Answering some questions on the LE1700

There have been some comments in the forum and the news posts that I thought needed addressing with another post.

First of all, pressure sensitivity is in both the active digitizer model and the WriteTouch model. The WriteTouch model does use a different digitizer technology (N-Trig), thus a different pen; but pressure sensitivity is there. The active digitizer model still uses the wacom digitizer. I’ve got both units here and pressure sensitivity works.

Second, in regards to the convertible keyboard and extended battery. Unfortunately, the convertible keyboard cannot attach to the back of the tablet when the extended battery is used. I brought this issue up with Motion when the LE1600 first came out, and unfortunately it still has not been addressed.

Third, there have been some questions regarding battery life with Vista. I still have the LE1700 with me and I’ll try to get some examples of standard battery life under Vista. I’m suspecting it will be between 2 to 2.5 hours with brightness fixed at 50% and wireless off. I’ll post a comment to this news post with those results later tonight.

UPDATE FROM BATTERY TEST:

I just had the opportunity to run the LE1700 Tablet PC through a simple battery test. Here is the scenario

• 1.5 ghz Core 2 Duo
• Vista Business
• Standard battery
• Power plan: Motion Optimized
• 50% brightness fixed
• wireless off ( didn’t come with wireless )
• Bluetooth on
• Journal, Word, and MineSweeper running

With the above setting, I got about 1 hour 40 minutes. Pretty darn bad. Some of that is definitely Vista, and some of it is definitely Core 2 Duo, but it is hard to say which is the biggest culprit. I definitely wasn’t pushing the machine hard. In fact, my daughter was using it for about an hour of that 1 hour 40 minutes drawing in Journal.

The official specs list battery life at around 3 hours. When I was using the LE1600 1.5 ghz Centrino running Tablet PC Edition, I was getting about 2.5 – 2.75 hours. Now, with this simple, unscientific test, I get about 33% less battery life with Vista and Core 2 Duo. Again – nothing scientific, but it is certainly worth noting. Sounds like people who want the LE1700 will need to do what X60 owners are doing: get the extended battery. It is also something that Motion needs to take a serious look at.

UPDATE #2:

I ran the same scenario above with the extended battery plugged in and got about 3 hours 20 minutes, with the extended battery roughly burning at the same rate as the standard  battery test. So, the extended battery appears to add about 1 hour 40 minutes of use. This falls way short of the spec’d 6 — 7 hours.

UPDATE #3:

I’ve been in communication with Motion Computing regarding the LE1700 battery issues I’ve been reporting on.

Motion believes that the experiences I’ve been having with battery times are indeed pre-production issues. For example, there were several production-level tuning tweaks / adjustments in the BIOS and operating system that were not implemented in the units I received. Once those adjustments are made to production units, Motion believes that battery levels will be up to par with what specs quote

I’m going to send my units back to Motion so they can take a look, and hopefully I’ll get some production level units to run further tests on.