14 DAY TRIAL // The last quarter of 2007 has been dominated by ultra-mobile personal computers. Asustek's Eee PC sold gold and you can barely find some units available on the retailers' shelves. The popular sub-notebook adds a plus of mobility at a faint price and is scheduled to make a comeback with the 16 GB version.
If you don't manage to grab an Eee, you might try a more sophisticated approach at mobile computers. The Dell Tablet PC is also hard to find, but the good news is that Amtek have just released their iTablet T221. The tablet features a stylish case that boosts its thin slate looks and at the same time gives the user the opportunity of tacking a more natural approach at day-to-day computing tasks.
Although Amtek's iTablet T221 is marketed as an ultra-mobile PC (UMPC), the mobile solution is much more than that. The system features a 12.1-inch XGA display with an active digitizer, resistive touchscreen, a 1.2GHz Intel Core Duo CPU, up to 2GB of RAM, a 60GB hard drive, 802.11a/b/g and a GMA 950 graphics chipset. The touchscreen response is excellent and qualifies the pen input even for operations that demand instant response.
The resistive touch screen technology can distinguish between the human fingertip and the shipped pen. This technology allows the users to grab the tablet with their hands and use the pen input without interferences, since the pen primes the hand when they are both present on the tablet's active workspace.
The iTablet T221 meets the hardware requirements for running Vista, Microsoft's latest operating system with built-in support for tablet PCs, which would add a bunch of extra features to the tablet.
The company has not announced a release date, but the tablet PC is likely to show up at the Consumer Electronics Show that will take place in January next year in Las Vegas. As for the price, internal sources have reported that the Amtek iTablet T221 will feature a retail price of about $2,237.