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Microsocft MVP: Tablet PC
Review: TabletKiosk Sahara i440D Slate PC
4 September 2007Posted By: AndrewPosted in: Choosing a Tablet PC
The first thing I thought when I pulled the i440D out of the slipcase was, ‘Wow, this is pretty slick.’
I’m a big fan of first impressions. If you can impress me right away and not do anything stupid later on, there’s a very good chance I’ll buy into whatever you’re trying to hawk me. As a side note, the i440D that I was using had Windows Vista Business on it.
Vista ran very well on the i440D, even with only a gig of RAM and the 1.83GHz Intel Core Duo (the L2500 chip for those who want to know). Granted, I wasn’t running my regular plethora of applications (it’s really amazing my tablet just doesn’t curl over and die some days). After using the i440D for a few days at school, it became very apparent that while it would serve as a very good device for taking notes at school, it wouldn’t fulfill my needs as a developer.
As a developer, I also LOVE my keyboard and would rather be without a mouse then without a keyboard most days. Fortunately, the i440D has plenty of ports to plug keyboards and other peripherals into, including a IEEE 1394/Firewire port. It also sports internal Bluetooth, which is great for connecting to a wireless mouse and keyboard.
The 1024×768 screen is decent, but nothing compared to the 1400 x 1050 resolution I use on my tablet or the 1600 x 1200 resolution I used when docked. This is one of the things that I would change about i400D: give it more pixels!
Battery life was pretty good. I used Battery Eater Pro 2.70 from MobilePC. It’s a handy little tool that basically puts your battery through hell and back by making the CPU, RAM, HDD and videocard run circles at top speed. The battery is spec’d for 42180 mWh, however Battery Eater reported full charged capacity at 39538 mWh.
Click to embiggen.
There’s a good solid hour of constant hi-speed performance before what I believe is sleep cycle (the part that looks like \ \ \ ). During the school day, I could get at least two classes out of it before I needed to find some juice, so somewhere around 2 hours and change or so. The i440D uses Vistas power management utility, which is pretty functional. The bottom does get pretty hot too, so watch out. Please remember that the this is a demo unit and I have no idea how the previous testers have been using this battery and computer.
I didn’t have any extra licenses for programs like MATLAB or Mathematica, so I wasn’t able to run traditional computationally intensive programs on it. I did throw on a copy of Office/OneNote 2007 for the duration of my trial (since it didn’t come with it) and those programs had excellent response time. Remeber that the i440D does have a 1.8GHz processor, so it should handle those types of programs relatively fine. The biggest issue with running programs like MATLAB and Mathematica is that you need a keyboard to type your equations in, unless you want to haul one around (or buy one of those roll-up keyboards).
The i440D has a fingerprint scanner which is very helpful for logging in and it also integrates with Internet Explorer and Firefox to protect your saved login passwords. It was a bit finicky with my finger, but it worked pretty well overall and I definitely appreciated having it.
One of the interesting things about the i440D is that the screen can be active or passive. There’s a button you can press to switch between the two. And interestingly enough, I used both modes. The active mode is great for taking notes when my hand might rest on the screen. The passive mode is great for when just need to check something really quick and I’m too lazy to take the pen out (yea, I can be that lazy).
So, at the end of the day, would I buy it? If I had the cash lying around, I would. It’s a little expensive for my taste (I am a college student, remember) and it’s not the workhorse that I’d want it to be (but I also do a lot of non-school stuff on my tablet). There is some good news though, Gail, my contact at TabletKiosk, would like me to let you all know that they offer a 10% discount to students, teachers and administrators. In order to qualify for the educational discount, you need to register on tabletkiosk.com with an email with an “.edu” domain name or fax a copy of your student ID to them. The 10% discount will be subtracted when the order is processed and will not be reflected on your order screen.
That’s pretty much all I have to say about it. Leave questions in the comments and I’ll try my best to answer them.
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September 4th, 2007 at 3:54 pm
[…] review of the TabletKiosk i440D Slate is up on […]
September 4th, 2007 at 5:46 pm
[…] Review: TabletKiosk Sahara i440D Slate PC » This Summary is from an article posted at The Student Tablet PC on Tuesday, September 04, 2007 […]
September 5th, 2007 at 8:12 am
How are the speakers?
(And yes, I know, external speakers should probably be used, but in the case where you might want to say, show a video to your friend after class)
September 5th, 2007 at 8:39 am
@Joe:
The speakers are great, as far as laptop speakers go. They were loud enough for personal use (i.e. showing videos to friends) and you might even be able to give a presentation with them, although I’d recommend hooking up some external ones for that purpose.
September 5th, 2007 at 9:38 am
Guys I have several convertibles but I had not have a chance to own a slate. What are the benefits to own a tablet like this with arms but no legs?
September 5th, 2007 at 10:14 am
“What are the benefits to own a tablet like this”
Less weight, slimmer shape of the device. I guess this pretty much sums it up. Oh, I forgot one: The rotating hinge on convertibles is a potential source of failures, as it always has to endure heavy mechanical stress.
Two comments on the review:
“Battery life was pretty good. […] During the school day, I could get at least two classes out of it before I needed to find some juice, so somewhere around 2 hours and change or so.”
ONLY two hours, and you call that “pretty good”? This short runtime would be the abolute showstopper for me. Very disappointing.
“One of the interesting things about the i440D is that the screen can be active or passive. […] The active mode is great for taking notes when my hand might rest on the screen.”
Nice to read that this machine has an electromagnetic digitizer and a touchscreen. But do you mean by that that the touchscreen reacts on every stroke? I’ve got some old Fujitsu Tablet PCs from 2000 (a long time before MS finally came out with their particular concept of this type of PCs) with touch screens that feature very effective palm rejection (as seen again on the recent Fujitsu Lifebook P1610). With this technology, you can rest your hands on the screen as with a passive digitizer, but still use it with your fingernails, no pen needed. I wonder why this innovative touch screen technology is still only seldomly used, it works very well.
September 5th, 2007 at 3:03 pm
@thomas:
On batteries: I didn’t really tweak with the power settings at all and I like to run my screen at full brightness or near full brightness. Only two of my classes don’t have easy access to power, so it’s not an issue for me. With a new battery and some decent power profile tweaking, you could probably run all day.
On the dual mode screen: It does have effective palm rejection technology. But it’s effective, not perfect.
December 1st, 2007 at 5:55 am
[…] stupid later on, theres a very good chance Ill buy into whatever youre trying to hawk me source: Review: TabletKiosk Sahara i440D Slate PC, The Student Tablet […]
July 23rd, 2008 at 8:37 pm
thanks,Other small improvements in battery life may be gained by the ability to turn off USB ports individually to save power.
July 23rd, 2008 at 8:38 pm
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