William
09-24-2007, 02:06 PM
As far as I can tell I'm one of the first people who is actually living with an i440D day in day out rather than having a 48 hour trial or similar. I've also got the docking station and the handsfree case, which I've not seen any review of to date.
Firstly, the included stand is great. From the videos/pictures I thought it looked flimsy. It isn't in the slightest, although I do wish it was part of the unit, rather than another thing to remember. I'm less impressed by the slip case that comes with the unit; it's far too tight and because of this, the zips are going to end up scratching the case, also it will provide little protection if (for example) the tablet falls and lands on the zip. A neoprene flap would solve these problems, and have been more useful than the dust cloth.
Onto the tablet itself.
Having a 1.8Ghz processor is just great. Ditto lots of RAM and a standard 2.5" SATA drive. The battery retaining clips are OK, but I sorely miss the bridge battery from my old TC1100 for doing a battery swap whilst in suspend rather than hibernate. The built in speakers are really terrible, slightly worse than my TC1100 (and I didn't think that would be possible). I don't know what Hugo Ortega is used to in laptops/tablets, but I'm glad I've never heard them.
This leads me onto my next grumble, the volume buttons. With the fitted speakers they're a waste of a quarter of the buttons on the unit. I would (much, much, much) rather have the buttons control the screen brightness -that's something that I want to vary frequently, unlike the volume which needs to be permanently muted.
Onto the fingerprint reader, which is nice when it works. Unfortunately the supplied software has a nasty habit of forgetting the Windows XP login password, rendering it just a bit useless. This is unquestionably a software bug, but it has persisted through reinstalling the software supplied by TK. There may be a later version for download from their website, but the zip file is corrupt, so I'll never know. Also TK installed a second piece of fingerprint software that is incompatible with IE7 -the FAQ suggests purchasing an upgrade. Why bother including the software on the tablet when it's useless? On the plus side, the scroll functionality of the fingerprint scanner still works, though it'd be nice if it rotated so it wasn't scrolling at 90 degrees to the window orientation when used in portrait mode.
I love the power switch, unlike my old TC1100 it's not going to get switched on by accident in a bag.
Heat and noise. The fan is definitely a variable speed one. Thankfully most of the time it's fairly quiet, you hear it at (I presume) full speed briefly during boot up. The casing does get very hot sometimes, although no worse than any other tablet/laptop I've ever used.
The dual mode touch is just fantastic. I always hated the idea of the palm rejection style touch screens, but the manual switch that TK have implemented is a stroke of genius for which they really deserve congratulations. The only reservation I have is that there are two modes of touch, point and stroke. I find stroke to imprecise for using a finger to click buttons etc. (usually starts dragging instead) whereas point is great, but you can't draw with it because you just produce a dot at the start of the line. If there was some way to combine these based on the whether I tap with a fingernail or the whole finger, that's be even better. I'd also suggest that the beeps are a poor way of knowing whether you're in digitizer or touch mode (especially if you have it muted, which is a must in meetings) and that an LED would have been better.
Ports
Only 2 USB is being stingy, there is plenty of space for more (rotate them 90 degrees if necessary). But only 2 is just silly
PCMCIA I'm at a loss to explain why there is only a type II PCMCIA slot when there is plainly space (and even markings on the case suggesting this was originally the idea) to have a type III, which would have been incredibly useful. Or even an Express card slot to look fancy?
eSATA. Why? It's useless where it is. Remember that eSATA does not deliver power, so the only time you might want to use it is when you have docked the tablet. At which point it is inaccessible behind one of the sides of the dock. No cut out. And, eSATA is not replicated on the dock. eSATA is a feature that I might have found useful, but it's rendered completely useless here by bad design. Speaking of ports covered by the dock, the RJ-45 Gigabit Ethernet port is covered too. But that's OK because it is replicated on the dock...
Ahh, the dock.
What no review I've seen has mentioned is that unlike every other manufacturer dock I've ever heard of, the dock does not pass through the network connection to the internal network card. Nope. There is a USB Ethernet controller in the dock. A 10/100 controller. Rather than the gigabit one in the tablet itself. This is the part of the design that most flummoxes me, because TK have added an extra component, at extra cost to provide a reduced version of something that they already integrated into the unit (the TK accessory website specifies pass-thru in case anyone#8217;s wondering why I didn't notice this before I bought the unit). I know that TK read this forum and I'd be genuinely interested to hear why they made this decision.
I can just about understand that you might not want to risk trying eSATA over the docking connector, particularly if you didn't have anyone skilled in routing high speed traces. But that argument just doesn't apply for gigabit Ethernet.
Finally, the handsfree case is a bad joke, as it covers all the buttons, the speakers, the microphones and the fingerprint reader. I imagine this is why there isn't a picture of case with the tablet installed on the TK website.
Despite all the grumbles I list above, I wouldn't swap the base tablet -it's good and the only inherent faults are minor, and for the most part should be software correctable. But I wouldn't buy the dock or the handsfree case again.
I also have a list of improvements that could be made to an i450 or similar, but it seems unfair to list those here as they're not really relevant to the i440D.
