Product Reviews

It's easy to be cynical about Tablet PCs, but with big names like HP, Acer and Toshiba already on board, Microsoft's latest venture starts to look less like a misguided whim. The latest tier-one company to join the party is NEC, which evidently has a lot of faith in Microsoft's tablet vision.

The forthcoming Versa T400 is an independent tablet - it doesn't convert into a notebook and there's no keyboard attachment. The T400 was designed with pen input solely in mind, and PC Pro has been lucky enough to get a sneak preview of a pre-production sample.

The ergonomics have been well thought out, and the T400 is very comfortable to hold in either portrait or landscape mode. Weighing less than 1kg certainly helps, but the depth of just 15mm makes things even easier. The power supply socket is placed far enough to the right so that the cable doesn't dig into you in landscape mode when it's plugged in, and there are also three USB ports and headphone and mic jacks along the top.

But that's pretty much where the connectivity ends: the ports are USB 1.1 rather than USB 2, there's no FireWire and you don't even get a PC Card slot. On the plus side, this makes the T400 stylishly minimalist, but it also limits your peripheral attachments - a variety of high-speed modern peripherals, such as hard disks, are automatically excluded. Fortunately, WLAN is already integrated, and you

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could add Bluetooth through the CompactFlash slot.

What's most impressive about the T400, however, is how much has been squeezed into the slim chassis. NEC could have opted for a low-powered VIA C3 or Transmeta Crusoe chip, but here you get a 933MHz Pentium III-M and 256MB of RAM (which can be upgraded through a SODIMM socket on the back). Our review sample was a pre-production unit, so the performance wasn't on a par with expectations, but we still found that the T400 was fast enough for the operating system and office software.

The 10.5in XGA TFT screen is clear and sharp, but the viewing angles were very disappointing. Even when you're viewing it head-on, you still get a light and dark area on either side of the screen - this is a consequence of the touch-sensitive coating.

The battery life was also slightly substandard - the T400 lasted 72 minutes in our intensive test and 137 minutes under light use, but again this could improve with the final product. However, the battery's capacity is just 1,800mAh, so it may not be a dramatic improvement. Still, it fits snugly into the bottom without taking up too much space.

It's this, along with the other tablet design touches, that makes the T400 so alluring. You even get two styli - a full-size one and a smaller one that clips in the side. There are also nice little features like being able to operate the BIOS entirely in tablet mode, with a virtual keypad appearing on the screen. The integrated Wacom tablet is easy to write on, and the operating system's handwriting recognition is also successful in use.

We've yet to see whether the Tablet PC is going to take off, but it's encouraging to see units specifically designed as tablets slowly trickling in. If you're in the market for a Tablet PC that isn't just a converted notebook, it may be worth looking at the NEC Versa T400. However, at £1,399, you'll still get much better value, features and performance from a notebook costing £400 less.