The Tablet PC: An in depth look with the FIC SlateVision

Construction: Build Appearance and Size

FIC is a brand that many in North America may associate with nothing more than motherboards but the company has been working on the IA side of computers for some time now. The most recent product out of the IA labs is the SlateVision Tablet PC. FIC was lucky enough to secure a Windows XP Tablet PC Edition license for the product, as Microsoft has to authorize all hardware running the operating system. This is a huge advantage for FIC, allowing it to enter the Tablet PC market early.

As mentioned before, the FIC SlateVision is a slate form factor Tablet PC. As of yet there is no keyboard or docking station available for our engineering sample, making the unit a slate and not much more unless external USB devices are used. There are plans to release these items soon and hopefully we will be able to evaluate them as they come to market.

About the size of a piece of paper and one inch thick, the SlateVision weighs in at only 3.25 pounds (although the shipping unit is supposed to cut the weight down to 2.97 pounds by using a new battery design). The size of the unit is very impressive and actually does really resemble a notebook of sorts. The unit is all back with rubber on the top and bottom and one side of the unit to make holding it easier. The case is made out of magnesium alloy, keeping the weight of the unit down and the strength of the case up. The buttons are silver in color and give the SlateVision an attractive appearance.

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The unit uses a 10.4" electrostatic XGA screen that can run at a maximum resolution of 1024x768x16. The 10.4" screen is typical for the current generation Tablet PCs which keep size down by using these smaller screens. 1024x768 seemed like a good resolution for the screen to run at, although we were somewhat limited in desktop space while the Input Panel was open. Even though the maximum color depth of the screen was limited to 16-bit, we were pleased with the image that the screen was able to draw with the exception of some slight dithering in Windows dialogue boxes and high resolution pictures. The screen is advertised as having a protection sheet over it, but we would have to wait until we took the unit apart before we could find the truth in that claim.

The screen is surrounded by buttons and LEDs of various sorts. In order to simplify things we will use the tablet in its landscape orientation to describe the unit and the button locations. The bottom of the unit is home to a set of three buttons which actually greatly add to the usability of the system. The first of these buttons is labeled "1st Menu" and is used to launch FIC's proprietary tablet configuration software which we detail in the software section of this review. The second button is a 4 way directional pad with a center click. The arrow buttons maintain their proper function no matter the screen orientation. This could be a problem because hitting the up button in landscape mode turns out to be the same as hitting the left button in portrait mode. Luckily the FIC software takes care of this problem and maps the buttons appropriately. Hitting the center of the button maps to the enter key. The button location proved to be excellent, falling into easily accessible positions regardless of screen orientation.

The bottom of the unit is also home to three LEDs. The first of these is the battery charge LED. The LED glows orange while the battery is charging and turns green when fully charged. One limitation of this LED in our engineering sample is that the LED would not light up unless the unit was powered on. This made determining battery charge while the unit was off rather hard. Hopefully the retail version of the unit has this bug ironed out. The second LED serves as a hard drive activity light. The LED blinks orange during hard drive activity and remains off when there is none. The final LED is the power status LED. This LED glows green while the system is powered on and turns orange when the unit is in sleep mode.

Moving to the right side of the screen we find the unit's single speaker. The speaker ont the unit provided to be slightly worse compared to what we have come to expect from notebook systems, but then again the SlateVision has much less space to work with compared to a full sized notebook system.

On the top right side of the unit is the internal pen holder. The small gray pen that sits in this holder includes a single right-click button (which did not work properly on our engineering sample) but is not pressure sensitive. The unit also comes with a slightly larger pen that includes pressure sensitivity but it is too big to find a home in the system: it must be carried separately. The majority of the time we found ourselves using the larger, pressure sensitive pen if for nothing more than the fact it felt more like a real pen than the smaller pen housed in the system.

The final item around the SlateVision's screen is the unit's internal microphone. The location of the microphone seemed to be reasonable as our hands did not get in the way often. The only problem we see with placing the microphone where it is is that left handed users may find themselves covering the microphone with their hand while the unit is in landscape mode.