Overview

Hardware Overview

Let's take a look at the physical attributes of the Toshiba Portege M205. Here's the top side of the M205:

The front of the notebook has the SD slot, the microphone jack, the headphone jack, and the volume control. The inclusion of the SD slot is a great feature making the M205 a great travel companion for anyone with devices that use an SD card for storage.

Front of the M205	The front ports

The left side of the notebook has a switch to turn on and off the wireless component of the M205. This allows you to conserve power consumption by not using the Wi-Fi components. Next to the switch is a single PCMCIA slot.

The right side of the notebook is where you will find the stylus for the notebook when the PC is in tablet mode. You can pop out the stylus from the side holster by pressing in on the cap.

The rear of the M205 consists of the following: DC-In Jack, Two USB ports, a VGA out port, a modem jack and a NIC interface. To the right of the Network port are a set of cooling vents.

Back of the M205	Left side
Right side	Close up on the vents

Here are pics of the underside of the M205 Tablet PC:

The screen cover can be opened by pressing in the button in front of the notebook. Pressing the button releases the latch that secures the cover onto the notebook body. Here's a shot of that latch which I wouldn't consider that sturdy but so far it's held up to my usage.

Here is a screen shot of the notebook opened up. At first glance, it looks like a regular notebook from many vendors. The screen has a SXGA+ resolution which is 1400 x 1050. Yes it is true that the resolution is fairly high for a small 12.1 inch diagonal screen - however, I found it fairly easy to use for my purposes. More on the screen later on.

The bottom of the screen consists of the following buttons (from left to right) - Power Button Lock, Power button switch, Cross Functional button, ESC/Display Rotation Button, and a Windows Security Button.

The cross functional button is essentially a navigational cursor which you can use when the PC is in Tablet mode. The Windows Security Button launches the Task Manager application under Windows XP.

Here are pictures of the keyboard and touchpad layout. The Toshiba keyboard has full sized keys and is extremely comfortable. I still personally like the IBM keyboard layout on the T40 but the Toshiba M205 comes a close second. The keys on the M205 have a very comfortable key press depth and tactile response. My only major complaint comes with the small directional buttons and the annoying placement of the page up and page down buttons on the lower right side of the keyboard.

The notebook uses a standard touchpad for cursor navigational. Again.. I wish every notebook had a touchpoint like device but oh well.

As you can see in this picture, the screen is connected to the bottom portion of the notebook via a swivel head. Rotate the screen to the left, flip the screen down, flip the latch over and watch your notebook turn into a tablet.

When in tablet mode, the M205 is used with the included stylus. The screen has a matte like surface which is sensitive to the included pen but not to anything else so you can use it as an wrist rest.

Software Overview

The Toshiba Portege M205 comes with the Microsoft Tablet PC Operating System. The OS is essentially Windows XP Professional modified to support input via a stylus. Toshiba packages Microsoft Works and Microsoft OneNote 2003. OneNote is one of the major killer apps for the Tablet PC. It's actually quite hard to categorize what OneNote is - except to say that it's a lot like having a notebook on your PC. When you use OneNote, you have the ability to jot down notes, input text and graphics and categorize content based on tabs. Here are some screen shots of OneNote 2003.

The OS includes an input panel which normally aligns the bottom of the screen. The input panel allows you to write in script on the surface of the Tablet using the stylus and then the character recognizer engine of the Tablet PC OS will attempt to convert the handwriting into text. The text is then input into wherever the cursor is at the moment. There is also a virtual keyboard for those characters or words which are just too hard to write.

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