Viewsonic Airpanel 100 vs VP1100

Notebook PCs based on the idea of input via pen rather than keyboard roll around every five years or so, always with the claim that this time they really are going to revolutionise computing.

Well, here they are again ... and we've put two Viewsonic offerings head to head.

Airpanel 100
Viewsonic describes the Airpanel as a wireless monitor. It is in fact a large and well-specified Windows CE-powered machine that conforms to the 'Mira' specification.

It comes with a very healthy 128MB of SD-Ram, a 206MHz Intel SA-1110 processor and a 10in touch-sensitive TFT screen with a resolution of 800 x 600.

The CE variant is CE .Net version 4. As soon as we booted up, it became obvious that it's aimed firmly at the corporate market.

The usual Windows CE Pocket applications - Pocket Outlook, Word, Excel and Powerpoint - are absent, and the only inbuilt productivity application is Wordpad.

Instead of the Pocket Office apps, you get connectivity programs, primarily Terminal Server Client for connecting to a Windows Terminal Server and running applications over the network.

There's also a Citrix ICA client for connecting to servers running Metaframe.

The Airpanel itself has no integrated network interface though: for that you need either to pop a network adaptor into the PC Card or Compact Flash (CF) slots, or get hold of the optional docking cradle.

This costs £100 and allows you to use the Airpanel as an all-in-one workstation, with the cradle itself supporting the screen and providing 10/100BaseTX networking, USB, keyboard and mouse ports.

Pen input is taken care of by the resistive touchscreen in conjunction with Paragraph's Calligrapher handwriting recognition software.

Using the screen itself was frustrating; while entering text in recognition mode it intermittently stopped registering strokes of the pen, causing the recognition engine to think we'd finished writing and producing random characters on the end of our text.

Being a CE machine, with its frugal SA-1110 processor, the Airpanel gives you enough battery life not to have to worry about it - you can do an average day's work and still have juice to spare.

Whether you'll want to do an average day's work with this thing, however, is debatable.

We were amazed when we heard the price of the Airpanel: over £1,000 is a lot to pay for what is essentially a large PDA.

It might make sense for corporates with specific applications in mind, but for the rest of us this just isn't a practical machine.

VP1100
The VP1100 uses Windows XP Tablet PC Edition. This isn't the convertible folding-style Tablet PC some manufacturers are producing: it's pure Tablet, essentially a small notebook PC with a touchscreen integrated into its top surface where the keyboard would be.

You get a Mobile Pentium III processor running at 866MHz, 256MB of Ram and a 20GB hard drive.

There's also built-in 802.11b wireless networking, 56K modem, 10/100BaseTX wired networking, Firewire port and two USB ports, plus CF and PC Card slots.

The interesting part, however, is the operating system. Microsoft describes it as a superset of XP Professional, ie a complete version with pen-based features bolted on.

It lets you have a portrait desktop as well as the usual landscape, and boasts some advanced handwriting recognition. The main avenue for entering text is the Input Panel applet.

Sysmark 2002 was not built with XP Tablet Edition in mind so we could not formulate a test result.

However, there's no reason this should run any slower than a normal 866MHz PIII.

Holding the stylus a centimetre or so above the inductive touchscreen and waving it back and forth a few times pops up the panel, which sits at the bottom of the screen in a similar fashion to the input area of a Palm PDA.

You can enter text with natural handwriting recognition, by tapping out keys on a virtual keyboard, activating a Palm-derived stylised alphabet, or by talking to the machine.

Speech recognition is good, as long as you have a separate mic headset, but suffers from the drawback of needing a quiet environment.

As well as the Input Panel, you get a couple of pen-orientated applications.

Sticky Notes is self-explanatory, while Windows Journal lets you take notes in meetings by scribbling on the screen, just as if the VP1100 were a standard pad of paper.

It even gives you a white background with feint blue rules and a red margin line.

This isn't quite as pointless as it sounds since, unlike a real paper pad, Journal can use its handwriting recognition engine retrospectively to enable you to do text searches on your archived notes.

The search facility is successful, even with the most hastily written scrawl.

The recognition engine is excellent for normal written English, but a nightmare for entering computer-specific things.

It seems unaware of the concept of web addresses and puts spaces between words, so www.hotmail.com becomes www.hot mail.com.

It also turns common web terms into standard English words, so 'google' becomes 'goggle', no matter how carefully you form your letters.

But once you've managed to get an address into Internet Explorer, web surfing is fun - the portrait screen mode is far better for viewing most pages than landscape orientation, and clicking on links with the pen is easier and quicker than with a trackpad.

As far as the overall feel of using a stylus for system control is concerned, there are drawbacks.

The big problem with the pen system is slippage when clicking: Windows tends to think you're trying to drag icons unless you're deliberate with your clicks and make sure you lift the pen off the screen absolutely vertically.

Double-clicking often needs several stabs at the screen before the system gets the message.

The 10.4in 1,024 x 768 screen also results in some tiny window furniture, particularly in those system tray bubble reminders XP constantly throws at you.

We rarely managed to hit the Close icon first time. While using it standing up as a notepad replacement, the VP1100's weight got a bit much after a while - half a kilo lighter would be perfect.

Microsoft's claim that Tablet PC represents 'the evolution of the notebook PC' is debatable.

They'll have their uses in niche markets and for some corporate applications, but for day-to-day use, nothing comes close to a Qwerty keyboard and separate pointing device.

The word 'natural' crops up a lot in the marketing literature for Tablet PCs, but most of us at PCW find handwriting a greater chore and less natural than typing.

We're the Qwerty generation, and it'll take more than this to make us abandon 108 keys for a single stylus.

DETAILS
VIEWSONIC AIRPANEL 100

SPECS

• 206MHz Intel SA-1110
• 128MB of SD-Ram
• 10in LCD TFT screen (800 x 600 resolution)
• Windows CE .Net version 4
• 212 x 287 x 23mm (w x d x h)
• 1.1kg

Price: £1,173 (£999 ex VAT)

Contact: Viewsonic 01293 643 900
www.viewsonic.co.uk

VIEWSONIC VP1100

SPECS

• Mobile Pentium III 866MHz
• 256MB of SD-Ram
• 20GB hard disk
• Intel 830MG graphics
• 10.4in LCD TFT screen (1,024 x 768 resolution)
• Windows XP Tablet PC Edition - 252 x 288 x 28.5mm (w x d x h)
• 1.54kg

Price: £1,996 (£1,699 ex VAT)

Contact: Viewsonic 01293 643 900
www.viewsonic.co.uk