We tried to get an Acer C300 Tablet PC for PDC, but it looks like they won't be arriving in the United States in time.
PDC would have been an excellent conference to pass the C300 around at. Developers are everywhere.
The C300 appears to be an excellent choice for developers, since it has reasonable performance and a larger, 14.1" screen. One downside appears to be that the display is limited to 1024x768 resolution like all Tablet PCs, so an extended monitor is going to be needed for heavy development work. However for on the go programming, the built in resolution hopefully won't be that bad.
There is at least one C300 in the United States right now, but from what I understand it's being used for training.
One thing that kind of irks me is calling around to some rather big online stores and several of them playing a game of pretending like they are going to receive a shipment for a new product on a given day, even when it's not guaranteed. Originally, as Steve posted, the C300 was supposed to arrive in the US on October 20th. I tried to get one too to take with me to PDC. A couple online stores were saying they would get pretty large sized shipments around this time. But interestingly, not all of the stores claimed this. Then the date slipped to the week of the PDC as Steve posted once again. Actually, one company was insisting that they were going to get a rather large shipment last Thursday. This didn't match with other companies though. I had my fingers crossed anyway. Sure enough they didn't get any. Nor did anyone else. Turns out most stores get their products from the same shipments overseas. So it's highly unlikely that one company is going to get a large shipment ahead of anyone else.
I can see for sales purposes on hot new products, why it's sometimes not worthwhile to keep their arrival information up to date even as the dates slip. I'm more likely to place an order with a company that says they are going to receive the product on Monday, for instance, even though other companies are saying their products are going to arrive on Friday.
When you're looking for a new product and one company has what appears to be an old ETA date and others have shifted to a date farther off, assume that the one with the most attractive ETA doesn't have the most up-to-date information in their systems.
So when will the C300s be arriving? I'm not exactly sure, but from what I can put together, it appears it will be November 3, which is the week after PDC. Oh, well. Maybe, just maybe, they will arrive a few days earlier. Even getting one by the last day of PDC would be OK by me.
Posted by Loren at October 25, 2003 08:58 AM