jkOnTheRun review- first impressions of the HP 2710p Tablet PC Part 1
The HP 2710p Tablet PC has been in my hands (literally) for less than a day but it’s already making some strong impressions with me so I felt I should share those. Judging from the number of inquiries I have received about the 2710p there are a lot of people interested in this new Tablet, and rightly so. A big thanks to HP for sending the evaluation unit to me so I can share my thoughts with you.
The first big impression for me came when I picked up the box at theFedEx depot. It is the smallest and lightest box I have ever seen witha Tablet PC inside and this gave me an inkling of what the Tablet islike. There wasn’t much in the box, the Tablet, standard battery, pen& string for attaching it to the device, some DVDs and the A/Cadapter. Taking the 2710 out of the box it was immediately apparentjust how small and thing the device really is. It’s also evident thatHP had their designers working overtime as it is the most attractiveTablet PC I have ever used. There are many facets of the 2710 that remind me of the tc1100, a Tablet I still think is the best form ever. The immediate impression of the 2710p as far as the looks goes is it is exactly what the tc1100 would look like if it were a convertible. That’s pretty high praise from me.
Specs & Performance
The evaluation unit I am using has the following specs:
These specs are not as healthy as other Tablet PCs out there but I am finding the device to be more than fast enough. There is very little lag in the OS, menus pop out quickly, and things generally happen fast. The user experience is quite nice from a performance perspective and I have no complaints at all about that. Boot time is no longer (nor shorter) than on any other device running Vista and standby and resume are pretty fast.
First look
When I first started playing with the 2710p last night I ran into my first issue. There is no PC Card slot, rather HP has included an ExpressCard slot. This makes sense given the size of the device but it meant that I can’t use my Verizon AirCard for EV-DO connectivity. That’s a big ouch for me, but I found that tethering it to the HTC Advantage over Bluetooth was painless and quick thanks to the video instructions Kevin recorded a while back. I’m getting pretty decent speed out of the tethered HSDPA and it will be interesting to see how this works in practice. The second issue I ran into, and I suspect it’s this particular unit I’m using, was the Ambient LIght Sensor (ALS) that automatically brightens and dims the display based on room light levels. This particular ALS is so sensitive that it would not let me brighten the screen beyond 50% and it was too dim to see comfortably. A quick trip to the Getting Started guide pointed me to the Fn-F11 key that toggles the sensor on and off, I turned it off and the screen is now bright and vivid. I am curious to hear if this is the same on other units if anyone has one.
Swiveling the screen rotates the display as you would expect and the hinge feels very solid. I like the minimalist design that HP has used on the display, with only the webcam and keyboard light on the bezel. It is very much like the tc1100 in this regard with little to get in the way or to be accidentally pushed. I do wish that HP would have used soft keys like on the tc1100, those two keys for rotating the screen and launching the Journal (or OneNote). Those keys sit on the bezel and can only be toggled with the pen, a method that would have worked well on the 2710p. Instead of soft keys HP put the screen rotation button on the side of the screen where you push it through a hole with the pen. This is clumsy at best and the soft keys would have worked much better. There is a second hole for the C-A-D which is a good solution for this seldom used key. The one glaring omission from the 2710p is the jog dial such as that found on the side of the tc1100 screen, a mechanism perfect for performing up/down functions in the web browser, for instance. The 2710p has nothing that can be used for scrolling like this, you must use the pen on the screen. This is the single biggest disappointment I have with using the 2710p in slate mode.
The web cam is a 2 MP camera and works well with Skype and other solutions. It also performs as a business card scanner that works surprisingly well. I took it to Starbucks today and had a guy give me his business card and it shot it with the camera into the included application. There was only one letter interpreted incorrectly on the card and the guy was blown away at the usefulness of this function. Of course he’s a salesman and gets dozens of card a week so YMMV.
Using the 2710p in laptop configuration is very pleasant, I find the keys to be very nice for touch typing with a good layout. I love how the CAPS LOCK and NUM LOCK have LED indicators right next to those keys which is a clever way to do that. The dual microphones work well for Skype but I haven’t had time to play with the speech recognition yet. The capacitive touch volume slider is interesting and works fairly well but I would rather have buttons to do that like on the Lenovo. I definitely like the trackstick that HP has chosen for this device, the flat rubber tip is just like that on the ThinkPad and I really like it. I find it very precise and easy to use and so far I haven’t hooked up an external mouse to it yet. That’s some kind of record for me as I prefer mice over anything else.
