The new Tablet PC arrived yesterday - six days ahead of the originally promised delivery date. As I feared, it
showed up with no notice. There will, therefore, be no pictures of the UPS deliver person carrying the box up to my
office. I did however, capture the out-of-the-box experience as promised and, in this first installment of my "Gateway
Chronicles", I'll show you the unpacking process. I'll be following this post up with a running commentary on the
build-out this weekend and some first impressions of the S7200.
Warning: For those of you unfamiliar with the ritual chronicling of a new Tablet PC, this post will undoubtedly appear
to be somewhere between the hopelessly self-indulgent ramblings of someone with entirely too much time on his hands and
borderline frightening. You may be excused now. The rest of you, I hope, will appreciate the great pains I have taken
to allow you to share in my excitement vicariously. ;^)
The box is deceptively small. It contained the Tablet (er, convertible - more on that later) and and accessory box
(see below).
More photos and the rest of the story after the jump…
As so many PC manufacturers do today, there’s a poster with quick set up instructions draped across the box contents
when you open it up. I believe Apple was the first to do this but it’s become pretty standard practice because everyone
knows that a) no one reads the manual until something goes wrong (if then), and b) most people are like little kids and
just want to start playing with the new toy as soon as they can.
The poster does not go into terrifically great detail.
Now we get to the good stuff. The accessory box contains the battery, AC adaptor, phone cord (how about a CAT-5 cable
for crying out loud? ), manuals and disks, and a 3M microfiber cleaning cloth for the display (a nice touch I
thought).
The documentation package opened up. Although I was expecting an actual Tablet PC OS install CD from the language on
the order page, it turns out I have a set of two recovery disks as well as a partition on the 80 GB hard drive with the
latest drivers and utilities. I have not looked at these CDs yet and will follow up with an analysis of whether they’re
user-friendly or just the standard end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it, nuke the hard drive and start over variety tools. As
you can see, the Gateway comes with Microsoft Office OneNote 2003 and a copy of Works 8.0.
The full-sized AC brick (and I use that word very purposefully) and the enormous 12-cell battery. I’m not kidding -
this thing would probably classify as a deadly weapon in a number of states and and excellent source of blunt force
trauma in most CSI crime labs. Still, up to seven hours of usable battery life is a sweet thing.
The big Kahuna with battery attached. This is a big unit (with apologies to Randy Johnson). I knew that going into
this decision and had an opportunity to work with the consumer version at Best Buy for a couple of lunch hours (sans
battery) but I still don’t think I really appreciated how much bigger and heavier than the M200 this widescreen beauty
actually is.
One of the pleasant surprises (there have been a number of them) is the nice tilt the battery gives the S7200. It
angles it very nicely for typing and surfing. In the background, for those of you with voyeuristic tendencies, the two
Australian signs were a gift from my buddy Mick Stanic (of The Podcast Network and MSN Search Champs fame) and you can
see some current reading matter and the infamous GTD in basket (awaiting procesing as I was quite obviously occupied
with other, more important tasks at the moment).
There you have it. The unpacking and assembly is complete. The next post will discuss initial setup. Before I conclude this installment of The Gateway Chronicle, I do want to point out that Gateway is being very, very studious in their marketing of this new line. The documentation consistently referes to the PC itself as a convertible notebook. The only time Tablet PC is used is in reference to the operating system and functionality of the device. I could probably editorialize on this at length (and probably will at some point) but my off-the-cuff reaction to this bit of positioning strategy is that they may be onto something. By emphasizing that this is first and foremost a notebook PC that can, in true Optimus Prime fashion, transform itself into a pen-based computer, I think they make the expectations for this unit very clear.
Only time will tell how effective this word play will be but, as a marketing guy, I was very aware of how they are positioning their product.
1. Congrats and ... enjoy :-)
Posted at 6:17AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Kay