The time is approaching when I’m going to be replacing Ryoh-ohki with her smarter younger sister (who will also be Ryoh-ohki). 
When the first machine gets back from her impending service, she’s promised to a good home with a charming hotelier in Bern, a lady who will take good care of her and who’s as big a hardware geek, if not a bigger one, than I am.
Yet at the same time, committed as I am to the MM-1 (also known as the Sharp Actius, now that they’ve started rolling it out in the US), there are other temptations. This would be one of them.
I’ve been getting increasingly intrigued by the tablet-PC concept, and the tablet version of the Mebius Muramasa TN-1 looks like a nice implementation of that. I’m impressed with the quality of Sharp’s laptops by now, having worked extensively with both Ryoh-ohki and Peter’s machine, the heavier and more butch Ken-ohki. If as I think the TN-1 is more of the same, that alone would be an attraction. I’d like to get my hands on one of these and play with it a little. The hardware specs are good enough: 1.1 gHz Intel Speedstep processor, 256-768 meg RAM, 30 gig hard drive, regular LAN and wireless LAN, all the usual ports for a machine of this kind, and (interestingly) a fingerprint lock. The only downside, for me, is the weight. 1.9 kg…mutter. That’s almost twice what I’m used to carrying these days: more even than Ken-ohki weighs with his CD-R/W drive in. And the size (a little bigger than Ken-ohki) makes it more difficult to do what I like to do with Ryoh-ohki…keep her in my shoulderbag. Especially on the road, where I have no desire to reveal what I’m carrying by exhibiting something too obviously a computer bag…and also don’t feel like having to schlep around something that weighs as much as some boat anchors.
And every time I start thinking about all that extra weight, I go back to the Dynamism site and look at this again…
“It’s too small for you,” Jason (my sales-and-sometimes-support guy at Dynamism) keeps telling me. Well, maybe. But my hands aren’t exactly huge, and I wrote several novels on Allegra, my Acer TravelMate, without too much trouble. Her keyboard’s only slightly bigger than the U101’s. (She is presently in honorable retirement as the machine we give to houseguests. …And yes, all my machines have names and genders, and it’s not just a network issue. I find they work better that way. Don’t anybody bring up the Pathetic Fallacy. [If I suffer from a fallacy, it’s more likely to be the empathetic one: or as Brandoch Daha would put it, “Ever she perversely affecteth the losing side in a quarrel.”]) …And this machine plays exactly into a prediction I made to Peter years ago: that one day there would be a PC no bigger than a Filofax.
…It’s gonna be a while before I have to make up my mind about this issue. Big and unusual, or small and neat?…
Hmmmm….
