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Gateway's
M1200 Tablet PC, will you
want to buy one?
by Sam R. Clemens, Reviews Manager
April 29, 2003
The vertical tilt of the stand can also be adjusted easily to suit your seating or desk height. And while the M1200 is in the stand, it is recharging the battery for its next use mobile use.
The only drawback
of the M1200’s stand is that it does take up a lot of desk space.
You are going to need a 30-inch deep desk. Otherwise, this is some beautiful
engineering.
Loaded on the M1200 Tablet PC is Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, looks and tastes like regular Home Edition XP except for the handwriting interface and voice recognition. We don’t have the time to go into a detailed review of Windows XP Tablet PC Edition here, so please do some research to be in the know.
The only word processing application that comes with the systems is the handwriting and voice interface notepad with some of the features of Word. That’s right, it also interprets your voice “dictation” for writing documents after a few one or two hour “training sessions”.
Despite what a number of other computer magazines have stated, you CAN install any Windows XP compatible software on a Tablet PC. We also installed Office 2000, Office XP Professional, Macromedia Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Flash MX, Norton Antivirus 2003 and even Adobe Photoshop Elements 1.0 just for testing. The graphics apps ran pretty slow as you’d expect on a sub 1GHz processor, but both Office versions were quite acceptable.
Click on images for enlargements
The following software
test results are independent of the Gateway M1200’s hardware quality
and would be of similar results on any Tablet PC. It is more an assessment
to Microsoft’s applications for the Tablet PC.
We had five different reviewers use the Tablet PC and do their best at training the voice interface. Three of the reviewers had very good experiences with the voice interface, two had results that ranged from mediocre to not so good from our Pacific Rim Media Manager who is originally from Taiwan, but speaks excellent English with an mild accent. This was all using an amplified headset with integrated microphone.
Handwriting or printing on the notepad “word processor” was another result altogether, and not a good one. We asked eight (8) reviewers to try the Windows Tablet PC version cursive and printing interpretation. One common complaint was that the stylus pen just doesn’t ever match the position on the simulated screen paper no matter how carefully you do the alignment procedure.
Cursive, or handwriting, interpretation to “set type” on the Notepad was at best mediocre, and at worst many hated it. Our Editor, Keith Benicek, and myself have been Apple Newton users since they were introduced 1993 (Keith still uses one for note taking!). We had the best results of everyone because of that prior experience, yet we both felt that Microsoft has a long ways to go in improving it’s writing interpretation. We also had the best results with voice dictation.
Our final test was to gage public acceptance to the Gateway M120 and the Tablet PC format. We were very interested in this because the idea was tried before and went absolutely nowhere.
I took the Gateway Tablet PC to the college campus I teach at part-time on four occasions. I showed the system to students and to other faculty members to gage their impressions and purchase interest. Nearly everyone just loved the Gateway Tablet PC.
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