Microsoft Surface Pro

Digital scans of old D&D modules are becoming one of my most bought and downloaded commodities, as sites like RPGNow, DNDClassics and 4Shared and allowing me to revisit modules that haven't seen life in nearly three decades.  I've been considering buying a new tablet recently as my Kindle Fire, while great for reading books, isn't holding up so well as a PDF reader; books can have their fonts sized appropriately and a page of text on the Kindle Fire doesn't have to be equal to a page of text in a document.  Not so with a PDF...digital scans are reproductions, often without any OCR, of the original documents, so I'm constantly having to resize and scroll around documents, which is annoying during play.

Gabe over at Penny Arcade posted a review of the Microsoft Surface Pro, including a video of him drawing on it.  I'm no MS fanboi, but they aren't Apple so my disdain is within the limits of still buying from them.  If they make a good product and don't lock it down or make it annoying, I'm willing to try it out.  From Gabe's review, it sounds like they have a winner.

He grabbed Sketchbook Pro, a drawing package, Steam and several games and tested them out.  The ability to draw on this  thing, then read through and markup PDFs, then whip out a few minutes of WoW or Civ 5 is pretty impressive to me, and would meet my needs almost completely.  I currently game/program/read on my Asus G71G series gaming laptop...it's great, but huge; I basically cannot take it places as it's so bulky, but it works great as a living room laptop.  It is, however, showing it's age.  It's running into heat problems and is getting choppy on some animations.  It also doesn't have a great feel for programming; I want something that has a smaller footprint and can easily be moved around or popped open in a coffee shop for a few minutes.  It's never really come back from hibernation well either.

All that said, it looks like the Surface starts out at $999 without the keyboard.  That's high for a tablet, but about right for a laptop, so as a combination product I think that's probably a great price point.  The ability to draw out a map, read through a PDF, connect with Google Hangouts