HP Pavillion tx2000z Convertible Tablet PC Review

Posted by John P. on March 27th, 2008 Comments Printer-Friendly

HP Pavillion tx2000z

Last November, I had the chance to get my hands on the HP Compaq 2710p, a business-oriented tablet PC. Early this year at CES in Las Vegas, HP introduced the Pavillion tx2000z, a follow-up to the tx1000 with a plethora of new features. How does it stack up? Read on after the jump for more details.

The tx2000z has a very sleek HP Echo Imprint Finish, with a glossy black and silver color scheme. It weighs in at 4.3 pounds with the four-cell battery and weight saver. The new active digitizer (technology by Wacom) and touchscreen allow you to use not only a traditional pen but use your fingers to navigate around as well. Open the tx2000z and you reveal a convertible 12.1″ widescreen display and an integrated webcam for video chat. The tx2000z also has a very interesting touchpad, it’s actually built-in to the case of the notebook and has a perforated texture to it.

Inside, the tx2000z has an AMD Turion 64 X2 dual-core processor, and NVIDIA GeForce GO 6150 graphics with up to 559MB of shared video memory. The tablet can also be loaded up with 4GB of DDR2 memory and up to a 250GB hard drive. It also has a removable SuperMulti 8x DVD burner with dual layer support and LightScribe as an option. The tx2000z also supports 802.11a/b/g/n & Bluetooth wireless connectivity.

In the performance spectrum, we tested the tx2000z using PCMark Vantage in both 32- and 64-bit versions, since Windows Vista 64-bit Edition is installed out of the box. The tx2000z received a score of 2188 PCMarks in the 32-bit version and 2471 PCMarks in the 64-bit version - not that much of a performance boost. In our CINEBENCH graphics tests, the unit pulled off a score of 3359 using both cores and had a 1.85 multiprocessor speedup.

We were also very happy with some of the external additions on the notebook, including dual headphone jacks, the removable optical drive to save weight, and the built-in fingerprint reader which is sometimes hard to find on consumer-oriented notebooks. The only problem we found was that we felt the LCD was a bit grainy and dull. We got around 4 hours of battery life using the four-cell battery, and with the six-cell (which adds a little bit of thickness), we received around five hours.

The HP Pavillion tx2000z tablet PC is available today from HP starting at $999.

Pros