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My HP Pavilion tx2500z Tablet PC

As many of you know, a little over a month ago, I decided to do something uncharacteristic of my Mac-loving self: I decided to buy a PC. Why? Well, I needed a portable laptop, I didn’t need to spend a lot of money on it (since I’d just left Mahalo and the next steps career-wise weren’t solidified as of yet), and for a long time I’d wanted a screen that I could draw on. I was looking at the very expensive ModBook (*) (entry level is about $2400 and it doesn’t have a built in keyboard, so it wouldn’t have been the most practical choice) and I was also considering just getting an entry level MacBook and then getting a Wacom Cintiq 12wx when employment path was more clear. Of course that would have put me back up in the same price range as the ModBook.

I’ve also been wondering whether Mac vs. PC matters as much anymore given how a lot of the things that I do have moved to the cloud.

At the same time I was considering this, I spotted the HP Pavilion tx2500z Tablet PC on DealNews for less than $1000 thanks to a $400 special discount HP was running. The tx2500z (here’s the specs on mine) came with built-in Wacom digitizer (not as pressure sensitive as the ModBook / the Cintiq 12wx, but still good enough where I’d be able to sketch on my screen) at under a grand, so I decided to take the plunge into my first real Windows machine (I don’t think the Asus Eee PC counts, as it’s more of a tinkering hacking fun-toy for me than a true primary machine) in a long time (and my first plunge into the world of Vista ever).

3 weeks later and I’m not regretting the move. It was the right decision. Why? Because Apple doesn’t make a tablet Mac. If Apple made a tablet Mac, this would be an entirely different story. I don’t have access to that alternate universe, though, so here I am typing this blog post on a Vista 64-bit machine and liking it.

Here’s the basic rundown of usage pros and cons of the tx2500z (as stated above, the major non-usage pro is that it’s a tablet and it was cheap; the major con was that it wasn’t a Mac b/c Apple doesn’t do tablets):

PROS:
1. The display is the same size as I would have had on the Wacom 12wx and it’s integrated into the laptop itself, so I’m not carrying around a whole other not-so-portable device (see this great review of the Cintiq 12wx for more details about its portability or lack thereof). I can sketch anywhere on it if I want to (provided that the lighting is conducive to drawing on a digital display).
2. The screen is both a touchscreen and a Wacom penabled display, so I can use either my fingers, the included pen, or the little thumb pointer that came with the extra Nintendo DS pointers that I bought a while back. The touchscreen turns off when you come close to the screen with the pen, so you can rest your hand on the display and everything. You can also turn off the touchscreen functionality in the system preferences, so that it only works with the pen (which is what I tend to do 90% of the time).
3. Drawing on the screen takes some getting used to, but is much more natural than drawing on my external Wacom Intuos 2 drawing tablet. The levels of pressure of the screen aren’t as sensitive as the external tablet, but it doesn’t really matter that much, because you can zoom in and out in Photoshop and Art Rage 2.5 (the two apps I doodle in most often) to achieve the same sort of detail you would with added pressure sensitivity.
4. The fingerprint scanner for logging in to the computer / as a password keeper for various apps and sites is pretty friggin’ James Bond cool.
5. The ergonomics of the laptop are nice and the keyboard is very responsive.
6. The integrated card reader (for SD, MS/Pro, MMC, and XD cards) and the large internal hard drive makes it a good companion laptop for a photography amateur such as myself.
7. Picasa 3 is light years better than iPhoto, which I’ve always found to be slow and crashtastic on OS X. And it’s free too.
8. There are lots of cool Windows only apps; most notably for me the games. Lots of games that I can suddenly play (like Warhammer Online) and the tx2500z with its 2.4Ghz AMD Turon X2 64-bit processor and 3GB of RAM handles them all fine so far.
9. I get to play with Google Chrome.
10. Since the latest update (note this is a caveat; not iTunes 8, but the 2nd iTunes 8 for Vista), iTunes runs fine on Vista and I even sync my iPhone to the iTunes library on this laptop, rather than on my iMac.

CONS:
1. HP installed a lot of crapware that I had to uninstall to make the machine run more smoothly.
2. The DVD button on the right side of the screen and the other button that launch HP’s default media center are both in a position where I would regularly hit them unintentionally in the middle of using the device in tablet mode. The control panel for changing the actions of these buttons does not work, so the only solution was to rename the launch file for the apps so that the association failed. After I realized that Windows default media center was better than these apps, I simply removed the applications entirely per #1.
3. There was no Vista disk included with the tx2500z, although Vista Home Premium came preinstalled. There is instead a slightly larger than 1GB restore partition on the hard drive that can be used to restore the machine to factory settings. Unfortunately, you cannot use that partition as the official Vista disk to run things like vLite, so totally and completely lame. Also, what if I want to use that partitioned space?
4. The bundled DVD-burning software that came with the tablet was misconfigured in the initial image to Japanese language and since Japanese is not installed, it fails on launch each time with a Japanese DLL file missing error. I simply uninstalled it and grabbed the free ImgBurn.
5. Blue screens of death everywhere. Such is the life of Windows. The largest culprits appear to be Flash and, oddly enough, Google Chrome (I think because I’m on a 64-bit system and Chrome isn’t really 64-bit savvy). I keep trying to decrapify the Vista installation to eradicate the occurrences of the BSOD, but again, not having a Vista disk so that I can do things like run vLite kind of gets in the way of that initiative.
6. I think battery life should be longer. I get 3-4 hours and I have the larger battery, which I thought would put me more in the 4-6 hour range.
7. The screen is SUPER glossy and takes getting used to. Also, the viewing angle is not too forgiving if you turn it too far one way or the other. This isn’t too bad for normal laptop usage, but when in tablet mode, it often means holding the device at less-than-ideal angles, especially if you rotate the screen into portrait mode.

So more pros than cons. Overall, I’m pleased with the decision. Warhammer Online is awesome and a large part of that. Drawing on the screen is amazing and an even larger part of that. These are my impressions 3 weeks in. We’ll see if it improves or degrades over time. Stay tuned.

Also, quick reminder, don’t forget to enter the first ever Sample The Web contest!

UPDATE: One thing I forgot in the cons side of things: Why don’t any of my regular Wacom pens work with the Tablet PC?