A picture says a thousand words
Keyboard w/ trackstick
Full frontal
Right side- Firewire, mic, headphone, USB, Kensington lock
Back- modem, Ethernet, VGA, Power jack
Left side- WiFI/ BT on/off switch; I-Info button (programmable), USB
Frontal- power switch, screen latch. All photos to this point have the slice battery attached adding ~.5 inch to thickness.
Day One- in the field
Last night I installed the core programs I would need to carry the 2710p with me today. This was easily done with the DVD drive in the base station that HP sent with the Tablet. I have never seen a thinner optical drive and am impressed that a base station that is about half an inch thick can contain a DVD burner. The programs I installed were Microsoft Office Pro 2007, OneNote 2007, Project 2007 and my time billing software.
I carried just the 2710p with me today and it performed very well. I have to say that holding the unit in slate mode and inking feels very reminiscent of using the tc1100. The 2710 is heavier, sure, but the slate experience is very similar. It felt like running into an old friend at the market. Using OneNote on the slate was a real joy with that long notepage in portrait mode. The 1280 x 800 resolution on the 12" wide-screen is the perfect resolution in both portrait and landscape. You can see a lot of information without things seeming to be too big or too small. It’s just about right in that regard.
A new battery strategy emerges
The included standard battery is supplying me with 4.5 – 5 hours of usage, depending on exactly what I’m doing and the power savings I have set. I am keeping the screen brightness a little higher than the canned power profiles because I attend a lot of meetings in bright flourescent lighting, so I feel that battery life is pretty good. It’s not enough to get me through a whole day, however, and if this was my Tablet PC I would have ordered a second battery to carry in the bag. This is what I do with most mobile devices I carry for whole day outings.
HP thoughtfully sent one of the optional ultra-slim batteries along with the 2710p. This battery covers the entire bottom of the device and is incredibly thin, I would estimate less than 1/2 inch. It weighs about a pound which brings the entire device weight to over 4 pounds which is too heavy for me to deal with all day. Since I use my Tablets largely in my hands in slate mode, the extra weight is just too much for me to handle comfortably. I don’t mind the weight in an emergency as it’s better than no juice at all but not for all day usage. Last night it occurred to me that since the ultra-slim battery is used in conjunction with the standard internal battery, that you can connect and disconnect it without powering down the device or going into hibernation. Armed with that thought, today I kept the slice battery in a pocket in my bag and used just the standard battery all morning. Around 1 pm today when I was in Starbucks doing some writing the battery started getting a little low, around 25%, so I popped the slice battery on. Voila! Instant increase from an estimated 1 hour left to over 6 hours left. This is cool and I can live with this method of using the extra battery. That way I keep the device weight as light as possible as some days I won’t need the second battery. I haven’t had this long enough to get detailed battery life estimates but it should easily be 9-10+ hours with the two batteries. That’s all day!
Comparing the size to the tc1100
It’s no secret that my favorite Tablet PC to date has been the tc1100. Detachable 10-inch screen, light weight, nothing will be smaller than this, especially with a 12-inch screen like the 2710p, right? Guess again. I shot this photo comparison of the 2710p versus the tc1100:
2710p (with slice battery attached) versus the RIM BlackBerry 8830
2710p (with slice battery attached) vs. tc1100 thickness
2710p (no slice battery) vs. tc1100- yes, the 2710p is thinner!
side by side (in soft yellow mood lighting)
tc1100 on top of 2710p- yes you can barely see it under there.
uber-thin slice battery
slice battery in front of tc1100
This concludes Part 1 of my first impressions of the HP 2710p. I will be adding more impressions soon and possibly a video review of the Tablet should that be desired. Leave any questions you have about the 2710p in the comments and I’ll answer all that I can.
Hi James: I have three questions. The first has to do with the screen, and how usable it is outdoors. The second is how the thickness of the 2710 compares to the thickness of the TC1100 without the attached keyboard (I know this is an “unfair” comparison, but I am trying to get a physical idea of the size). The third question is how you would compare the “feeling” of writing on the screen compared to other tablets (X61, TC1100, P1610).
Thanks a lot for your responses…
James,
My tc4200 does the same thing with the ambient light sensor. I find it annoying too.
