Phil online

I had given up on the idea of a carputer in my little car. But I saw this ForSale ad on mp3car.com that piqued my interest. It was for an industrial tablet PC. It’s basically a 10″ touchscreen with a computer built-in, for less than half the cost of a 7″ touchscreen. How cool is that? And he has so many broken ones, he throws in a couple of those for spare parts.

It all arrived this week while I was out of town. I’ve only had an hour or so to play with it, but I like it so far. Here’s my write-up…

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First of all, I didn’t get an AC adapter because he was running low on them. But I did get a car adapter.

The two broken units are really broken — like broken glass. The working unit powered up fine and runs great. It looks like they used to have an internal battery, but it’s all dried up. I’m going to see if I can get a replacement.

One of the broken units powers up and works, video and all! The touchscreen doesn’t work, but it looks like the driver’s not installed. I’ll try adding it later, when I get time.

The ad says 128MB, but I think mine has 160MB.

I downloaded drivers for my USB WiFi to a 1GB PCMCIA card, plugged it in (to the non-broken unit), installed it, and it works! Suddenly I’m surfing the web on this thing.

It doesn’t have a CDROM (and I don’t have one on USB), but I installed iGuidance from the 1GB PCMCIA flash card, too. I haven’t copied maps over, but it appears it’s going to work. There’s no serial port for my GPS, though, so I’ll have to get another USB GPS mouse.

It also seems to be missing a mic input, though I haven’t looked very hard. No biggie.

The screen needs some cleaning. Looks like someone lost the stylus and used a ball point pen instead. It didn’t hurt the screen, but it left some ink here and there. Also no biggie.

This is a nice little device. When I’m done, I’ll have a TomTom clone with a larger screen for less than $300 (including GPS and software). Add a data cable for my cell phone, and I’ll be wireless. Suh-weet.

Thanks, Moe.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 20th, 2005 at 10:28 am and is filed under General, Carputer, Design, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.