Technology in Education

Intro 

For the last few weeks, we’ve had a new HP TC4400 convertible (laptop/tablet) in house and I’ve had the opportunity to sample it’s wares. With the relatively short period of time that I’ve had to work with it I can’t find much that I don’t like about it.

Google Image Search for TC4400 Images

As a tablet

It’s pretty sweet even if a little on the heavy side. Fold the screen around and the display automatically changes from lanscape to portrait. The pen is extremely accurate (unlike the Fujitsu) as it uses the (is it typical now?) Wacom overlay. There is a feature of this pen that I haven’t seen before, it’s got an “eraser”. The back side of the pen has a spring loaded portion that certain applications recognize as an eraser, pretty cool.

I loaded the educational and tablet experience packs from Microsoft along with a host of power toys to push the tablet as hard as I could but I didn’t see any shortcomings in performance at all.

The specs…

• This is a more compact machine, with an external optical drive. The keys are full size but the keyboard is shortened.
• Windows XP Professional
• Centrino Duo 1.83GHz processor.
• 1.49GB DDR2 RAM
• 80GB HDD (partitioned into two drives, one of which is about 8GB and is labeled HP_RECOVERY)
• 3 USB ports
• Internal Intel Wireless (A/B/G)
• Single PCMCIA drive
• SDIO/MMC slot
• VGA & S-Video out
• Integrated 10/100/1000 Broadcom NIC
• Integrated Agere Modem

Environments

I’ve used this machine at work, at home and travelling and found no issues with any features. The wireless was always able to draw a good signal from any wireless AP in range. The machine was always fast and capable of rendering pages in whatever browser I used (mostly FireFox).

I didn’t however get a chance to use this computer for the things I do every day. This includes graphics/photo editing, video processing/editing or curriculum develoment as these tasks are performed with software that I didn’t take the time to install. I’m sure however that had I taken the time I would have been equally impressed with the machine as I have been with the rudimentary tasks performed.

Will we use them?

I doubt it. We’re a Dell shop and I really can’t see moving away from that. Price, performance and support of our Dell products are not easily matched and mixing technology vendors isn’t something we’re looking at doing currently. But, if I were looking for a machine that I was going to purchase, with the experience that I’ve had with this machine, I would take a very long, hard look at this little box. Portable, tablet capable and very powerful this machine flat rocks.