Quick and dirty home office setup

It's been a few weeks since I've had my new Samsung Slat 7 tablet PC and I thought I would give it a quick review before I upgrade the OS to Windows 8 (this way you get a sense of what it's like out of the box).

The cool things about this PC:
The tablet hardware is actually pretty freakin' nice! The chassis of the PC is nice and thin, the touch screen responds to both a pen input (although there is no pen silo in the chassis), and to finger touch!  My pet peeve about previous tablet PCs was that you only had pen input which was pretty awful.  I think that this device has a wacom digitizer which gives you 8 points of touch, pretty impressive when you add the Windows Touch Pack and you get a copy of the lagoon app/screensaver. There is 1 USB slot, 1 SD card slot, 1mini-HDMI slot (with wireless HDMI on it as well, if I am not mistaken) and a headphone port. There is also a front and a back camera so you can skype, MSN chat, yahoo, chat and any other app that can do video chatting on it.

As you might be able to see from my setup, I also got the dock for this which I setup with a spare visio monitor I had lying around to enable a dual screen workstation.  I expected this tablet to be a little laggy compared to a desktop, but jeez, the thing is fast! Totally worth the money and you can easily bring it with you and be mobile with the case stand, and a wireless keyboard (I use my Apple Wireless Keyboard whenever I don't use it with my iPad). In addition, if you happen to have another dock where you work, you can easily bring the tablet with you to-and-from and just use the same device - pretty nifty!!!

The bad:
Well, number 1 is Windows 7. Don't get me wrong, when docked, with a keyboard and mouse, this tablet kicks some serious butt when compared to most work machines (PCs) I've worked with. But as a tablet, Windows 7 is still not that great.  The mouse and desktop metaphor doesn't work that well with touch and a tablet.  Samsung has done a pretty nice effort getting a launcher and some touch enabled apps (calendar, RSS, weather and so on), but it still feels tacked on.  I would prefer to use Microsoft's extras download pack for calendars and such, and use Outlook for mail, and I would love for those to be touch optimized. This is why I am looking forward to Windows 8.

The dock:  OK, I said I liked the dock, but I have a serious issue with the cost for what it offers.  It costs $91 and it's just a square that gives you 1 HDMI port, 1 Ethernet, and 1 USB (well, and power).  FAIL. Most computer monitors have VGA or DVI. Would it kill you to include an HDMI cable and an adaptor to DVI or VGA?  Also, why only 1 USB port? What if I want to have an external DVD drive and an external Hard Drive on my dock concurrenlty (And not use the port on the tablet)?  It just costs too much money for what you get (a square slab).

That said, I love this device :-)

Let's see what Windows 8 brings.