I love what I am hearing about this model. I don’t know if I could live without a trackpad though. And I would really like to have a touch-enabled display.
Thanks for the first impressions!
Looks like a nice unit. Does the slim battery have the juice to charge the internal battery?
I’ll take the questions I can answer now from the field and the others later.
The slim battery will not charge the internal, they are roughly the same rating so it would be a zero sum gaem.
I do wish the screen was touch from time to time but the inking experience is so good that I could live without it. It feels very much like writing on paper.
I will check the thickness against the tc100 sans keyboard when I get back home. Also the outdoors readability. It’s been raining here for days so I haven’t had any sunlight with which to work.
Is the screen rotation automatic or not? If not could you remap the rotation hidden button to real keyboard buttons? So that before you enter in the tablet mode, you just hit the key combination et voila. No need to go with a pen on the side…
How do you “compensate” for the lack of jog dial? Do you simply flick through page using the pen?
Last: Did you also have the bug reported on GBM.com? That is when switching from tablet to laptop mode the PC stays in tablet mode, forcing the user to swivel again the screen and hit the hidden button.
Thanks for the review, finally a TC1100 replacement!!!
Hi James, another question is what is the size/weight comparison with the X61? I’ve read the specs of both machines, but am interested in your “personal” sense of size/weight between these machines. Thanks again.
I’m pretty amazed to see a trackpoint on a device that’s not a ThinkPad.
My friend brought over her new HP tablet last night, and now I’m chagrined I didn’t find out what model it was. Not this one, though–it had a “cheese grater” touchpad and a fingerprint reader to the left of the screen. Pretty machine, though.
Thanks for getting on this pre-review fast James. You summed it up, “Finally a TC1100 Replacement” I was lucky to get one for $300 shipped off Ebay from one of those Retail Store Liquidators *The last Model made so “The Good One”) and I have just loved it. While I have several other notebooks and my SONY u71p (thanks again to JKOTR) I still cannot even think of selling that TC1100. Everything is so “right” on that machine. Now, if I can only score a 2710p for $300 “game over” !!
@ Fernando re: Trackpoint.
I too love the Trackpoint. It is and has always been my preferred choice. I have never seen a Trackpad to date work right IMHO. But several manufacturers have had them. Gateway has offered them, Toshiba offered them for years, DELL has been offering many of theirs with both the Trackpoint and Trackpad (smartest solution if you ask me!)as well as COMPAQ/HP offering their version called the PointStick. My SONY u71p has it as well. In fact I am using a red IBM TrackPoint cover as a replacement when mine wore out on ,my “U”.I arrived at these manufacturers with a quick Google and I’m sure there are many more. So the manufacturers must know that the “pencil eraser”style as you hear it called so often does have a following. Personally, I love them on a desktop Keyboard also. IBM made a Keyboard with the Trackpoint for Desktops and it was great. Enough said, I just realized I have gone OT!! Sorry James!!
Jordon, that was the tx1000 with the cheese grater touchpad.
Fernando, the 2710p without the slice battery feels lighter than the Lenovo with the 8 cell battery. I think the fact that it’s smaller helps as the device feels better in the hands too. With the slice battery the 2710p weight is similar to the Lenovo.
Nikoo, the screen automatically rotates like most other Tablets, both ways. I flick with the pen, and since I use Firefox I installed the Grab and Drag extension which works great with the pen.
I did have the screen fail to rotate back to landscape once when I changed the configuration to laptop mode while the unit was asleep. A simple double swivel of the screen righted it. All other rotations have worked flawlessly.
Could the fingerprint reader act as a scroll device, a la what Motion Computing states can be done with their fingerprint reader?
I have the TC1100, and have been using for several years. I have only had one issue where I had to send it back and have the hard drive re-imaged, as certain functions ceased to work, but that being said, it has worked seamlessly since.
This is my opinion, but even with the new things, I’m not motivated to get the new version. I like the detachable keyboard, and sometimes use the stowaway keyboard, as I can use that with other devices. I like the very thin factor of it without the keyboard, and I just plain like the detachability of it.
Like you too, I have the Verizon 595 air card, and with my work, I cant do business without it, and the idea of tethering, iick.
