ECS EZ-Tablet EZ30D review

There's no denying that the EZ-Tablet EZ30D is unique. The first thing any user will notice is the size: while Acer's slightly bigger C111TCi has a 10.4in screen and keyboard, and is the smallest of the other products on test here, the EZ-Tablet is a slate design with an 8.4in screen, running at 800 x 600 resolution.

With a built-in 640 x 480 digital camera, the EZ30D looks more like a high-end Sony CLI PDA than a Windows Tablet PC. Yet, although some versions of this machine have been sold with Windows XP Home Edition, this is indeed a real tablet PC and fully supports the Microsoft Tablet extensions.

There's a full range of connectivity options included, with 802.11b wireless networking, two USB 2 ports, VGA, and a four-in-one card reader capable of working with most memory cards. You also get 256MB of RAM, which appears to be the only place that ECS has cut corners in order to make its bargain price of £799.

The EZ-Tablet is also unique in its use of a Transmeta Crusoe processor running at 800MHz, rather than the more common Intel Pentium M chips. Unfortunately, this is also the source of the major problem with the EZ-Tablet: its speed. Not only is it sluggish even on simple business applications, but the EZ-Tablet also manages to make Windows itself look slow, occasionally visibly redrawing the windows onscreen when you open or close them. Maddening.

This is a shame, because it spoils what could be a great niche for the tablet PC as a whole, as a kind of souped-up PDA that's small enough to carry around with you all the time, yet powerful enough to run Windows and give access to the world of Windows applications. While no tablet is ever going to be the first-choice platform for running Photoshop, at least it should be capable of working with a complex spreadsheet - something that the EZ-Tablet struggles to do at anything other than a snail's pace.

This means the EZ30D is a real disappointment. While there are plenty of features here - we were particularly pleased to see VGA out on a machine this small, which means you could use it as a highly mobile presentation system - it was so slow that realistically it would be suitable for only the most patient of users. The company would be better off charging slightly more and including a faster processor, even if this meant sacrificing some battery life.