July 15, 2003
A tale of two Tablet PCs
Well last week I completely broke down and went out and bought an Acer 110TCi Tablet PC. I had previously posted that I'd ordered an Acer 104TCi from Costco, however the Costco unit took too long to ship so I, well ..., got impatient and bought the 110TCi at a Franklin Covey store. Of course when I then went to try to cancel the 104TCi, it did finally ship so I'll be getting it later this week, oops. Oh well, anyway, this isn't about the 104TCi it's about the 110TCi as well as the tablet I eventually ended up with.
Buying from Franklin Covey is really a bad idea, there are cheaper ways and they don't have the best return policy in the world. Of course, I'm a geek and my curiosity got hold of me and I couldn't stop. So I went ahead with the purchase. Well, so now you might ask what do I think of the Acer 110TCi? And my answer, it's a piece of junk.
So why did I choose the Acer 110TCi? Quite simply, I was seduced by its feature list. Of all the current Tablet PCs it easily has the best set of features. 900 Mhz Centrino, built in wireless, firewire, USB 2.0, built in keyboard, up to 2GB RAM with 512MB already on board and small size. Only the Motion m1300 comes close, and is of course better if you want a pure slate, which I didn't (or thought I didn't). Unfortunately, while swayed by the feature list of the Acer I forgot one very important thing. I'm a Macintosh user! The Acer epitomizes everything that I can't stand about PCs. It has tons, and tons of features and a great spec sheet, however, the industrial design, build quality and usability for the task absolutely stink. This is pure PC garbage all the way, it seems that the engineers only cared about adding features and gave no thought at all to how people will actually use the device.
If they had given it any thought, they wouldn't have designed the absolutely pathetic excuse for a display latch or the stupid rubber plugs for all the ports. They wouldn't have spread those ports all around the outside of the machine so that when you hook up AC power, ethernet and audio you have cords coming out of three sides. They wouldn't have put that incredibly dumb nubbed plastic disk under the touchpad. They would have used the removal of that disk to make the mouse buttons larger.
If they had given any thought, they would have maybe considered exactly what buttons to put on the front of the machine so that you actually have some power to do more then just scroll. They also maybe would have designed those buttons so that they require less pressure to activate and don't hurt your fingers after using them for a while. They wouldn't have put a bright red flashing light right next to the screen. They wouldn't have put the hardware button to easily toggle power to the wireless card in a location that is inaccessible from the form factor where you're most likely to want to toggle the power to the wireless card.
Once again, if they had given it any thought, they would have put in a battery that actually lasts more then about 2.5 hours. They might also have come up with a more elegant and easier to operate mechanism for pivoting the display. They might also have designed the software that controls the features of the machine with more consideration for the fact that the machine is a tablet. They would have maybe put in a powered Firewire port so that you don't need to have, yet another, AC adapter to use the provided CD-RW drive. They might have also considered that sometimes people might want to pick the machine up while it's plugged in. So maybe having nice, thin and flexible power cables would be helpful, so you don't take out everything on your desk when you move it. They may also have considered that using the Pen is a common operation on a computer designed to be used with a pen and that it might be nice if that pen was easy to remove and replace in its storage compartment. Or they might even consider that people don't usually like to write with those little thin stubby pencils that you find next to the card catalog in the Library and that using them as the model for your built in pen might be a bad idea. Maybe they would have even considered that a tablet is held at a different angle then a regular laptop and that they might want to do something about the quantity of glare that comes of the screen at that angle.
Ugh, the Acer was such a huge disappointment. I may not even need to bother to mention that the wireless card in my unit didn't work, that the pen calibrartion went out of wack every five minutes or that the plastic cover over the IR port fell inside the machine after one day.
At first i was incredibly angered that the wireless card didn't work, however now I'm thrilled. That is what allowed me to return that complete pile to the store.
I read a ton of reviews of the Acer before buying one, pretty much all of them were good. This is a very depressing reflection of how low the standards of PC users are. It's really depressing to me that something so horribly designed, could receive so much praise. It also tells me that the computing press really isn't doing its job anymore. If the people who review the products aren't willing to criticize them for their flaws then there's no incentive for the companies to improve. It's even more depressing when you consider this is a second generation machine.
So, anyway, I gladly returned the Acer.
So does this mean I'm now completely against the whole Tablet PC concept? Well not necessarily, this is the tale of two tablet PCs after all. The rest of the story will come in a later installment.