HP Pavilion Tx2000 Tablet PC meets Dirty Jobs

HP recently released the new Tx2000 which is in very similar to the entry level Tx1000 Tablet PC.

The major drawback of the Tx1000 was the lack of a digitising tablet. The Tx1000 only has a touch screen, which is not very practical in a full size tablet PC because in normal writing posture, your hand will create multiple touch points on the screen, making it difficult to use.

Hat’s off to HP who listened and built a digitising tablet and a touch screen into the Tx2000. The tablet pen is a battery powered model and not a Wacom pressure sensitive digitiser, no doubt to keep the price down.

Correction: This Tablet PC does use a Wacom capacitive touch digitising system. The pen does not use a battery and the touch screen function works with a nice light touch.

HP have released a video series for the launch featuring Mike Rowe from Dirty Jobs (Discovery channel).

Not really sure if it’ll sell more Tx2000s but it’s a bit of fun anyway!

Check out the full video series here.

HP Pavilion Tx2000 Key Features:

• Full on entertainment machine
• Looks pretty cool
• AMD Turion™ 64 TL-64 2.20 GHz Processor
• 2Gb DDR2 RAM
• 12″ Wide screen display
• Touch screen and active digitizer
• NVIDIA® GeForce™ Go 6150
• 8X DVD±RW Double Layer, Lightscribe
• Weight: 1.96 kg

We’ll have them in the shop soon for AUD $2199.00 Inc GST.

The Tx2000 is a great way for home users to get started with a Tablet PC.

Tablet PC 101 #11 Learn physics

Tablet PCs are great tools of education. Students use tablet PCs for things like taking notes, getting organised and composing music. And thanks to Microsoft’s Windows XP Tablet PC power toys, students can experiment with Newton’s laws too.

From the Tablet PC power toys page:

Bring your drawings to life with the Physics Illustrator, a motion simulator for the Tablet PC. Simply draw two-dimensional bodies, connect them in various ways, and apply forces, then watch as animation makes the bodies move, collide, and interact.

The Tablet PC physics tool is hours of fun, and you might just learn something too!

Tablet PC 101 #10 Email in your own handwriting

Dealing with email overload is one of the greatest challenges in running a business. Often, many of the emails that flood your inbox are internal communications that need a quick response.

Email - meet Tablet PC

With a Tablet PC and Office 2007 (or Office 2003) you can send email in handwriting. That enables you to send emails from places like:

• An airport lounge
• A doctors waiting room
• A cafe over coffee

Tablet PCs allow you to maximise your working time by enabling you to use a fully functional PC in places where you generally wouldn’t use a laptop.

Brush up your handwriting skills, because you’re going to need them again. Tablet PCs are great productivity tools.

Tablet PC 101 #9 Get work done on a plane

Ever tried to use your laptop on a domestic flight in economy? It’s tricky.

Because a laptop screen hinges at the back, you need more at least 50cm of room just to open the laptop and tilt the screen to an angle that you can see. Then you need some extra space so that you can reach the keyboard.

It all adds up to bad ergonomics, RSI and neck strain!

With a Tablet PC however, you can work comfortably on even the most cramped budget flights.

Because you work on and over the Tablet screen, you only need about 30cm of space to work comfortably.

The Motion Computing CE 1700 clip on keyboard has the advantage of being centrally mounted which means that you can also use it in laptop mode with a keyboard in a more cramped space than a laptop would allow.

It’s great to be able to use that time when you’re stuck at 40,000 feet to get ahead on emails! In fact, I wrote this blog entry high above Canberra on the way back from CeBit in Sydney today.

Tablet pC 101 #8 Take notes in meetings with your clients

Are you lugging around an A4 notepad and pen in that portfolio of yours?

There are so many places where Tablet PC is practical and a laptop just isn’t. Meetings with your clients are a perfect example.

You wouldn’t generally use a laptop in a round table meeting because the laptop screen creates a barrier between you and the client. Your clients also can’t see the screen, so they will be suspicious about what you’re doing in there…

If you place your Tablet PC flat on the table, there is no screen barrier and your clients can see the notes that you’re taking.

