No, I didn't drop the nice new Lenovo X60 tablet that arrived late last week; just couldn't think of a better headline for the blog post.

I haven't had a tablet notebook for ages, so I was looking forward to the X60. Overall, it's a pretty well put together little notebook dressed in standard IBM, sorry, Lenovo, corporate black. Haven't done any extensive battery life testing (there's no optical drive to load the software from) but the X60 seems to go for three hours or so with the supplied battery.

Windows XP Tablet Edition is pretty impressive, considering it can make sense out of my horrible handwriting most of the time. However, it's guessing abilities are annoyingly US oriented - switching the default language to NZ or UK English makes no difference.

Using a program like ArtRage from local heroes Ambient Design makes the X60 come into its own. But... you can get the same fun and artistic usability if you buy a cheaper digitiser tablet, although I'd say drawing and painting directly on the screen like with the X60 has a slight edge still.

In terms of writing, the novelty of being able to scribble straight onto the screen wears off fast. You're never going to be able to write faster than typing, basically, so it's a good thing the X60 retains a good-sized keyboard with nice feel to it. Being a masochist, I handwrote this entry on the X60 and it took a long time, as it's not that easy to correct mistakes.

Furthermore, tablets tend to be designed for right-handed people mainly. If you're a southpaw, you can reorient the screen, but controls are not ambidextrous so they remain right-handed. I would've liked the X60 to run cooler as well: it's not a laptop in the true sense of the word, unless you wear asbestos undies. Lenovo got the size and weight right with the X60 though, making it nicely portable.

Still, I like the ability to quickly draw a picture of something instead of using words even though for a freelancer one of the former really isn't worth a thousand of the latter. Presentations could be a lot more interesting with a tablet as well - is there any tablet functionality/features in PowerPoint?

Next, I might upgrade XP to Vista, which apparently has much improved tablet support. Need to check if all the hardware is supported first though.