Toshiba today officially made their new Portege M400 Tablet PC, the replacement for their popular Portege M200, available for order.The unit has a near perfect weight and form factor for a tablet PC thats offers easy convertibility from notebook computer format to tablet -- at 4.5 pounds, students and healthcare professionals will find the M400 easy to carry throughout a long and busy day.
The tablet PC can be ordered with Intel's new Solo (single core) or Duo (dual core) processors, up to 2 GB of system RAM and a hard drive up to 120 GB in size.
Unfortunately, those who work with digital video and large image files will be disappointed to learn that the M400 offers only an integrated Intel graphics solution that shares system RAM; in other words, Toshiba has decided not to offer optional nVidia or ATI graphics chips with dedicated graphics RAM. In my view, this is a huge error in judgement by management. In addition, the Microsoft Windows Vista Upgrade is expected to release in Fall 2006 with increased demands on graphics hardware making the purchase at this time of a unit with an integrated or shared RAM solution somewhat questionable.
While the base M400 is priced fairly reasonably, a beefed up M400 with dual core processor, a GB of RAM and large, fast hard drive quickly breaks well over the $2,000 mark.
Personally, I will wait unti Vista ships before I buy a tablet PC -- there should be lots of updated tablets introduced at that time -- perhaps even a "M600" with stronger graphics processing.
However, for those who will use their tablet for modest content creation the Toshiba Portege M400 with its light weight and excellent form factor is worth considering.
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