Also, when you get a Tablet PC, you will be showing a more impressive front to your clients. That’s because when you go into any meeting with a Tablet PC you will look more:

• Professional
• Impressive
• Technically superior
• Organised.

But the real kicker is that you can actually be all that!

A Tablet PC will allow you to:

• Never lose a note again
• Search through your handwritten notes
• Email handwritten notes
• Mark and action notes for follow up
• Audio record the conversation in sync with you handwritten notes.

It’s perfect for meetings, especially with clients.

Tablet PC 101 #7 Use Gestures / Pen Flicks

Windows Vista has a brilliant feature for Tablet PC users called gestures or Pen Flicks. You can program gestures to do things that you would commonly do on your PC, like scroll up, scroll down, undo, cut, copy, paste and delete.

Gestures make a lot of sense on a Tablet PC because a pen is so much easier to use than a mouse.

You can program the sensitivity of Vista’s gestures, as well as the actual commands that the gestures trigger. There is even a neat practice tool to help you to get going.

Like the scrolling mouse wheel, once you’ve used Windows Vista gestures, you will find it hard to live without!

Watch a full demonstration of the Windows Vista Gesture tool below thanks to www.gottabemobile.com.

Tablet PC 101 #6 Recognise Handwriting

With a Tablet PC you can turn your handwriting into computer text… or not, the choice is yours.

If you’ve ever used handwriting recognition on a PDA or Palm Pilot, you’ll know that it can be a tedious affair. Tablet PCs hare a far superior system of handwriting recognition that takes advantage of their computing power.

The Tablet PC input panel allows you to write multiple lines of text, suggesting and correcting as you go. It is a very quick and accurate input method, and it’s even better now in Windows Vista.

But one of the real beauties of Tablet PC is that you don’t have to bother with handwriting recognition if you don’t want to. Programs like Microsoft OneNote and Journal allow you to leave your notes in handwriting and convert them to text later. In fact, OneNote recognises your handwriting automatically and stores a copy in the background as searchable text.

Tablet PC 101 #5 Mind mapping

Mind Mapping works better on a Tablet PC than on a desktop PC or laptop. Mind Mapping is a creative process that is used for capturing ideas, thoughts and concepts and organising them logically. It can also be used as a note-taking method and a memory aid.

A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged radially around a central key word or idea. It is used to generate, visualize, structure, and classify ideas, and as an aid in study, organization, problem solving, decision making, and writing.
Source: Wikipedia

It’s often a process that involves discussion and brainstorming. Because Mind Mapping is a creative process it flows better in your handwriting.

There are several Mind Mapping software packages available that bring Mind Mapping to your PC. Mind Manager from Mindjet allows you to work in Ink on that Tablet PC. The ability to create a map in digital ink with your own hand means Mind Mapping that just works better on a Tablet PC.

Already a Tablet PC user? Click here to download a free trial of Mind Manager.

Tablet PC 101 #4 Get Signatures

If you work with forms, then you probably need to get them signed too.

Tablet PCs are often used for getting signatures in real estate and  mortgage broking. In fact, any company that uses contracts can benefit from Tablet PCs.

A Tablet PC is the simplest way to capture and store digital ink signatures. There are 3 really easy ways to capture signatures with a Tablet PC right out of the box:

1. Create a digital version of your paper form with Windows Journal and the signature on that (easiest for everyone)
2. Simply embed a digital ink field into your windows based application that stores the signature to your database (easy for programmer)
3. Use the specialist digital ink signature control capabilities to capture and encrypt signatures (not too hard for programmer)

Microsoft has a step by step guide for software developers here.

Tablet PC 101 #3 Draw On your Computer

In the course of your day to day business, there are many things that you might need to sketch or draw. 

Here are some reasons that you might want to draw something on your Tablet PC:

• Artists - create digital art on screen with a pen
• Graphic designers - create a sketch concept and share it quickly with your client
• Construction contractors - Create a sketch for your quote and pass it on to your team
• Engineers - Mark up plans on site in AutoCAD
• Insurance assessors - Annotate images and notes of damage
• Bored travellers - Doodle on the train or plane.

Of course drawing preceded writing as the earliest means of visual communication, and they do say that a picture is worth a thousand words. 

There are just so many things that you can’t put in words. But at least with a Tablet PC you can draw them without paper!