I’m not using vista, and with the company I work for, I telecomute from the islands via Citrix vpn to their intranet,and I don’t think that because of all the other specific programs that specificaly related to current XP and Windows 2000 server compatibility, IT group wont quickly go over to Vista Business edition until all other programs that all users are using, are all upgraded. What I ‘m trying to say is, that the speed of the TC1100 is still adequate with all the 2007 office programs and filtering of the VPN, and as long as I have a fast speed connection, everything clips along at a good speed.
All the documentation we have is converted to digital, virtually paperless. So downloading *.tiff files is routine. Again, speed with the new programs, and all that, the TC1100 works verys well for me.
For crash and burn situations, I have another hard drive imaged 80gig, with relatively all my programs and files, ready to go and plug in.
I have the 1.5 gig ram being used too. I would like to have up to 6 gig expandiblilty if I could get it!
I’m not considering upgrading my machine anytime soon.
It will take a lot more convincing for me to change my mind. Bottome line, I believe that HP should have kept some of the items you mentioned in your article and added, but oh well.
Is the 2710p also touchscreen or does it require you to use the pen? Active Digitizer? Resistive?
hi people,
I’m about to buy a used TC-1100 and probably my question is off topic, but for the TC1100 owners I would like to ask them what type of memory this tablet use (SO-DIMM or PC-100 or PC-133 or SO-DDR)? and how many memory slots does it have? are they user accessible?
and what size is the hard drive (2.5″ or 1.8″)?
Thanks for the answers, and have a great weekend.
JC
James, re: the slice battery… from the video on GBM, it looks like the battery covers a ventilation opening on the bottom of the tablet. Is that true or is that a speaker? If it’s a vent, do you have any concerns about operating the tablet with the vent covered for extended periods of time?
Also, with regard to having to use the pen tip to press some buttons, are they soft rubbery buttons or hard plastic? Is it something that could blunt the pen tip over time and possibly lead to screen scratches?
(On that note are screen scratches a problem for any of you long-time Tablet PC users?)
Dave, I don’t know if they are vents or not but the device does not run any hotter with the slice battery so I’m not concerned about it. In fact, the 2710p doesn’t feel hot ever.
I don’t worry about the pen tip pushing those buttons. It doesn’t take any pressure to push them through the hole so it won’t damage the tip.
As for scratches, HP told me that they have used a special process for the 2710p glass that makes it very difficult to scratch.
Thanks! It seems I am going to be purchasing one of these now.
I’ve been to HP’s site multiple times to spec one out but stop just shy of actually placing the order. I was going to wait for Dell’s XT, but with recent rumors that it will NOT, in fact, work with previous Latitude D series docking stations and power adapters, I have no need to try to maintain my existing investment in accessories. I’ll look forward to additional thoughts and opinions from you on the 2710p.
I was wondering: if you kept the slice battery in the bag because it adds weight and thickness it seems for you another standard would do the task better, wouldn’t it? You should get about the same total battery time, right?
The advantage of using the slice battery is being able to connect and disconnect it without hibernating or shutting down the 2710. It’s a great advantage being able to use it on the fly when needed without impacting my workflow.
James, GBM Ink Show talks about it having an Integrated WAN upgrade capability, but no mention of it in HP website.
Can you shed some light on that ? Does it or doesn’t it have the potential ? Does HP think they’ll install PC Card slot in the future ? Or ?
HP will offer an integrated wwan option which is not available yet. There is already an extendable antenna on all 2710s but no way to order the option yet. I believe it will be EVDO from Verizon and Sprint.
Your review is very good from a users point of view. From a service point of view the 2710p is a nightmare. We have approx. 270 of these on campus and in the first year we have had to replace or repair something on over fifty of them. This does not include any software issues. The front case latch in particular seems very prone to breaking and you have to order a complete case bottom just to replace the latch! Warranty repair parts are usually backordered for weeks and if you drop it and break the case and the system board or the LCD covers, you might as well heave it into the trash as out of warranty repair costs quickly outpace the cost of the computer. Recently we have had issues with the Ultra Slim battery heating up and expanding until it literally blows the battery covers off. The charging circuitry is prone to not charging the batteries on an intermittent basis and Hp’s battery test software often gives false reports of battery problems. Many of our faculty members are asking for something else to replace the 2710p’s when they bring them in for service. I’ll admit, the computers get a bit rougher handling in the campus environment, but these things are very fragile and are not standing the test of time, at least from a serviceability standpoint.