DesXcape 150DM: Making your PC portable
By Shoshana Berger
Business 2.0
Editor's note: Gizmos Weekly is produced by Business 2.0 and features gadget reviews and gift ideas
(Business 2.0) -- Some months back, there was all manner of crowing about how the tablet PC would revolutionize computing. I took a few early models out for a spin. Sure, a wireless notepad with scribble recognition is handy, but it didn't exactly have me breaking into song. Why would I shell out more than $2,000 for a beefier version of my PDA? The Philips (PHG) DesXcape 150DM (due for release Stateside next week) is a more satisfying Happy Meal that includes a 15-inch LCD screen, a docking station, and a keyboard that all connect wirelessly to one another and your PC, where the power and applications actually reside. Instead of trying to cram the computing power of a tower into a tablet, the DesXcape leaves your sumo PC on the desktop, where it belongs, and lets you take the lightweight keyboard and LCD out to play.
With a 300-foot range, the DesXcape is not quite as portable as a tablet PC, but for home networks, it's a smart solution. I took the slickly designed color LCD -- which weighs just 5.3 pounds -- upstairs to my bedroom and sent an e-mail to myself back at the office. The DesXcape is supposed to let you roam without separation anxiety, and sure enough, it retrieved all of my apps and docs from downstairs, assuaging the feeling that I'd decapitated my PC. The touchscreen is highly responsive to the large, penlike stylus, and the optical character recognition makes fewer gaffes than the (albeit early-model) tablets I tried. One warning: The rechargeable batteries purportedly deliver "up to" five hours of operation, but I found that they don't quite live "up to" that claim. Be prepared to redock sooner than that.
Back at the mothership, I placed the screen in its tilting base station and tried out the wireless keyboard there. (This part of the package is optional, and for those of you who already have a setup you like, the base accepts any USB keyboard and mouse.) The desktop has always been an à la carte affair; the DesXcape just zooms it into the wireless, take-it-to-go era. But then, that's how the future sneaks up on you -- with a gizmo that makes you question how you ever got by without it.
DesXcape 150DM, including wireless 802.11b transceiver and, for a limited time, the wireless keyboard: $1,500; available in the first week of February.
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