Toshiba Tecra M4-S515
Tablet PC’s are slowly coming into their own, though not as quickly as the makers of such machines were hoping. The cost of a tablet is just too much for what you get from it, partially due to the expensive touch screen that most of them have. The Toshiba Tecra M4-S515 is no exception to the price rule, at $2,484 it only received a 2.5 out of 5 from PC World Magazine and there is good reason why.
From PC World:
The Toshiba Tecra M4-S515 is a nicely designed convertible notebook that’s easy to use as a tablet PC. It has plenty of ports accessible in both tablet and laptop modes, but our test unit’s touchpad didn’t always work.To convert the M4-S515 into a tablet, you have to swivel the 14.1-inch screen clockwise and lay it flat against the keyboard. Along with the touch screen, the M4-S515 offers two keyboard pointing devices: an eraserhead and a touchpad. The eraserhead worked fine, but the touchpad did not. No matter how I tweaked the settings, the touchpad wouldn’t reliably select text when I dragged my finger across it. Selection usually required several swipes, and sometimes it didn’t work at all.
With a slightly above average CPU at 2-GHz, a lower than average battery life, a single charge running around 2 hours and 41 minutes, and a pretty average series of components otherwise, I am not surprised that this new entry into the Tablet PC world is currently only a built-to-order model.
Quick Stats:
- 512MB of DDR2-533 SDRAM
- Windows XP Tablet Edition
- 14.1-inch touch screen
- 80GB hard drive
- Double-layer DVD+RW drive
- V.92 modem
- Gigabit Ethernet
- 802.11g
- Touchpad and eraserhead pointing devices
- 7.3-pound weight (including AC adapter, phone cord, and optical drive)