Timing and Spacing

Well, I've had the LE1600 for about a week now. Here are some of my first impressions in roughly the order I discovered them.

The handwriting recognition is pretty good. I was pleasantly surprised.

Update: There is a stylus holder in main unit, just underneath the battery. Awesome!

There is no screen protection. I should have realized this earlier, but with a convertible you get some screen protection when the unit is closed. I've stuffed plenty of laptops in my backpack and not worried about it. However, with the tablet I'm really leery of just putting it in my backpack. So now I have a sleeve to put the tablet in before I put it in my backpack. This really increases the bulk, but increases my peace of mind as well.

Out of the box, there's no pressure sensitivity in Corel Painter and Plastic Animation Paper. After an initial bit of panic and then some research, I discovered that you need Wacom drivers (but Wacom pens are not required). After I installed the Wacom drivers, these two apps worked great.

I picked up a Wacom pen with the dual button on the side in case I want to try to use Maya, but I have difficult time getting a dark enough line in PAP with the WACOM pen. The pen that ships with the LE1600 feels better and less "cheap" than the Wacom pen.

I didn't get the View Anywhere screen. I can't use the tablet at all in bright sunlight. It's usable in shade. This won't be a problem for me in general.

I thought I read someone complaining that the boot time was 70 seconds. It didn't seem like it was that long to me, so I did some measurements.

Surprisingly, the boot time was longer than I thought it would be, but I tend to just hibernate the unit most of the time anyway, so I really only see the 28 seconds. All in all, I think the performance is pretty good. For the apps I'm running (Corel Painter, OneNote, and Plastic Animation Paper), the performance is fine.

I've been carrying around the unit with the extended battery hooked up. I haven't measured the uptime for general usage, but I can believe the stated time of 8 hours. That would seem about right. For playing a DVD, I watched for 2 hrs 40 mins and had 25% power left. I was pretty pleased with that.

All in all, I'm really happy so far. Performance is good, battery life is good. Everything else is just minor quibbles. Maybe soon I'll post some sketches or animations. Gotta finish my demo reel for Siggraph first though.