monitor into ink mode, the screen automatically readjusts for me. The pen comes with an eraser. I can be productive, even while sandwiched between two sucky seats on a Delta flight. The headphone jack is in a good location for either landscape or portrait mode, so it doesn’t easily fall out, blasting my music for all to hear. The battery life is friggin amazing!
All in all, I would definitely recommend this tablet, provided the startup procedures are followed from above. If anyone else has used this tablet I’d be interested in your opinions.