Weekly Project: the $250 Tablet PC and a Project Gone Horribly Awry

Tablet PCs are hot. In early 2007, at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas and MacWorld Expo in San Francisco, no less than three landmark tablets made their public debut:

• Flybook A33i - an 8.9-inch foldable touch screen computer by Holbe Dialogue Europe; $2,670 (approx)
• Model 02 - the 60Gb hard drive ultramobile PC by OQO; $1,850
• ModBook - a Mac tablet by Axiotron; $2,279

All of this tablet news isn't new, though. Tablet PCs have been on and off, again, since the late 1990s. In fact, some savvy surfing will yield an irresistible surplus Tablet PC product: the Fujitsu Stylistic 1000--for less than 30 bucks. Buyer beware, however. This is not a sleeper product that can be easily (or, cheaply) converted into a modern Tablet PC clone. Rather, most (if not, all) surplus Fujitsu Stylistic 1000 purchases will end up as expensive door stops.

At first glance the stumbling block that prevents a vintage Stylistic 1000 from becoming a useable modern Tablet PC might seem to be a hardware issue--lack of styli, rechargeable batteries, memory, and hard drives. Not so; all of these issues can be successfully resolved.

The real trick in making a Stylistic 1000 work like a modern Tablet PC is trying to get an operating system to boot. Take your pick: Linux, Windows, DOS, and even Mac each OS attempt is fraught with failure.

And therein lies the tale--a tale of a project gone horribly awry.

Time: Days to Weeks
Cost: $217.77 w/o option
Difficulty: Maybe impossible

Parts List

• (1) Fujitsu Stylistic 1000; HSC Electronic Supply #20791; $29.95
• (1) stylus; FinePoint Innovations # KCP6; $75
• (1) battery; Batteryspace.com #NB-LAP03; $79.95
• (1) memory; MemoryTen #FMW3EM16; $19.95
• (1) CompactFlash ATA/PCMCIA adapter & CompactFlash memory card; Amazon.com SanDisk SDDR-64-768 Compact Flash to PC Card Adapter; $12.92

Option

• 512Mb CompactFlash card; Amazon.com SanDisk 512 MB CompactFlash Card, SDCFB-512-A10; $9.99
• PS/2 keyboard; salvaged

There are two popular sites for purchasing a surplus Tablet PC:

• HSC

The model sold at HSC is a transmissive monochrome LCD FMW2430M.

• Surplus Sales of Nebraska

You can purchase three different types of Stylistic 1000 tablets from Surplus Sales of Nebraska:

• FMW2430M Transmissive monochrome LCD; $39
• FMW2430F Transflective monochrome LCD; $39
• FMW2430S DSTN Color LCD; $65

You can find product information for the Stylistic 1000 on the Fujitsu support Web site.

NOTE: Surplus Sales of Nebraska sells a 16Mb DRAM expansion memory card (#FMWEM16; 95-0676-00). This card will NOT fit the Stylistic 1000 PCMCIA slot. According to Bob Grinnell of Surplus Sales of Nebraska, these cards fit a "separate slot" on older Stylistics not the Stylistic 1000.

NOTE 2: Surplus Sales of Nebraska claims that a local IT "expert" was able to load both Windows (sic) and Linux (sic) on the Stylistic 1000.

Not just any stylus will work with the Stylistic 1000. This Tablet PC uses an active electromagnetic digitizing technology designed by Mutoh in 1995. Today FinePoint Innovations sells a stylus that will work with the Stylistic 1000. The KCP6 (P/N 10977-0034E) is a sleek, battery-powered pen that will fit smoothly inside the stylus storage bay of the Stylistic 1000.

Don't bother trying to find a Fujitsu rechargeable battery that will actually fit the Stylistic 1000. Instead use an external 16V battery from batteryspace.com. This battery comes with an adapter connector that will fit the external power input jack of the Stylistic 1000.

House the external battery inside the Stylistic 1000 battery compartment with hook and loop fasteners and plug the battery's connector into the Tablet PC's power input jack. Insulate the Stylistic 1000's battery contacts from accidentally touching the metal box of the external 16V battery. The computer will behave just like its been plugged into an external AC power supply--without the power brick and lacking the tether of an AC power cord.

A 16Mb memory module for the Stylistic 1000 can be purchased from MemoryTen (aka MemoryX). The 16MB Fujitsu Stylistic 1000 72pin SODIMM module is installed inside the computer and provides the maximum amount of RAM that can be addressed by the BIOS (e.g., 24Mb).

Format an appropriately-sized CompactFlash memory card for holding a target operating system. For example, a 128Mb card will work for an "embedded" installation of Damn Small Linux. Load the OS on the formatted card. Insert the formatted and loaded card into a PCMCIA card CompactFlash adapter and install the adapter in the large Type III PC card bay of the Stylistic 1000. Turn on the tablet PC and see if the operating system will boot. After trying countless CompactFlash cards (i.e., different manufacturers, different capacities, different operating systems), the following errors prevented a successful boot:

• Operating system not found
• Invalid partition table
• Disk error

The following OS were attempted:

• BG-Rescue Linux
• Damn Small Linux
• FreeDOS
• FUSION PC 3.0
• IBM PC-DOS 6.22
• MS-DOS 6.22
• MS Windows 95
• MS Windows 2000
• TOMSRTBT

Another annoyance with the Stylistic 1000 centers around its picky PCMCIA ports. The card "fingers" that guide the PC card into the computer's port will only tolerate a thin edge. Therefore, you might have to trim some of the guides for an occasional PCMCIA card.

UPDATE: This is a work in progress and new information will be added as soon as results can be verified.

If you're still looking for a surplus steal in Tablet PCs, consider the Fujitsu PenCentra 130. For less than $120 from HSC, this handheld PC comes with Windows CE embedded in ROM, stylus, battery, memory, dock, keyboard, and carrying case. Don't expect to load Windows CE applications and games on this PenCentra 130, though. The embedded OS is very finicky, but this sampling of Windows CE-MIPS-formatted products should get you started: Bubblets and Tascal Registry Editor. Also, a recent HPC:Factor forum posting by HSC suggests that the memory module might not be available anymore.