Keep taking the tablets

Last year included a ton of travel, with the Windows Embedded Essentials (India, China, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, San Jose, Boston, and Germany), as well as other events, customer visits etc...

When travelling I like to catch up on some of my skunk projects and also read a few books, since I'm now running a Toshiba Tablet M200 I decided to download some eBooks for MS-Reader (there's a client for desktop PC's and Pocket PC's) - I decided to take a number of books with me on the trip - including "A short history of nearly everything", "the Da Vinci Code" and a handful of other books - I would normally have a bag full of hardware and books, it was going to be an interesting experience using the Tablet instead...

The tablet screen rotates and locks down over the keyboard, in tablet mode the Windows XP UI rotates into a portrait view, in this mode you can view an entire page at a time in MS-Reader - I decided to read the Da Vinci Code first, and couldn't put the book down (actually, couldn't put the tablet down) - the M200 has a 4 way toggle that meant I didn't need a pen to move pages, I could just switch up and down pages using the toggle. There are a few downsides to using the tablet

1. having to turn the tablet off for landing (especially since I was just getting to a good part of the book)

2. not having any laptop power for the flight from Asia to Seattle - I only managed a couple of hours on battery

3. Getting a warm lap from the heat of the laptop

Beyond these minor issues the experience was actually very good - I have some more travel on the horizon, so will definately get some new eBooks to read, and will also make sure I have a 2nd laptop battery fully charged...

It would be good to have some Technical eBooks to read on the next trip... I will have to see what's available...

- Mike