Verdict:
It's light, innovative and - on the whole - well designed. Just note that it's tricky to type with the TC1100 on your lap.
The HP Compaq TC1100 is unique among tablet PCs because it's neither a true slate nor a convertible. Instead, it comes with a detachable keyboard, which can also be folded underneath the machine while attached. In theory this should provide the best of both worlds, but in practice it has certain limitations, which take the gloss off something that's otherwise a very nice machine.
Unclipped from its keyboard, the TC1100 is a small, light slate that's cleanly designed with minimum fuss. There's the standard complement of ports - VGA, two USB 2, modem and 10/100 Ethernet - as well as a well-integrated SD card slot on the top. The neat design touches extend to the side of the machine, where there's a Sony-style rocker switch for scrolling up and down on a page, as well as three user-programmable buttons and - usefully - a dedicated reset button that can't be accidentally pressed. The pen, which
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is fat, chunky and comfortable in the hand, slots in the top right-hand corner in slate mode.
With a 1GHz Pentium M processor and the standard Centrino chipsets, performance is perfectly reasonable, helped by the included 512MB of memory. The screen itself - a 10.4in LCD running at 1,024 x 768 - is good, although it looked washed out in daylight, and its viewing angles didn't match those of the Motion M1400. At 1.4kg without its keyboard, though, this is a light machine.
Then we come to the limitations. The first and most obvious is the lack of any kind of bundled optical drive - something that, for nearly £1,300, should come as standard. But a bigger limitation is the keyboard itself, which really only works on a desk. If you try typing with the keyboard on your lap, you quickly find that it has a tendency to overbalance and simply fall over - something that means it's unusable in some situations, such as on trains with no table. The keyboard itself is also fairly uncomfortable for typing on for any length of time, due to its flat, springy action. It has more in common with the detachable keyboards you find with PDAs than a real laptop keyboard.
Given these limitations, it's best to view the TC1100 as a slate tablet PC with a keyboard for occasional use, rather than as a true convertible model. Looked at in this way, it's an attractive machine for users who will be using their tablet mainly as a slate, but with occasional bouts of pseudo-laptop work.
