[update 2006-12-04]
This particular post talks mostly about OneNote, however if you would like a little more in depth review of the Tecra M7 convertible tablet model, I recommend going to the Tecra M7 page on this blog.
[/update]
Ok, so I’ve had my M7 now for a week and a half, and I love using it! There’s a few things I’d like to just write down before I forget them, since they seem to be piling up, and I need ot save that precious memory for study anyway. Here goes:
1. OneNote 2003 kinda sux . I like it a lot, but there are a few features that are not present in this program that are absolutely inexcusable. Fortunately, the majority of the ones I mention here will be in OneNote 2007 according to this MS developer’s blog.
Missing features that will be in ‘07, unless otherwise mentioned:
- drawing tools – no way to create a basic box or circle. Also means that there is no support for rotating images in OneNote – such as when you try to import a PDF that only prints to OneNote in portrait if you don’t want it to look stretched, but you need it in landscape.. Ugh.. – I had this problem with a periodic table template that I wanted to load in it..
- full screen / minimal UI mode – OneNote ‘03 does have a minimal UI mode, but you only get the benefit of this when the window is <300 px wide.
- page break lines – there is no way to display page break lines on a page. This is a big bummer if you want to print out notes that have lots of drawings in them, and they are likely to get cut in half right at the page break. The only way to fix this is to go to print preview and find where drawings are cut, then go back to the page and add page space, then check print preview.. then add page space.. a trial and error process that’s pretty tedious if you have a long document. As far as I know, a page-break type of feature to aid in making your notes more printer-friendly will not be in ‘07.
- infinite subpage structure – OneNote breaks things down in a limited hierarchical manner of “My Notebook” > Any amount of folders you want > Section > Page > Subpage. You can’t break it down any farther than the subpage. A free program called Keynote, which only supports rich text (it’s not intended for tablets), allows an infinite amount of branching from central nodes. Even the nodes themselves are notes in Keynote! I don’t understand the reasoning of having a limited number of sub-paging, but perhaps there’s a technical limitation of some kind in their implementation. To my knowledge this will not be in ‘07
- lasso select tool – they have this tool in the flash cards program, but for some reason not in OneNote ‘03. It allows you to select irregular shapes – very useful if, say, there’s a multi-part drawing at a page break line and the “add page space” feature can’t be used because some lines are too close too each other. Breaking apart the drawing isn’t a problem with the lasso, and is often much more difficult with the standard selection tool already present which only creates selection boxes.
- extra page space w/out asking for it – in OneNote ‘03, there’s a small button at the bottom of the vertical scroll bar for adding page space. If you immediately scroll up again w/out writing anything, it disappears again. This is REALLY annoying. I often do math problems, and need to scroll up to find an equation to copy.. then scroll back down to find that the extra page space I created is gone. OneNote ‘07 has changed this so that it will simply create page space as you scroll (or something along those lines).
–End rant–
Ok, so other than some missing features, OneNote is a fairly intuitive-to-use program once you get used to the folder/page/subpage structure (though I wish there were more to that structure, as mentioned before..). I’ve been doing math homework on it (a lot more fun than paper, because I can rearrange formulae on the page without erasing!) and taking notes in class.
2. Audio recording w/ built in mic – So far I haven’t used the audio recording feature for in-class notes because when I tried it in my quiet dorm room w/ just me talking, there was terrible static noise in the background. My voice is still quite audible, but I really can’t stand that kind’ve audio quality. I don’t have a sample file right now, but will in the future post a sample of quiet static vs. talking for you potential buyers out there who wonder about the mic quality. In any case, my recommendation is to get a good USB mic if you want quality recording, but that will run upwards of $50 in cost for most of the mics I’ve found online.
3. The screen is surprisingly resistant to scratches – I was worried that not getting a screen protector to put on it right away would be the doom of my screen. It turns out that Toshiba has designed it for its intended use though – while there are a few very small scratches now that can only be seen at very oblique angles in direct sunlight, the screen looks spotless in any other situation. I still have to clean the screen every day though from hand oils from using it in slate mode, which is not surprising.. just something to keep in mind. I’ve been using a lint-free cloth intended for cleaning glasses, and I really need to get some general lens cleaner in a spray bottle, as that stuff typically works well for any kind of display as well.
4. Battery life is shorter than advertised – big surprise! With casual mixed use of Wi-Fi on/off, I’ve been getting something like 5 hours of battery life when I have both a regular 6-cell inside (only option available) and a 6-cell slice expansion battery pack attached. This isn’t bad, compared to the typical 2 hours I got from a 6-cell in my last laptop – a Compaq with considerably less hardware (bought $550 on sale a year and a half ago). It’s certainly plenty enough for my needs, but certainly not what is advertised. See the official specs – PDF of a particular model for advert. battery life.
Of course, some of this might have to do with variations in hardware – I have an Nvidia card that draws additional power for the internal RAM, and a faster processor (T2500) than any of the specific models whose specs are listed in PDF form. Still, I don’t think that justifies a 3 or 2 hour difference in battery life.
5. It’s super-responsive compared to my last notebook. The Core Duo processor is definitely a quick puppy. There are a few delays in loading various things, however these are primarily due to the fact that I have 512 MB of RAM, and therefore the PC has to pagefile some things to the hard drive, thus slowing performance. Nonetheless, the hibernate-resume function is very quick, and programs that were sluggish on my previous laptop (1.3 Ghz AMD, 512 MB) are super-quick on this one.
6. Shutdown behaves oddly sometimes. I don’t know why, but for some reason when I go start > shutdown, the PC semi-freezes. I can still move the mouse, select icons, etc., but the start menu becomes unresponsive. If I ctrl+alt+delete and hit “shut-down”, this will freeze the screen as well and make it unresponsive.
Once, simply hibernating and resuming solved the problem – the shut down dialog came up and allowed me to select “shut down”, so that I could reboot the system into a fresh state in the morning. This hibernate-resume technique doesn’t work every time though, and I think is indicative of some odd inner-workings of the XP Tablet Edition, since it probably has to check with a few TPC processes before loading that shut down menu. I still need to investigate the list of processes that run in startup, so I can eliminate those that are unnecessary.
Anyway, I don’t like having to force-crash a brand-new computer just to get it to reboot, so I’ll have to take this up with tech support, or perhaps talk to my techy friend down the hall in the Owen dorm. Either way, I think this issue is resolvable and quite possibly something unique to my system alone – something that is not systemic to all M7 models.
—-
I guess this post turned mostly into a whine/rant about some things that I was disappointed about, but I should hope that no one considers this to be a listing of reasons why not to buy the Tecra M7. It is a great little notebook, and quirks are something to be expected with any model. Once I get some new software (ON ‘07 at some point), and work out the technical difficulties with shutting down, my system will be running clean as a whistle!
Pics coming soon! My dad left a 3MP point-and-shoot, and I’ll be taking a few pictures of my M7 tomorrow 
