Electrovaya Scribbler SC3000 Premium

The SC3000 Premium from Electrovaya gets the nod for most-improved slate. It retains everything we liked about its predecessor, including a lightweight design and biometric security, and adds several enhancements, starting with snappier performance and a much-improved display for taking notes and giving one-on-one presentations. Add in a new dual array microphone system and you have one of the most versatile slates on the market, albeit one that sacrifices some battery life for performance.

On the outside, the 3.5-pound Scribbler SC3000 looks the same as the SC2200, which is mostly a good thing. The sleek white SC3000 comes with a great layout of dedicated preset buttons, the best of which are the Rotate Screen and the onscreen keyboard launch buttons. To prevent accidental presses while carrying the slate, these buttons have to be held down for a moment before launching. The Scribbler still suffers from a lack of any easy way to hold onto it. There's no felt grip area or battery that doubles as a hand grip, it's essentially a solid rectangle.

The Scribbler comes standard with a keyboard stand and its own slide-out touchpad that doubles as a snap-on lid. This setup feels a bit flimsy, but we didn't have any problems using the SC3000 as a notebook. As for the keyboard itself, it adds about a pound to the overall travel weight.

The new wide viewing angle display from Toshiba is light years ahead of the screen on the SC2000 and ranks up there with Motion Computing's LE1600. We had no trouble at all working either with the system docked or when walking around, which is not often the case. The screen is extremely smooth to use in conjunction with the stylus, enough so that it becomes second nature. As a plus,  an automatic light sensor adjusts depending on the surrounding light.

The SC3000's audio capabilities have improved with the inclusion of a dual array microphone system. The microphones can be adjusted to capture three different widths of reception, so you can record everything from meetings and lectures to personal dictations with impressive accuracy. From across our conference room, a speaker's voice was recorded and played back easily and clearly. Make sure the tablet is positioned directly in the path of the speaker and that the wide angle setup is selected; we noticed a significant drop in quality when other settings were used. We only wish that Electrovaya included a copy of OneNote so that users could have their voice recording and written notes in sync.

Thanks to a slightly faster 1.5-GHz Centrino M processor and speedier 5,400-rpm hard drive, the Scribbler SC3000 turned in an impressive MobileMark score of 195, a near 40-point jump versus the SC2000. Programs loaded quickly and we could multitask with relative ease. Graphics performance has vastly improved with Intel's new Graphics Media Accelerator onboard. The SC2000 couldn't even run 3DMark2001, but this slate scored a respectable-for-a-Tablet 2,774.

It boasts Electrovaya's patented SuperPolymer battery, but the SC3000 offers about 45 minutes less battery life that its predecessor. Still, 4.5 hours of battery runtime with the 802.11a/b/g wireless connection either on or off is quite good for a slate Tablet. You basically end up with more horsepower at the expense of some endurance.

Electrovaya's fingerprint sensor is one of the best we've tested, taking mere minutes to set up our profile with no annoying false negative errors. The user-friendly Softex OmniPass software makes managing multiple passwords a breeze.

The decent software package includes full versions of Corel Grafigo for capturing ideas and annotating documents and Farstone VirtualDrive Lite to play DVDs without an optical drive. Trial versions of Franklin Covey TabletPlanner and Alias SketchBook Pro round out the suite.

Its price is rather steep, but the Scribbler SC3000 is a well-rounded slate Tablet that benefits from upgrades in all of the right places. It remains highly mobile, but offers more speed and is much easier on the eyes.