First post and have so many questions I hope to find the answers to here.

1. What are good (hopefully active) Tablet PC sites? I'm the kinda geek who wants to know not only best of what is out there right now, but I wanna know what's around the corner so I can make the best choice about what to get.

2. Where can I go to get some hands on experience with these things? I've looked around at the big electronics retailers (best buy, circuit city, ect.) but they have little to nothing in the way of tablets and the one or two i have seen, were bolted down so you could only demo them in laptop mode, ick!

3. From the poking around the internet so far, I think I am leaning towards a slate style tablet and am wondering if anybody has built or is planning on releasing a slate with an optical drive. That's the one thing that might keep me attached to the convertable style tablet.

4. If your tablet does not suppot hot swapping batteries, can you swap batteries more quickly by going into a suspend or sleep mode? Do these modes still require contant juice, or can you take out the battery and restart without rebooting?

Answers to any of these would be great. I'm gonna start looking around through the archives here to see what info I have find already posted.

Pete