I was looking over some of the new laptops and the new notebook/tablets caught my eye. Being a college student would the tablet portion be of any value? Tell me what you think
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For me, Tablet PC's are not something I have ever played with. I know Power Notebooks ( http://www.powernotebooks.com/ ) has been selling them at reasonable rates for a long time, but I have never thought to purchase one. Believe it or not, that's actually a great place to buy laptops - those guys have a crappy site, but they're the people who manufacture for the bigger brands like HP, Acer and Dell.

The two scnarios where I can see one being handy: (1) You're a graphic designer and use Adobe Freehand or other similar apps for drawing. (2) You admantly hate typing, so you hand write your notes using the OCR handwriting recognition type software.

Do you think you have use for something like that?

I am not very fast at typing and I am really good at mis placing notes. I was thinking I could used it to take my notes and also store them. Thanks for the reply.

Oh here is the one I am looking at.... http://www.gateway.com/products/gconfig/prodseries.asp?seg=ed&gcseries=gtwym275b

They are offering a refurbished one for 1100. I have a toshiba that is about a year old, so i can possibly sell it to help cover part of the cost of the new one.

I'm pretty sure these often come with character recognition software that you can train to your handwriting, but I don't know how well it works.

I would research the longevity of the hardware and what kind of failure rate you're looking at - after all, I think in its basic form, a tablet notebook is nothing more than a fancy touch screen.

I would try to find a store locally that sells this type of laptop - Be(a)st Buy? CompUSA? Something like that. Go give them a shot and let the salespeople tell you what they're good for - then go online and find something at a cheaper cost from a reputable vendor.

PS - Gateway has store fronts around the US. I'd try to check that machine out, it looks pretty cool.