Gadgetory

this is red wine with pocket calm and part 1 of the video review of the electrode 1000 today I'm going to go through the hardware specifications for this Windows Vista tablet pc first let me go through the dimensions the device is 12.2 inches wide x 9.8 inches tall by point 9 inches deep and weighs three point three pounds so this is really not much bigger than a pad of paper and it really makes it easy for you to carry around internally it includes an intel core 2 duo processor running at 1.06 gigahertz and come standard with one gigabyte of ram and a 16 gigabyte hard drive the RAM can be upgraded to a maximum of 4 gigabytes and the hard drive can be upgraded to a maximum of 160 gigabytes on the wireless size it includes an 802 11 a B&G Wi-Fi radio as well as a Bluetooth 2.0 radio the only thing I didn't like about the bluetooth on the device or that the drivers do not include an 82 p driver so you really can't use it with your bluetooth headphones which is an unfortunate also included is a 45 watt hour battery which can be upgraded to a larger capacity 70 watt hour battery for longer usage times on the front of the device we have a 12.1 inch xga panel that has an anti-glare coating as well as a Wacom digitizer so what this digitizer means is in order to navigate to the tablet pc you have to use the included included tablet pen here so to navigate here you just tap on the screen like you saw i brought the screen back on or if you want to go through your Start menu you just use the pen here using a digitizer has some advantages and some disadvantages one is because it only recognizes the pen if I rest my hand on the screen here it won't recognize my hand touching it and therefore won't therefore won't interfere with anything that I'm doing but at the same time if you lose your pen you can't navigate through your device nor if you decide you don't want to use the pine you just want to just leave it in its little silo and just quickly access things on the screen you can't do that would have been nice of electro via had included both a touch screen and a digitizer hear something that HP I've seen done on their consumer tablets the other thing nice thing about this digitizer is its pressure sensitive for so for you Photoshop users who are familiar with wacom other the pen and tablet combos you can use it to edit your photos or create any images in Photoshop with ease and actually some fun there so that's a nice little touch if we look around the screen you can see it's got this nice black bezel Inge and the screen itself is just very smooth to the touch one thing I didn't like is when you rest your hands on the screen sometimes you do pick up the fingerprints but you know what's nice is electro via included a microfiber cloth so you could actually wipe the scream down to get rid of the the fingerprints around the black that are actually embedded in the black bezel there's a lot of indicators and switches and buttons and things but I'm going to go through right now the first is are these three little lights at the top here the first is actually your battery charge indicator light you also have a Wi-Fi on/off light as well as your hard drive running indicator in the center of the top device here we have a 1.3 megapixel webcam then we have on the left and right here your stereo speakers as well as a microphone across the bottom which can be used to use your speech recognition software oricum used in conjunction with the webcam to do web conferences web calls etc on the side of the right side of device here there's actually four little orange icons that you can't see at first I didn't know what they did but if you actually double tap the first one they actually light up and they're actually quick shortcut keys for certain functionalities the first icon lets you rotate the screen quickly without having to go through your settings this is pretty nice so you get like it like I said it's quick it's easy but the only problem is it only rotates in a counterclockwise direction instead of letting you go clockwise so you can go back and forth in either direction so if you go from portrait to landscape to get back to portrait you have to rotate the full 360 degrees and vice versa if you're in landscape decide you want to go back to portrait portrait want to go back to landscape the second icon is a quick access key to the windows Mobility Center this is included with most tablet PCs actually all tablet PCs and it's just quick access to information like brightness volume Wi-Fi status battery etc the third icon button here is just a quick shortcut key for the Internet Explorer which is really nice so you don't have to go through the start use your pen to to access your browser and the last item we have here is a shortcut key for the control alternate delete so it just gives you get you quickly to the task manager or if you want to lock your your tablet up you can just access it quickly here the other thing I didn't like about these little icon buttons here was you know one day it's they are lit so that's nice but at the same time because they're flush with the screen you can't really feel for them you don't know where they are exactly especially in dimly lit rooms or in a dark room what would have been nice if Allah is if electro via had put a little dot or a protrusion next to the icon so that you could feel around and quickly just intuitively just feel for those things that would have been nice on a usability standpoint if you notice here on the device I'm actually have it propped up it's propped up by this little stand that it comes with it's a very lightweight stand waist practically nothing and it actually compacts to this nice little size here so let me go back to the device and let's go through the other aspects of it across the bottom here you'll see that it's pretty clean there's nothing on it except there's this little silo here for your tablet now would have been nice this this little silo is nice but problem I have with it is it's kind of difficult to get the pen out cci kind of struggle with it what ever been that really nice is if it was spring loaded or something of the store just made it a little easier to get your pen in and out moving on to the left side of the device we see a lot of inputs and switches here the first is a jog dial so this is nice for scrolling through your web pages or any word or excel documents you just scroll up or down and pushing in is just a selection key we also have the on/off switch as well as the Wi-Fi on/off switch also have your headphone jack your microphone jack a VGA output for external displays or projectors two USB 2.0 ports as well as an Ethernet port moving to the top here we have a pc Express card slot here so if you have a wireless data plan with verizon AT&T sprint you can just get a card and just plug it right in and you can access your internet or your email without having to use the Wi-Fi radio so it really gives you just anywhere access to the Internet and the right next to it we have the DC port in for your AC adapter we also have here a vent here for the fan to keep the device cool as well as a fingerprint reader which works really nicely lets you log into this Windows Vista every time you start it up or you can set it up to remember your logins for various websites and you have the just the little key lock here that you can secure your device when you're at your desk on the right side here again it's clean just like the bottom and all we have here is just a switch for the for the battery and if we go to the back here this whole thing right here is the battery here I'm presuming it's just a memory slot and this probably is the hard drive slot you're also going to notice it's got a port replicator here so that's really nice once not available yet but we can assume that electro via will come without it come out with one pretty shortly so let's talk about some things I didn't like about this device here one like I said I mentioned earlier was just these little icons here you can't really feel for them they're kind of flush with the screen it also would have been nice if there were additional where buttons things like a volume up up down toggle as well as to some additional buttons where you can access quickly access things quickly in the device you're really dependent on just using your screen with you know again it's a nice thing it makes it small but from a usability standpoint I would have liked something just some additional buttons here just to use again like I said I didn't really like the style the stylus silo was just really difficult to use and otherwise you know it's it's just a a nice little nice little slate tablet pc here again you can I don't know if you can see it here that you can see some of the fingerprints that I had on here but again they included a a microfiber cloth just to clean the device so this has been part one of the video review for the electro via scribbler SC 4000 keep a lookout on pocketnow.com with the next review which will be the software that has been included with this device