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Originally Posted by roozter
Of course, my desires outstrip my budget...
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Tell me about it. Most of what I have currently came second hand (gotta love eBay) and at the expense of a meal or two. ;) It has to be done though. That's the nature of an addiction. Just admitting that you are powerless against gadgets and that your life has become unmanagable is a step in the right direction though...
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Originally Posted by roozter Please tell me more about the Stylistic 3400 & 3500. I read they are good for viewing outdoors? Are they upgradeable i.e. OS, hard drive? I am particularly interested in the handwriting option. And anything else you consider important... |
Gladly, although I'm sure there are lots of opinions about lots of devices here. :) They are upgradable (standard laptop drives, 44 pin connector) and one memory slot each, standard SO-DIMMS if I recall. I'm running 98SE on the 3400 and XP Tablet on the 3500 and they're both excellent outdoors.
If you've used a laptop with a bare LCD outdoors, you'll probably notice just a hint of something "not quite right" for the first few minutes until you adjust (owing, I believe, to the width of the touch panel which places the point of glare just a *tiny* bit above the actual surface of the LCD image. Fujitsu did a pretty good job with the surface of the touch panel and glare seems very minimal, almost unnoticable, particularly when compared to older devices where the space between the surface of the screen and the actual image is more pronounced. The PenCentra, for example, looks fabulous outdoors but the "glare point" is high enough above the image that a reflection can seem just slightly distracting. Almost all new devices have addressed this more than adequately though.
Personally, I think the quality of the handwriting recognition is dependant on a number of factors, not the least of which being the effort you're willing to put into it. Platform and software are important but I find that much of the time it depends largely on how you write and taking the time to think about how you write. I "grew up" with a Palm and I find that I not only write faster in "grafiti", but that I will occasionally grafiti on paper as well (when I'm forced to use paper, that is...)
I get along well with handwriting recognition. For high use, I'll still resort to a keyboard but 95 percent of the time handwriting works more than adequately for me with few errors. (certainly not enough that correction is a task)
I'm babbling...I'm sorry. I'm in love with technology and Fujitsu is my friend. ;)