One of my favorite vendors, Motion Computing, just announced that their 10.1″ CL900 Tablet PC is available for ordering. Pricing starts at $899. All ordering is through their resellers and there is a 4-week shipping lead time.
I’m waiting for Motion to send me one of their review units, so I’ll need to see how this N-Trig equipped digitizer pans out compares to the HP Slate 500 I just tried out. The battery-based active pen looks just like the one on the Slate 500.
By the way, N-Trig contacted me yesterday. We have a conference call on Friday to discuss my experiences with the Slate 500.
I hope something can be done to solve the pen and touch issue. I thought Dell got one thing right when they would kill touch in the presence of the pen. I don’t give them credit for much, but that was a solution. It seems like a fairly simple issue to resolve – when folks are inking, they are not wanting to utilize multi-touch.
And I am excited about Motion’s new tablet. I look forward to your review.
Thanks, Rob.
Rob, thanks for your post! The Motion CL900 is on my radar screen as a possible. CDW has the 62gb SSD-2mb RAM-no mobile broadband for 1251.99.
Another possibility is the Fujitsu Q550. What is your “take” on this device?
Look forward to your CL900, N-Trig “inking” experience/review.
Thanks
@Steven
This is how it worked on my old Toshiba Portege M700, with the touch turning off when the pen was close, and you’re right, it’s a good solution.
@Rob
Good that N-Trig got in touch, clearly there’s issues to resolve. With the user experience so good on iPad, any competition has to be spot on with the UI experience.
There’s so much history with tablet PCs, years before iPad, and there’s plenty of ‘good practice’ for manufacturers to duplicate and avoid making the same mistakes we’ve seen in the past…..like marking the screen with stray touches while trying to ink!
@john – I’m tentative on any N-Trig device at this point. The Asus EP121 excites me the most from a slate standpoint.
We’ll see how the CL900 turns out…
@Rob
I’ve tried the EP121 briefly twice now (met a guy at an airport that had it and saw it at Fry’s) and have to say I absolutely loved it. The Wacom digitizer was just as amazing as on my old Tecra M4 and the multi-touch implementation was flawless (at least, in my VERY limited testing). I had absolutely zero problems with vectoring when I was using the pen (even while my wrist was still on the screen and I was flipping the pen over to use the eraser). And, it was fast, between the Core i5, SSD, and 4GB of RAM, everything was instantaneous. It even had a pen garage to boot!
That said, I ordered the Q550 instead. As much as I loved the EP121, the so-so battery life (and, more importantly, the fact that the battery is non-swappable) is what killed it for me. That, and it’s not exactly small.
As a pilot, I need a small, mobile machine to take on the road to replace the P1610 you sold me (which is still going strong, BTW). The Q550 fits the bill in every important way but one: the N-Trig digitizer (that, and it’d be nice if it were a little faster, at least a *dual-core* Atom) . I’m just hoping (and expecting) that the N-Trig will be better than the resistive digitizer in the P1610.