I met with a client earlier today to discuss running one of my workshops with his team so they could understand the possibilities (and warnings) of Office 365 in advance of unleashing the new tools on the firm. When we sat down in the coffee shop he put his tablet on the table … and it wasn’t an Apple iPad. I’m used to seeing those in meetings, but he had one of the Toshiba Z20t hybrid tablet/laptop devices instead. I hadn’t seen one in the wild before. He’d left the keyboard behind, and just carried the tablet head down to the meeting. I hadn’t realised that was what he was carrying when we walked down the street.

We did talk about that device a bit before and after the core discussion, but the key points for him in choosing the Z20t were:
– it ran Windows, which was better for him for running Microsoft Office.
– it was his “one device.” He connected back to the keyboard in the office.
– it had a large screen – about the same size as an A4 size of paper – enabling him to read documents in portrait mode.
– it connected to a real (sturdy) keyboard, unlike the “flimsy” Surface Pro 4 tablet/keyboard which he had seen and tried (and like the Surface Book, which he had not seen).

His notes for our discussion were in OneNote.

Before I met Eric Mack I had only ever purchased Toshiba laptops. After meeting Eric I switched to IBM ThinkPads / Lenovo ThinkPads, and haven’t gone back (yet). Interesting to see what people are using and getting value from.