HP updates the 2710p

The 2730p is a refresh of what I consider the best laptop I’ve ever owned – it also happens to be a good Tablet PC.

The best part is that the older 2710p’s are going for about half price, refurbished. If I had to get a new laptop, I don’t know which one I’d choose (my wife would probably break the tie and suggest I get the 2710p).

Vista SP1 release candidate

I went to the "install fair" at Microsoft's Silicon Valley campus this weekend to get an early peek at the long-awaited service pack 1 for Vista. The event gave Microsoft engineers a chance to see how the install process goes on a variety of machines so they can tweak things before this week's public release. The entire install process took about three hours on my machine, but the folks at the event said many people there (including me) ran into a problem that caused a hiccup -- it should be fixed before the service pack goes public.

Unfortunately, I had to uninstall it, because it messed up the sleep function of my laptop. I don't know if this is because my 2710p's sleep feature is nonstandard or whether it's a bug in the Vista service pack, but I can't afford to have anything wrong with my laptop, so I'll just have to wait for the final release. I do plan to install the service pack beta on my home machine to see if it improves reliability. We'll see.

Another glowing review of the 2710p

An excerpt from tablet enthusiast site jkOnTheRun:

This new model is a design marvel that rekindles the love of using a Tablet PC, and that's why I bought one.

. . .

It is not only a great Tablet PC but also a stellar thin and light notebook computer, something that other OEMs have attempted to do but none as successfully as this in my book.  The hardware components are a decent compromise for providing great battery life while still providing very good performance, even under the resource hog that is Vista.  HP has done a good job making sure that the entire package works as flawlessly with Vista as anything I have seen yet.  The thin and light design is stellar at providing a great OOBE and daily usage.

The 2710p vs. the x61

I feel a little more reassured now about my tablet PC purchase. The Houston Chronicle's tech guy reviewed the Lenovo x61 (the tablet I was considering for more than a year) and the HP 2710p head to head. Like me, he gave the 2710p the slight edge.

For me as a journalist, it really came down to two things: the 2710p's integrated microphone (for recording interviews) and the "night-light" feature, which illuminates the keyboard in dark rooms.

Time To Re-Learn Cursive

finally got a new laptop computer, replacing my six-year-old

Sony Viao srx77p with HP's new 2710p convertible tablet. At about $1,900, it was pretty expensive for my budget (I've been saving up for more than a year), but I can safely say it is, by far, the finest laptop I have ever owned.

The purchase decision was a tight race between this and Lenovo's/IBM's ThinkPad x61s, also a convertible tablet. I was looking for an ultraportable tablet with a comfortable, full-sized keyboard and good battery life. Performance wasn't as much as a factor, though I wanted to get something that could handle Firefox, Word, Outlook and OneNote running simultaneously -- and still feel fast in a few years. And I knew I would need at least 2 gigabytes of memory to ensure Windows Vista ran smoothly.

I had read as many reviews as I could find. Most of the amateur/enthusiast sites were spot-on about the 2710p's strength and weaknesses. The least useful review, surprisingly, came from CNet, which slammed the 2710p for using a trackpoint-type cursor control -- something that barely warranted a mention in Cnet's "Editor's Choice" review of the Lenovo X60 (each was written by a different staffer).

Here's my quick-and-dirty summary judgement of the 2710p.

The good: The 2710p is light, sports a decent battery life and has a keyboard that rivals Lenovo's legendary feel. It also packs some handy features Lenovo lacks, such as built-in camera, integrated dual-array microphone (which means I can easily record in-personal interviews via OneNote) and a pop-out "night light" that illuminates the keyboard when it's dark -- this will come in very handy when I'm covering keynote speeches at tech conventions. And then there's the wow factor -- it looks stunning.

The bad, as well-documented in most of the online reviews:

• the power switch is hard to slide, as is the screen latch.
• There's no easy screen-rotation button accessible in both laptop and tablet modes (the screen rotates when you "transform' the machine from a laptop into a tablet and vice-versa, but if you shut it down in tablet mode and decide to fold it into laptop form when putting it away, it could boot up in the wrong orientation).
• The ambient light sensor, which saves battery power by ensuring that the screen is no brighter than it needs to be, is in the worst possible place. In tablet mode, most people will wind up placing their arm over the sensor when writing, constantly dimming the screen.
• The digitizer pen pops out too easily. It still takes force to pull the pen completely out of its holster, but I'm still worried about losing it.

Still, I'm pretty happy with my purchase. I'm not sure how the machine will stack up against Lenovo's famously tough machine in terms of durability, but the marketing material listed several features designed to put business users at ease: DuraKeys, chemically strengthened glass on the screen, and a motion sensor that parks the hard-drive head to protect the machine when it's dropped or jostled. The case is also made of a magnesium alloy, which is supposed to be pretty tough for its weight, and coated with something called DuraFinish to keep it looking newer longer. And did I mention how nice it looks?

Finally, about the cursive. I've been using the tablet feature, and the handwriting recognition is atrocious -- even after I spent an hour training it to learn my style. Maybe it's me, but no matter what I do, it just won't recognize my lower-case a's, lowercase d's and a few other stubborn letters.

But it reads my cursive script, which is quite messy, flawlessly. So I'm re-training myself to write in cursive. This is not as easy as it sounds. I know cursive is probably much more efficient, but for some reason, I've always preferred block letters, even after I became a newspaper reporter. (Thanks to the Internet, I now see I'm not the only one who feels this way).

Here's what's wrong with cursive: capital U's and V's, which are far too similar; the awkward capital T; the goofy-looking, three-humped lowercase m; and the stupidest cursive letter of all time -- the capital Q. Lowercase k's, meanwhile, have become the bane of my existence.

Wish me luck.

My (not-so-hot) photos: