My buddy Brian is as serious about looking at new toys as I, and he gets some great ones. I’ve spent a fair amount of time lusting after the Lenovo tablet computer he totes around, but I’ve never been able to justify paying the difference between a standard laptop and a tablet with similar specs. Now, Popular Mechanics has named the Toshiba Portege R400 its Gadget of the Week, and it looks like a very cool machine. The R400 incorporates a number of the hardware gadgets (like the Personal Information Assistant) that Microsoft discussed over a year ago, but have been slow to make their way onto shipping hardware.

I’ve been doing more and more with OneNote, and it makes good use of the handwriting capabilities of a tablet, but towards the bottom of the Popular Mechanics blog entry you run smack into the major problem of the R400: it’s danged expensive. I know myself, I tend not to buy the stripped-down model of anything, and paying three large for a laptop when you can get very capable portable computers for well under two grand just doesn’t seem right.

While I’m waiting for the price to come down, I’m going to try out some of the USB writing tablets available to plug into my current laptop. I’ll let you know how that goes…

Categories: General computing, Hardware