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The Pavilion tx1020ea attempts to perform two very different duties. On the one hand it’s a tablet PC, on the other it’s a Media Center notebook.
It's a 12.1in widescreen device that feels densely packed when you first pick it up.
The display has a 1,280x800 pixel resolution and can rotate 180° clockwise and folded flat onto the keyboard for tablet use.
Vista Home Premium is installed and it has all the pen and handwriting support previously found in Windows XP Tablet Edition.
The stylus isn’t an active pen, so it relies on old fashioned physical pressure to write. Although not usually a problem, we found the pressure required was far too much, making it uncomfortable to use for prolonged periods of time.
Additionally about one square inch in the bottom right hand corner of the display wouldn’t work at all, even after extensive calibration. HP informed us it would replace any notebooks suffering from this problem.
The problems with the screen didn’t end there either. A slight backlight bleed was present and viewing angles weren’t particularly good.
As a Media Center device the Pavilion tx1020ea excels against most other notebooks. It comes with a remote control that sits in the thin ExpressCard/34 slot.
There are also media controls on the screen itself, along with a DVD button to start HP’s Quickplay software; this resembles a basic version of Windows Media Center (which is, of course, also bundled with Vista Home Premium).
Altec Lansing branded speakers sit either side of the screen’s hinge and are a cut above other notebook speakers. Unusually, two headphone jacks are also included, making it great for travelling couples.
For video conversations there’s an integrated, 1.3 megapixel pinhole webcam just above the display, complete with two microphones for stereo audio capture. The only media aspect this laptop lacks is a TV tuner.
As for the physical design, swirly lines are ingrained over the whole silver and black chassis. The finish is excellent but the vast array of media and system buttons and one too many plastic borders make the whole unit feel cluttered.
The keyboard is a good size for such a small device, with the exception of the shift keys which are a little too small. But its most attention-grabbing feature is the trackpad, with a grid of sunken dots that gives it an interesting texture.
The notebook weighs 2.55kg including power supply, which is a lot for such a small notebook. HP supplies a second, larger battery, which adds another 300g and juts out the back of the unit by an inch when plugged in. This is not a generous move by HP, but rather an essential one, since the standard battery lasted just 65 minutes in our DVD rundown test. The extended battery lasted 100 minutes.
The rather hefty weight can also be attributed to the unusually thick chassis. It packs a Lightscribe DVD writer, a 120GB Sata hard disk, a card reader and three USB2 ports. It lacks Firewire ports though, which is disappointing.
An AMD Turion 62 X2 TL-50 powers the system. It has two cores running at 1.6GHz and is backed up by 1GB of Ram. We think this Ram is the bare minimum Vista can run on. By default, 64MB of the main system Ram is apportioned to the Nvidia 6150 integrated graphics.
Although the Nvidia 6150 is better than Intel solutions, it’s still incapable of running any type of modern computer game as a score of 424 in 3Dmark05 and 14fps (frames per second) in FEAR proved. The rest of the system scored similarly poorly - 2,395 in PCmark05 is not impressive.
At £799 the Pavilion tx1000ea is one the cheapest tablet PCs we’ve tested, and it shows. We have reservations about the build quality of the screen and performance is lower than other Vista notebooks at this price.
See also:
A truly portable tablet PC, but one that's dogged by poor battery life 23 Mar 2007
Open-source web tablet, video-phone and media player has potential - shame about the Vista-style mark-up 21 Feb 2007All Notebooks & Tablets PCsTags: Tablet PC
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