Customer Reviews

Acer TravelMate C301 Tablet PC (1.50 GHz Pentium M (Centrino), 512 MB RAM, 40 GB Hard Drive, CD-RW/DVD Combo)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I've had my TMC300 for over three months now. After reading other reviews, I decided to defend this tablet. Although I've had one key that sticks (the right mouse button) and my screen went to black, I use this Tablet all day every day. I was upset I had to send it back to Acer, but they had it picked up the next day, and returned in five working days, one day before they promised.

The inking abilities with Microsoft Office 2003 are ok, but even though there are many things lacking, I've been able to produce document instruction manuals twice as fast with the pen than drawing elements in Word. Creating notes with Windows Journal is great. The dictation abilities with XP Tablet are also ok, but the text recognition of XP Tablet SP2 is much improved. The battery seams to last forever. I've had the computer on for the past 6 hours. With the hibernated mode, there is still 50% battery power. I've been able to play 2 DVD movies on a plane with one charge. My only complaint to this tablet is the low speaker volume and the lock that keeps the screen closed sometimes sticks.

Overall, I like the system features and performance.
I love that it is a tablet - it is so much more convenient
than a regular laptop.
There is one very annoying problem with this model though:
the keyboard is "sticky" - meaning, despite this tablet is
brand new and just arrived, when I press and release a key on the keyboard it acts as if I kept it pressed, continuing to
type the same character again and again. Sometimes, when I compose an email and press the "DEL" key to delete a character - ooops! - it deletes half of the email. Unfortunately, this problem happens way too often, a few times per day. I did not expect this behavior from a new computer.

I purchased my Acer from Amazon with great anticipation. I had read a lot of reviews about the various features and it seemed very promising. My son had also purchased one and he was pleased with it. Mine came and I was very excited - but the fun lasted for a very short time. The Microsoft Tablet software (Journal and the free download trial version of OneNote)while being hyped as great - weren't. And so my productivity dreams vanished within a couple days. Then the screen became unpredictable, and in a short time I could not get it to work at all. I returned the unit to Amazon and now wonder if I will ever try another tablet pc. Probably not, because the current software is designed for scribblers and note takers not organized document makers. I really do hope that some company will take the tablet seriously enough to make it lightweight, cool, bright, and powerful enough to do the work of regular notebook. And also for Microsoft to work on a tablet pc word processor at least a little bit like Word.