It's nice, very nice indeed. My new M200 Tablet arrived at the office this afternoon thanks to an awesome tip from James, my customer's IT infrastructure head honcho guru super-hero like person (spookily though, his surname is the same as mine, as is his Birthday - cue Twilight Zone music). Toshiba were absolutely no help at all in signing me up to their dev partner program (boo hiss), so James pointed me in the general direction of one of the company's IT suppliers. I would mention their name, but they only deal with corporates I think, and the last thing I want to do is send you rabble over to bang on their door.
Anyways, first impressions of this machine are awesome. I mean, on a personal front I can now get some serious writing, including screenshots, done for the book during my commute. The Acer just wasn't working out for that as I said in a previous post. In addition, this can replace my Dell lapmonster, it's that powerful. It really is that powerful. I haven't got the memory upgrade in there just yet so I'm only running the standard 512meg at the moment, but it's still pretty awesome in the performance stakes. I had read online that Pentium-M's are faster than their Ghz equivalent Pentium 4 counterparts and so far that's bearing out to be true. This 1.8Ghz Pentium M really does feel like a 2.mid-range Ghz Pentium 4.
So, what's the machine actually like. Well, if you have used, touched or scoffed over a Portege 3500 then the first thing that hits you is the build quality. The 3500 was a fragile balsa model compared to this beastie. The keyboard is nice and solid, ideal for fast typing. The screen rotate thingie is chunky and reassuringly firm, while I was always quite scared of snapping the old one in a fit of yuppie decisiveness.
Something I'd gotten used to with the Acer was the ability to rotate the screen from buttons attached to the screen's casing. I remember on the 3500 though that you had to run this annoying screen rotate utility to do the same thing. It's wasn't hard, just fiddly and annoying. Well, that's all changed with the M200. Now we have (cue drums) "The Acceleramoeter". I imagine that this is a mercury switch or something inside the machine, because it not only senses the orientation of the screen automatically (you just hold down a button for one second to confirm that you really do want to switch), but you can even set the machine up so that shaking it horizontally or vertically does something. Exactly what it does it up to you, but now at last you have the ability to transform your Tablet PC into the world's most expensive etch-a-sketch. It's kinda neat. Set up the shaker thing for File..New Document, run up ArtRage and watch the hours of mirth ensue. I have to get out more.
You also get 4 "pen" buttons on the side of this screen that can be configured to do anything you want as well. I have one of mine set up for Alt-Enter so that at last I can easily switch Zinio in and out of full screen mode.
Talking of full-screen mode, the screen resolution on this is just gorgeous. It runs at 1400x1050 which I had heard was retina-blisteringly painful to use on a 12 inch screen. It's not. It's gorgeous. I love it. It's about bloody time tablet makers got around the 1024x768 limit and it's nice to see Tosh leading the way. I can run Visual Studio now without it feeling cramped, and better yet writing on the screen actually feels a whole lot more accurate than on the standard 1024x768 screens. You can even write smaller now, which is great because I did sometimes feel like a child that hadn't quite learned joined up writing on previous generation tablets.
I've only had a couple of hours use on the machine so far, so not really enough to give it a full test, but so far I'm hooked. The Toshiba M200 is the best tablet in the world today, even if Toshiba themselves are complete numpties for not letting my buy one at discount on their developer partner program.
Update : One more thing. As I type this the battery is reading 54% remaining. I left the office about 2 hours ago and since then I've been installing software and generally giving the thing a pretty nasty battery draining workout. The estimated time left on the battery is apparently1 hour and 54 minutes. Crikey! Way to go Tosh.
7:43:13 PM 
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