Product Reviews

Last month we were impressed by the Hewlett-Packard Compaq TC1100 Tablet PC (What's New, Shopper October 2004), but at £1,527 doubted its value for money. It's since dropped to £1,475, but Mesh's Tablea Centrino Xtra - which has a more powerful Pentium M 1.6GHz processor and a bigger 60GB hard disk -undercuts it by £536.

At first glance the Tablea looks like a standard notebook. System components are in its base under the keyboard, rather than incorporated into a single unit with the display. The keyboard can't be removed, but it can be rotated and clipped behind the screen. This doesn't reduce its bulk and, at 2.7kg, it isn't as light as many tablet PCs.

The 14.1" touch screen is glossy and prone to reflections. Viewing angles are reasonably good, but an opaque quality left graphics looking a little indistinct. The pen's a pressure stylus - you can move the cursor accidentally by leaning on the screen's surface - and you

Keyboard keys must be almost fully pressed to register, and we released a cursor key accidentally when scrolling through documents.

A fiddly rubber flap on the rear panel protects a D-sub, network and modem ports. The front edge has audio connectors and a small microphone, and a camera with 640x480 resolution is set into the screen's top bezel. To the right is a PC Card slot, 4-in-1 memory card reader and two USB ports. Both the PC Card and USB port are required by the USB DVD/CD-RW combo drive when you can't use AC power.

The Tablea ships with Windows XP Home rather than Tablet Edition, which means it uses third-party software for tablet-specific features such as handwriting recognition. The supplied ritePen software will capture handwriting from almost any region of the screen, but we experienced frustratingly inaccurate results.

In our tests, the system scored 2,674 in PCMark04, but the lack of hardware features in Intel's Extreme graphics meant it scored only 119 in 3DMark03. This also has an impact in the new Shopper application benchmarks, where it achieved just 67; the Elonex Soliton Safari (see page 20) has the same processor and amount of memory but a better image manipulation score helped it to 77.

For a Centrino, the Tablea is unexceptional, and its battery life of two hours 13 minutes is poor. It's well priced, but its bulk and lack of effective handwriting recognition limit its practicality.