M700 arrives anyway

I got a surprise yesterday. The FedEx guy delivered a Toshiba M700 to my door. Yep, despite the fact that I’d cancelled the order, an M700 arrived anyway. At first I wondered if it included the touch support which I had been looking for, but a quick check of the packing slip indicated no such luck. Nope. Toshiba simply wasn’t going to give up. So I gave in and opened the package. I’m resigned to the fact that I won’t have touch in my new Tablet. Oh, well, no developing touch apps for Toshiba equipment. Fine by me. I’ll look elsewhere for a touch Tablet.

(And yes, I could have refused the shipment or even asked for an RMA, but I give up. Simple as that. Toshiba has won a re-frustrated customer–I’ve already been disappointed in the Vista driver situation with my M400. Oh, don’t get me started.)

Anyway, here are a couple shots of the touchless-M700.

First the box: Nice and small. Aren’t Tablets wonderful in this regard?

And here’s a shot of the box contents, including power cord, instructions, a catalog, drive blank, Vista DVD, Tablet pen, and the Tablet itself.

Ta da, here’s the M700 Tablet ready to go:

Before I upload some other pictures, let me cut to the chase. Here’s the opening desktop that the M700 displays:

Yes, if you’re squinting right, the desktop is filled with garbage–despite promises from Toshiba to the contrary.

Here are the default icons on the desktop, which include some “special offers, ” such as for LoJack:

And then there’s the system tray–which includes a handful of icons I’m going to have to check one at a time as well as Google desktop search. Ugh! This is Vista folks. What’s Google desktop doing there polluting my taskbar?

Yes, I’m already in a bit of a rotten mood, but come on, what’s with all the startup apps? Do I need to do a clean install? Looks like it. Ugh.

Anyway, I have to run some errands and when I get back I’ll post some more pictures including some closeups of the M700 and side by side shots with the M400. Gotta run. More to come later.

Update: OK, I’m in a better mood now. Some holiday shopping did the trick. I also had some more Tablet time with the M700. Here are a couple more impressions:

* I’m no fan of extra apps scattered across the desktop and system tray. The OS is thick enough, I don’t need more stuff–unless I really need it. That’s why I was a bit turned off by the Google Desktop App. Windows Vista does desktop search just fine for me. I don’t need double the indexing going on. But to be fair, when I started really looking at what was installed on the system, I’ll give Toshiba a nod for going in the right direction. There are fewer apps and icons than in prior systems. I’m thankful for that.

* The M700 system as I have it configured (2.6GHz, 2GB, 7200RPM drive) is a bit snappier than my M400 (2GHz, 2GB, 7200 RPM drive). Boot time up to the login in screen was a merry 45 seconds on the M700 and a slightly slower 58 seconds on the M400. That’s better than a 20% speed improvement, which should come in handy for development work.

* The display is fairly nice. The resolution is definitely lower than the M400’s, but it does seem brighter. I need to figure out a way to better quantify this, but I give the display a thumbs up.

* The keyboard does feel a little different than the M400’s. It’s a bit snappier, if there is such a thing. Some of the keys (such as the Windows key) are in different positions, so that may take a bit of getting used to, but probably not a big deal.

* The latch mechanism is different than that on the M400 too. The M700 has two endpoints which the display snaps into. I think this is a better design. It gives the display less play when using the pen when not in Tablet mode.

* The On/Off switch has changed too. The slider switch on the M400 is replaced with a momentary switch and a lock/unlock slider. I guess this makes sense–especially for new users. I alsways found it somewhat confusing to figure out how long I was supposed to hold the On/Off slider.

* Weight wise the M700 is balanced nicely. I give it two thumbs up. It feels good both in notebook mode as well as Tablet mode.

* I have noticed that the Tablet’s pen doesn’t slide very well in and out of the pen bay. That may just be a flaw of the pen. I haven’t figured it out. Something is sticking.

Let’s see. Other impressions? I wish the speakers were on the display. Tablet mode convers them up–just like on the M400. I am super happy, though, that Toshiba kept the radial volume control. I prefer it over other solutions. And lastly, there was something odd about setting up the WiFi. I was able to set the properties just fine, however, it took better than three or four minutes and several attempts at opening IE before I could get to any web pages. I wondered if there was something going on behind the scenes.