Bentley College on Tablets

Bentley College has a marketing class focused on Tablet PCs, profiled in today’s Boston Globe. “Because it lacks the capability to show DVDs, the introductory version of the Tablet failed to ”match student lifestyles outside the classroom,” in the words of the Bentley project’s first research report. Subsequent versions of the Tablet are being designed to accommodate DVDs.” Will slate models ever contain DVDs or is the added weight not worth it? It makes sense for a Tablet similar to the Toshiba, which is essentially a regular notebook computer with a swivel screen. I do not want a desktop replacement. I want a desktop complement. It should have sufficient speed running one or two applications: such as Windows Media Player playing an MP3 or streaming a radio feed and typing in Microsoft Word or scrolling PDFs in Adobe Reader. Battery life matters, especially as the proliferation of WiFi and my hunger to use it cuts my normal usage battery life in half. Weight matters most to me. There are a lot of feature packed notebooks out there weighing in at around 10 pounds. Compare that to a 12″ Ti PowerBook at 4.6 pounds or my Tablet at 3 pounds. Adding DVD functionality is simple at the docking station, where power is not an issue. Too bad my docking station costs $300 and is proprietary.