Wow, that was a long post.
If anyone has any questions on anything I haven't covered, I'll be happy to try and answer.
Firstly, the included stand is great. From the videos/pictures I thought it looked flimsy. It isn't in the slightest, although I do wish it was part of the unit, rather than another thing to remember. I'm less impressed by the slip case that comes with the unit; it's far too tight and because of this, the zips are going to end up scratching the case, also it will provide little protection if (for example) the tablet falls and lands on the zip. A neoprene flap would solve these problems, and have been more useful than the dust cloth.
Onto the tablet itself.
Having a 1.8Ghz processor is just great. Ditto lots of RAM and a standard 2.5" SATA drive. The battery retaining clips are OK, but I sorely miss the bridge battery from my old TC1100 for doing a battery swap whilst in suspend rather than hibernate. The built in speakers are really terrible, slightly worse than my TC1100 (and I didn't think that would be possible). I don't know what Hugo Ortega is used to in laptops/tablets, but I'm glad I've never heard them.
This leads me onto my next grumble, the volume buttons. With the fitted speakers they're a waste of a quarter of the buttons on the unit. I would (much, much, much) rather have the buttons control the screen brightness -that's something that I want to vary frequently, unlike the volume which needs to be permanently muted.
Onto the fingerprint reader, which is nice when it works. Unfortunately the supplied software has a nasty habit of forgetting the Windows XP login password, rendering it just a bit useless. This is unquestionably a software bug, but it has persisted through reinstalling the software supplied by TK. There may be a later version for download from their website, but the zip file is corrupt, so I'll never know. Also TK installed a second piece of fingerprint software that is incompatible with IE7 -the FAQ suggests purchasing an upgrade. Why bother including the software on the tablet when it's useless? On the plus side, the scroll functionality of the fingerprint scanner still works, though it'd be nice if it rotated so it wasn't scrolling at 90 degrees to the window orientation when used in portrait mode.
I love the power switch, unlike my old TC1100 it's not going to get switched on by accident in a bag.
Heat and noise. The fan is definitely a variable speed one. Thankfully most of the time it's fairly quiet, you hear it at (I presume) full speed briefly during boot up. The casing does get very hot sometimes, although no worse than any other tablet/laptop I've ever used.
The dual mode touch is just fantastic. I always hated the idea of the palm rejection style touch screens, but the manual switch that TK have implemented is a stroke of genius for which they really deserve congratulations. The only reservation I have is that there are two modes of touch, point and stroke. I find stroke to imprecise for using a finger to click buttons etc. (usually starts dragging instead) whereas point is great, but you can't draw with it because you just produce a dot at the start of the line. If there was some way to combine these based on the whether I tap with a fingernail or the whole finger, that's be even better. I'd also suggest that the beeps are a poor way of knowing whether you're in digitizer or touch mode (especially if you have it muted, which is a must in meetings) and that an LED would have been better.
Ports
Only 2 USB is being stingy, there is plenty of space for more (rotate them 90 degrees if necessary). But only 2 is just silly
PCMCIA I'm at a loss to explain why there is only a type II PCMCIA slot when there is plainly space (and even markings on the case suggesting this was originally the idea) to have a type III, which would have been incredibly useful. Or even an Express card slot to look fancy?
eSATA. Why? It's useless where it is. Remember that eSATA does not deliver power, so the only time you might want to use it is when you have docked the tablet. At which point it is inaccessible behind one of the sides of the dock. No cut out. And, eSATA is not replicated on the dock. eSATA is a feature that I might have found useful, but it's rendered completely useless here by bad design. Speaking of ports covered by the dock, the RJ-45 Gigabit Ethernet port is covered too. But that's OK because it is replicated on the dock...
Ahh, the dock.
What no review I've seen has mentioned is that unlike every other manufacturer dock I've ever heard of, the dock does not pass through the network connection to the internal network card. Nope. There is a USB Ethernet controller in the dock. A 10/100 controller. Rather than the gigabit one in the tablet itself. This is the part of the design that most flummoxes me, because TK have added an extra component, at extra cost to provide a reduced version of something that they already integrated into the unit (the TK accessory website specifies pass-thru in case anyone#8217;s wondering why I didn't notice this before I bought the unit). I know that TK read this forum and I'd be genuinely interested to hear why they made this decision.
I can just about understand that you might not want to risk trying eSATA over the docking connector, particularly if you didn't have anyone skilled in routing high speed traces. But that argument just doesn't apply for gigabit Ethernet.
Finally, the handsfree case is a bad joke, as it covers all the buttons, the speakers, the microphones and the fingerprint reader. I imagine this is why there isn't a picture of case with the tablet installed on the TK website.
Despite all the grumbles I list above, I wouldn't swap the base tablet -it's good and the only inherent faults are minor, and for the most part should be software correctable. But I wouldn't buy the dock or the handsfree case again.
I also have a list of improvements that could be made to an i450 or similar, but it seems unfair to list those here as they're not really relevant to the i440D.
Wow, that was a long post.
If anyone has any questions on anything I haven't covered, I'll be happy to try and answer.