The Tablet PC Show #041 (MP3 - 21.9MB- 63 min)

[audio:http://tabletpc.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_tabletpcshow_20060717_041.mp3]

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Welcome to episode 41 of the Tablet PC Show! This week I’m joined by Matt Hoffman, who we tried to get on last week, but connection issues prevented it. We start the show with Matt telling us a little bit about himself and we get sidetracked (for the first of several times) into a discussion about his Gateway m280 tablet and how Microsoft OneNote got him interested in tablets initially.

News and Updates:

• A company called Newton Peripherals has released the MoGo Mouse, a Bluetooth mouse which is unique in that when not being used it stores, and charges itself, in your PC Card slot. Sadly, it’s lacking a scroll-wheel.
• A new PowerToy called RSS Send to OneNote makes it easy to copy a site’s RSS entries into a OneNote section.
• A new Microsoft HotFix may fix battery life issues on some tablets and laptops.
• Christian Falch is showing off an early version of a utility which promises to allow inking anywhere in Windows. We’re quite excited about this possibility and think it’s a shame that Microsoft isn’t doing this.

That last bit of news takes us into a conversation about inking in Windows, specifically in Vista, and how we’d rather ink than use the TIP.

Next, Matt talks about three freeware applications that he has found very useful:

Knockout - An Outlook companion that offers greater control over Outlook and Word.

AutoPatcher - Provides the ability to quickly install all Microsoft hotfixes and patches at once.

AutoStreamer - Automates the creation of “slipstreamed” Windows install disks with the hotfixes and patches and custom installs or information included. (More information about slipstreaming and unattended installs can be found here.)

Matt then relates his troubles with his Gateway m280 tablet. It’s a great device, but he has had numerous repair problems with it and with Gateway.

I talk about my latest toy, a Sprint PPC-6700 Windows Mobile phone and we go on to talk about some past PDAs I’ve owned, including a Jornada 820, a Casio Zoomer, and an Apple Newton. Those devices are all similar in size and weight to some of the tablets and UMPCs currently on the market and we speculate that the form factor is a winner — provided you have the right OS running on it. As a PDA they’re too big, but with the power of a full Windows XP implementation, it’s very nice.

We then delve into more about Matt’s m280 and he talks about some of the buttons on the bezel of the device and has provided these two photos of it:

He also mentions the troubles he’s had with the device’s SATA hard drive, but we save that story for another episode.

Finally we begin to wrap things up with discussions about Vonage phone service, Think Outside’s Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, and how the price of gadgets goes up when you get married (it exactly doubles).

If you have comments or questions or feedback, please feel free to leave a comment here, email me, or leave me a voicemail right here!

Matt has also offered his assistance to anyone having problems with their tablet, so if you’ve got an issue and would like some help, please leave a comment or send an email and we’ll make sure Matt gets it.

Music:Intro: “Wallawalla” by Drop Trio
Outro: “Second First” by Drop Trio

(Music available at magnatune.com.)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 19th, 2006 at 10:25 am and is filed under General, Podcast. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.