hello,
i'm considering purchasing a tablet pc to use in multimedia performance situations... basically i am planning to work with flash and/or opengl to create real-time vector graphics and possibly do some video manipulation; however my focus at the current moment is simply 2d vector graphics...

i'm interested in using a tablet pc rather than a standard laptop primarily because i like the idea of seeing what i'm drawing as it happens, rather than using a wacom tablet and looking elsewhere...

my primary concern is that the tablet pc will not be able to keep up with what i'm doing & will start to drop frames etc...

i would also like a firewire port (or cardbus so i can put a firewire card in) & s-video out,

and i'd like to have bluetooth & either a clip-on keyboard like the hp/compaq or a slate (slate with bluetooth kbd/mouse is perfect)

so i have three questions:

1) from what i have read, the integrated intel cards aren't so zippy, so i'm assuming i should go with either an nvidia or (ideally) radeon - however it's a little disappointing to spend $2000+ on a machine with only 32MB of dedicated graphics memory when i could spend $1500 on a new 12" powerbook & it would have twice as much memory... not to start a mac/pc war or anything, but my personal preference of os is os x, so i've really got to be convinced that the graphics card is going to be up to par...

it seems as though the only tablet with a radeon card is the NEC - and from the looks of things it's not avaiable in the us right now... and i can't seem to find much information on it (in english) to compare it against the alternatives... i already looked at the excel spreadsheet & there are a bunch of columns missing, so i think whoever filled that in was just as confused as me... so if anyone has some more information. like whether it has firewire & s-video ports, if there are other processor configurations & maybe where to buy one...? that would be great....

from my understanding, the next best graphics card available is the nvidia that ships with the toshiba, then the nvidia in the hp compaq.

i guess the toshiba is the most practical, except a) it doesn't have s-video out (it does have a cardbus slot, so i could put in a firewire card if necessary), and b) i'm not so psyched on the design...

i like the design of the compaq, but the cpu is a bit underwhelming - anyone know how a 1.1 gHz pentium compares to a 1.5 gHz g4? i searched for benchmarks, but came up empty & annoyed with pc/mac wars...

the acers & fujitsus seem nice except that they've got the intel graphics deal, and that scares me... does anyone have feedback on how they run with, say, graphics-intensive flash sites or medium-complexity 3d games?

2) has anyone swapped a graphics card (and/or cpu) in a tablet pc? is it possible? is it risky? how risky? are there any good resources for how to do this? i'd love an hp compaq tablet (the design is my favorite - although the versa pro looks quite nice too), but with say an ati radeon 9800 card & a 2 ghz pentium m...

3) i'm assuming that hp compaq will put faster cpu's in their tablets someday (soon?), and i was curious as to whether anyone knew of good "tablet rumors" sites, whether for hp/compaq or others...

oh yeah & if anyone can give me some names of major chains (or stores in the los angeles area) that might carry the hp/compaqs, acers & fujitsus where i could try them out in person (i.e. actually take in a cpu/gpu-intensive program on a usb drive & run it, or at least use the thing with some demos they have pre-installed, preferably with a pen), please let me know...

cheers,
mk