Technology Are tablets/convertibles the way to go for medical school?

[bonoz]

I'm not talking about iPads. I'm talking about the Lenovo X220 tablet: http://shop.lenovo.com/us/products/...ad-laptops/x-series-tablets/x220-tablet.shtml

Is it worth the price tag?

Pros:
Small, light, fast, durable, portable, touchscreen, pen, excellent battery life, utilitarian, excellent keyboard, etc.

Cons:
Expensive, tablet functionality can be cumbersome, no Cd rom, no HDMI port, no USB 3.0.

Or should I look at other options?

Thanks

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[Phlame217]

USB 3.0 is pretty far away from becoming a standard at the moment so it will be even longer before the ultra-portables fully adapt to it. HDMI port is more of a personal thing.

I invested in a high end Macbook Pro or else I would invest in something like the Asus EEpad. A couple of my classmates use it and it is very convenient. Another one I am interested in is the upcoming update to the samsung galaxy tablet.

You can get by on those, but my school uses lockdown browser for testing so ultimately you have to have a OSX or Windows based computer to take exams.

 

[movax]

Cons:
Expensive, tablet functionality can be cumbersome, no Cd rom, no HDMI port, no USB 3.0.
Thanks

Absolutely, it has a premium. I had a very old tablet in undergrad, but I loved it because I could type up notes in OneNote when needed, and I could also very quickly sketch out circuits and other diagrams the professor was drawing on the board. Very versatile device.

Tablet functionality has improved greatly with Windows 7, and judging from the Windows 8 dev preview, it will only get better. No optical drive is not an issue these days; the MacBook Air dumped it, you can install Windows via USB stick, etc. You can always get a cheap USB optical drive if you absolutely must have one.

You actually do have HDMI possible from the X220. It looks like the X220 sports a DisplayPort connector, which you can hook up cheap adapters to (less than $10 from Monoprice.com) to get HDMI or DVI. So that isn't actually a con.

No USB 3.0 is not a huge deal. Your average mechanical harddrive that you'd find in an external enclosure will likely max out at around 100MB/s or so sequential read, which is around 800Mb/s. USB 2.0 handicaps you to half of this, 480Mb/s before factoring in protocol overhead. There are USB 3.0 hard-drives out, yes, but how often are you going to be hitting that external for huge files sequentially? I would predict you'd be using it more for bulk media storage or something, perhaps backups.

If you really needed that external speed, you could pick up an ExpressCard with SATA or eSATA, and you'd be good to go. Lenovo's website is awful and doesn't clearly indicate the X220 has an ExpressCard slot, but it does indeed sport an ExpressCard/54 slot.

The next X220 will either include USB 3.0 this year, courtesy of a NEC or ASMedia controller, or will wait until next spring for Intel's new chipsets with built-in USB 3.0 support.

So, the only real con in my opinion would be price. It's worth mentioning that this guy sports an IPS-based LCD screen, which puts it ahead in terms of display quality of almost every other laptop out there (including every single Mac, which still sport TN screens). What this means to you is superior black levels and viewing angles.

I'm not even a Lenovo fanboy or anything (I prefer Dell, own a 2010 MacBook Pro myself), just wanted to clarify some of your cons. Hope this helped!

 

[1UP]

USB 3.0 is pretty far away from becoming a standard...

Incorrect. USB 3 will be in standard chipsets starting in Q1 2012.

 

[movax]

Incorrect. USB 3 will be in standard chipsets starting in Q1 2012.

Specifically, the USB 3.0 specification was finalized in late 2008. Certified motherboards began appearing around the beginning of 2010, with devices sporadically popping up throughout. Intel has been the lagging entity in terms of adoption and will only start supporting it with the 7-series chipsets as you said. There are many other manufacturers who are shipping USB 3.0 every single day right now though.

Granted though, once Intel starts shipping 7-series chipsets next year, adoption will take off like crazy, but even now all the major manufacturers (except Apple) are tossing a Renesas or ASMedia controller on-board to provide it.

USB 3.0 has been working fine for me as both a developer and user. The Renesas drivers were a bit rough earlier, but things are pretty smooth now. AMD's got USB 3.0 in their FCHs right now, but not on the mainstream desktop chipsets yet.

tl;dr - USB 3.0 is plenty standard, the only thing to wait on is Intel shipping USB 3.0 chipsets next year which will essentially force adoption to the entire market. You can walk into any store this second and walk out with USB 3.0 computers and devices. (Cleverly giving Thunderbolt a one-year head start, but TB is in a different class entirely in my opinion)

 

[Phlame217]

Incorrect. USB 3 will be in standard chipsets starting in Q1 2012.

It will be 2013 before you start seeing >50% and 2014 for >90% of peripheral devices and all using USB 3.0 therefore why pay out the ass now for a 3.0 capable device when you could wait 1.5 years for capable devices to come down in price and also get the new technology that comes out before then and now? Thats my stance. Its no different than when blu-ray players came out and competed with HD-DVD and people paid $400+ for the players and had very few movies where as I waited and picked up a wifi capable blu-ray for <$100 when blu-ray had saturated the market well enough.

 

[movax]

It will be 2013 before you start seeing >50% and 2014 for >90% of peripheral devices and all using USB 3.0 therefore why pay out the ass now for a 3.0 capable device when you could wait 1.5 years for capable devices to come down in price and also get the new technology that comes out before then and now? Thats my stance. Its no different than when blu-ray players came out and competed with HD-DVD and people paid $400+ for the players and had very few movies where as I waited and picked up a wifi capable blu-ray for <$100 when blu-ray had saturated the market well enough.

USB 3.0 harddrives are already available from all the big names, and they are very close (if not identical) in price to their USB 2.0 cousins. Vendors are shifting production over to USB 3.0 <-> SATA bridge ICs from USB 2.0 <-> SATA, so more and more of them will ship with USB 3.0. There's no giant premium in getting a USB 3.0 PC or a USB 3.0 device.

Other USB devices don't need USB 3.0, so why would they increase cost and complexity to support it? Some budget devices still ship as USB 1.1 because they don't need the speed and want to keep costs down. Really only external video and storage devices will benefit from implementing USB 3.0, a printer has 0 need for 5Gb/s transfer speeds.

Like I mentioned in my post, with the ExpressCard slot in the X220 it is a moot point, because he could just buy a USB 3.0 ExpressCard adapter, or an eSATA ExpressCard adapter. No reason not to get a X220 right now as CPU upgrades are still over six months away and it is not a major architectural revision and the rest of the machine is very modern.