Okay, now the pressure is on.

People (aka Warner Crocker at gottabemobile.com) expect us to produce a serious review. Enough of the glamour shots. No more Scribbler with flowers and sunsets and ravines.

We were struck in reviewing the Scribbler how tough it must be to be a Tablet PC designer. Just because everything comes together in one neat little package in a Tablet PC (see perfect egg, here), so customer preference speaks at a hundred different points.  

In regular life, I have a computer; then if I want a thick pen or a thin pen, a heavy pen or a light pen; if I want glossy paper or a nice linen, I go out and buy them. But when I choose my tablet, I choose not just my computer but all these very personal things.

First Impressions

The Scribbler has the feeling of a hefty notepad lying on the knee. It’s a larger unit than the TC1100, with a 12.4" screen instead of the 10.4" we’ve had to accustom ourselves to in the last two years. The fact that the TC1100 does the smaller screen with the same number of pixels gives it a super-crisp visual appeal that we love, but there is a lot to be said for having that much more screen. I (Lyn) found myself reaching for the Scribbler to read and take notes over the TC1100 during its visit to our house, in order to have that extra space. And you get it for almost the same weight–3.5 lbs for the Scribbler vs. 2.9 lbs in the slate mode for the TC1100.

It writes a little different from the TC1100. It makes a scribble scribble sound, consistent with the name ‘Scribbler.’ We liked the drag and the nice feel of friction of the pen on paper, compared to the glossy feel of the TC1100 (of which we’ve never been great fans). I also picked it up for notetaking during its visit to enjoy the feel of the stylus on the screen.

The speakers get big points from us. We’ve grown accustomed to having the TC1100 talk into our bellies, with the speakers on what is the bottom edge when in slate and portrait modes. But it’s still a little odd. Kind of like some strange alternative medicine vibration healing thing. The Scribbler puts the sound where you want to find it: out into the air, travelling to your ear.

The stylus holder, however, is slightly less logical. If you hold the tablet in slate and portrait modes, the pen is awkwardly located on the left bottom side. As a right-handed person, I have to hold out the tablet forward with my left hand and remove the pen with my right hand. This feels strange and non-intuitive. I also worry that the pen will fall out, though it seems fairly secure in the holder.

Indeed, while Electrovaya, unlike HP, figured out that we didn’t want the sound projecting into our stomachs, they somehow thought we’d like to draw out the pen that way.

In landscape mode, it was somewhat less odd, because then the pen would be at the top left–still a reach across with the right hand, but the same as the primary landscape orientation on the TC1100.

(Of course, you have the four orientations available so you can turn things around–but then all the other buttons end up not in their intuitive places, and screen quality isn’t quite the same if it isn’t in primary portrait or primary landscape.) 

It really made us think about the development of tablet technology. Because people have such personal relationships with their Tablet PC and with writing implements, one shouldn’t really have to choose one’s tablet based on the thickness of the pen. It does seem that you can use digitizer pens interchangeably–the TC1100 pen on the Scribbler, for instance–but then it doesn’t store inside the unit, which does seem necessary, given how costly the pens are and how useless the tablet in slate is without one. Perhaps some day the market will be big enough that many other manufacturers will be making many different pens to fit each tablet…ah sweet dreams….

Keep tuned for more review to come…

Toronto based Electrovaya sent us a review unit of their Scribbler SC 3100.

How we evaluate this piece of hardware is greatly influenced by our experiences of the HP TC1100. For the past two years we have developed a close relationship to our TC1100s and it has been interesting to see this new (temporary) Tablet-PC-Sibling alongside the beloved TC1100.

If you have read this blog even for a minute you know that we have mostly enjoyed our TC110s. They have done their jobs well. The greatest disappointment has been HP’s discontinuation of this particular model which we have addressed here, and here, here, and here. If only Mark Hurd and Patricia Dunn had paid a bit more attention to further developing this model, they may not have had to testify in Congress, not to mention being indicted (Dunn only). Boardroom power plays take away from what is really important to us, the end-users–not to mention that it is quite boring (if one is not involved, at least!).

Ok, but somehow Electrovaya intuited that perhaps the day would come when we’d be in the market for another tablet. And like all TC1100 owners, we’re faced with making the leap some day. In the absence of hybrids, will it be convertible or slate for our next Tablet PC?

Back to the Scribbler:

Here is the basic rundown on the goods we received:

• Electrovaya Scribbler SC 3100 slate
• eraser pen
• keyboard
• docking station
• wire stand
• portfolio bag
• software including recovery cd-rom set

We forgot to ask for the outdoor viewing screen! Rats!

Our review unit had 1280 MB RAM and a 60 GB hard drive

Some features of the Scribbler:

• 12.1 inch XGA TFT 32-bit colour with 180 degree viewing angle
• dual array microphone
• intel centrino 1.6 GHz processor with 2 MB L2 Cache
• Integrated Biometric Device for Finger Print Sensor
• intel 802.11 a/b/g wireless network card
• Optional outdoor viewable screen
• superpolymer lithium 75Wh battery

According to our Wildflowers of Nova Scotia book, that’s a New York Aster keeping the Scribbler company on the estate of Melville Manor. 

So those are the facts. The hard-nosed hardware features of the temporary tablet-PC-Sibling to our TC1100s.

Coming next: our impressions and experiences. In the blogosphere, ever so much more interesting than facts! 

That’s two first-place prizes to give out in the first tabletology quizology (in a conceptual, prizology, kind of way), and one sour grape for neuroblabla (we know who you are!).

Yes, indeed, it is the Electrovaya touchpad that goes with the Scribbler SC 3100. You slide it out of the right top of the keyboard and slide it in to the side of the key board. You can place the touchpad either on the left or right hand side of the key board (useful for those of you who are left handed). Here is a close-up of what it looks like.

Clever, eh?  

We’re not exactly exhaustive, manual-reading kind of computer users. We’re kind of post-literate when it comes to technology. We expect things to make sense by feel. So we had the Scribbler a few days, and we had more than one conversation about the appearance that there was some "thing" that maybe could detach from the clip-on keyboard, before we figured out that it did detach and, furthermore, what it was. Can you spot it hiding in the picture below?

The origami appearance you see in our mystery picture is because the touchpad itself needs to flip inside the frame that has the connectors to the keyboard in order for it to attach on both the left and rights sides. They probably have a whole special team of elves in a special Santa workshop at Electrovaya who build this little gizmo.

First in a series of tablet PC mind-bending brain-ticklers:

What is this device? 

• Electrovaya’s Complimentary UMPC for your cat? 

• A finger trap for curious Tablet PC onlookers?

• A very clever mousing solution for a Scribbler Tablet PC?

Leave us an answer and tune in for the answer this weekend…

We get an email the other day from Electrovaya.

It turns out Warner Crocker writing at gottabemobile.com isn’t the only one who misses us. Electrovaya would like to give us some incentive to get more productive on our tablet pc blog. 

They’re asking if we want to review the Electrovaya Scribbler, a snazzy-looking slate number.

Have they visited tabletology?, we wonder. Do they know what they’re asking for?

They do clarify that we’re on the hook for the price of the unit if we don’t return it from Melville Manor Ravine Daycare (our new digs) in the same condition it was in when it left its Toronto home.