When the Compaq Evo Tablet PC arrived in the office it trounced all the others with its superb design. Where the Toshiba and Acer tablets are very much notebooks with reversible screens, the HP is truly innovative. The guts of the tablet are behind the TFT screen, with only a thin but strong keyboard that can rotate out from under it. This means the screen is top-heavy, but used like a notebook its designed to be rock-steady.

The Evos ace in the hole is that the keyboard can be hidden under the screen like a convertible Tablet PC, or it can also be detached, leaving you with a slate Tablet PC. Another bonus is that the keyboard is hot-swappable, too.

Internally the Evo runs the new 1GHz Transmeta Crusoe TM5800 processor with 256MB of RAM, a 30GB hard drive and an NVIDIA GeForce2 Go graphics chip. There was a minimal, but noticeable lag when processing handwriting, but we could not help but be impressed with the Evo. As we went to print pricing hadnt been finalized; the Evo will be approximately $4,000-$6,000, although its expected to fall around the lower end of that huge range.