Wednesday, December 29, 2010

HP Touch Note TM2 review

So this review is a little late in coming, but I’m kinda glad ‘cause now I’ve lived with this thing for several months so I’m starting to get an idea about how it actually is as a day-to-day device.

The HP Touch Note is a Tablet PC, not to be confused with a slate form factor tablet device such as the iPad. I got it mainly because I was interested in a very portable computer but I tend to hate touch pads, so a touch screen was appealing.   I saw a deal for it on Gizmodo and for $750, HP sold me one.  

This is basically a small laptop with a screen that flips around and closes so you can use it as a sort of “slate” or you can open it up and have a normal laptop with a touch screen.  The screen is both a touch screen and a pressure sensitive “pen” screen which comes with a stylus similar to a Wacom tablet.  In fact, it runs Wacom drivers for pressure sensitivity.

Otherwise the specs are pretty tame.  Run of the mill ATI graphics card, also an intel card for power saving mode.  4 GB of RAM, Core 2 duo cpu, a 500 MB 5400 rpm hard drive.  External DVD drive which I had to pay extra for.  It’s got a webcam and a touchpad, so it’s a pretty reasonable standard laptop when configured that way.   It’s a bit faster than most netbooks, but maybe slightly slower than other laptops in the same price range.

When I got it out, the first thing I noticed was that the hard drive was dog slow.  Took forever to boot, took forever to run apps, took forever to get out of hibernation.  Initially, I though the computer was slow, but I found it could run some fairly power hungry apps, such as Art Rage and Starcraft 2 pretty well.  It’s no racehorse, but the computer is reasonably fast outside of the hard drive. 

It also came loaded with a huge helping of HP bloatware.  I might have liked some of the stuff HP had installed if it weren’t such poor software.  There was a ton of touch specific apps that HP had installed, but nothing I was interested in.  First order of business was installing a fresh copy of Windows 7 Ultimate from my MSDN subscription. 

This turned out to cause not a few problems.  Basically, it turns out that HP installs a lot of their own custom drivers to make all this pen and touch magic work.  It took me quite a while to finally install everything needed to get the thing back up and running again.  Protip if you get one: Bing  HP Touch Note TM2 drivers and you should find a big page that lists tips on how to get the thing working well. 

This is actually my biggest beef with the device.  It really shows how nice it is for Apple to control hardware and software (especially from a consumer perspective).  The hardware is OK, but the software is pretty bad, HP is not exactly a powerhouse software company.  The device looks pretty cool and has cool features, but a lot of the touch and pen functionality takes an inordinate amount of tweaking.  And as much as it pains me to say it, Windows 7 is not a good touch OS, so using the device as a slate only is practically out of the question.  It always “sort of” works.

For Christmas, I asked for and received a SSD hard drive, which solves basically all the speed problems on the device, it boots fast, runs software fast, wakes up fast.  Huge improvement.  This helps a LOT, of course it significantly raises the price of the device, but I’ve found it to be worth it, in spades.

So all these complaints, does the thing suck?

Not exactly, as a portable art device it is FANTASTIC, Autodesk Sketchbook Pro is absolutely a killer app for this thing, and despite hours of painstaking debugging to get the pressure sensitivity to work properly (you need to set up a batch file that disables a service, and make sure you have the right drivers), it is an absolute joy to draw pictures on the tablet.  It’s not exactly light at 5 lbs, but it’s manageable, and it’s a HELL of a lot cheaper than a Cintiq.  It does run Flash and if you’re only using it for Kindle and Internet Explorer, it is passable as a slate device, though not ideal.  The battery life is also pretty good, lasting about 6-7 hours of light to medium use without a charge. This has improved with the SSD, also.

Basically, the bottom line is this.  If you don’t mind playing around with drivers and software for a while to get something to work, this might be a great device for you.  It doesn’t work well out of the box, but it can be tweaked into an amazing little device. If you want a shiny new toy that is just awesome from power-on, this probably isn’t for you.