Axiotron Modbook review

Take the insides of a 2GHz MacBook, remove the keyboard and screen, add a touchscreen, and what do you have?

As you can see from the pictures, the answer is the Modbook. It's two-and-a-half years since Axiotron and OWC first displayed the Modbook at the Mac industry's annual gathering in San Francisco, but it's only just reached these shores.

It's still the only option if you want a tablet Mac, so we were keen to see just how it measured up. The basic spec of the Modbook is the same as that of the 2GHz MacBook: a 2GHz Intel Core Duo processor, 2GB of memory, an Nvidia GeForce 9400m graphics processor, 120GB hard drive and 8X SuperDrive. The memory can be upgraded to 4GB and the hard drive to 320GB. It has two USB 2 ports, a FireWire 400 socket, Gigabit Ethernet and mini DVI. The Modbook also supports Bluetooth, draft 802.11n wifi and, uniquely, comes with a GPS chip.

Despite the fact that Axiotron has built its own shell, the iSight camera remains intact, and the Magsafe power adaptor is the same as the MacBook's. The case also houses the allimportant pen stylus with which you draw on the tablet's screen.

No keyboard or mouse is supplied with the Modbook, though you could plug them into the USB ports, or pair them using Bluetooth, and use it as a regular Mac. That, of course, would be missing the point of this adapted MacBook, though we found it useful for initial setup and occasional web surfing.

It's clear from the software bundle exactly how Axiotron envisages the Modbook will be used. The highlight is Autodesk's SketchBook Express; an application that's only available with the tablet. Its interface has been specifically designed to be accessed using a pen, which means that key functions such as tool selection and settings modifications are performed without the need to resort to keyboard modifiers. This takes a little getting used to if you normally work with a mouse and keyboard, or even if you use a traditional graphics tablet. The application isn't a full-on Photoshop style image editor, nor is it as fully-featured as Corel's Painter, but is exactly what it describes itself as - a sketch book. As a tool for picking up and scribbling ideas for running off quick sketches, it's excellent.

Part of the reason SketchBook works so well is the touchscreen and pen combination. Once you've spent a minute or two calibrating them, the pen feels very comfortable to use, particularly when drawing. Yes, selecting from menus and closing windows takes a bit of getting used to, but this is compensated for by the ability to draw onscreen as you would with pen on paper. The digitiser pen comes with three studio nibs, three pencil nibs and five felt nibs. It has two programmable side buttons and an eraser.

The other bundled software applications include Quickflip, which allows you to rotate the Modbook and use it in either landscape or portrait orientation; and Quickclicks, an onscreen keyboard and shortcut application. Quickflip did exactly what it was supposed to in our tests, but we found Quickclicks to be unintuitive and tricky to get to grips with.

In our battery of tests, the Modbook performed similarly to its MacBook cousin, scoring an almost identical result in the CPU test. However, the MacBook outperformed it slightly, but by enough to be significant, in both the memory test and OpenGL score. Likewise, the Modbook was the better performer in the Quartz graphics test.

Your decision about whether to buy the Modbook won't be made on test results. It will come down to whether the convenience of having a Mac in tablet form is worth paying double the price of the equivalent MacBook. There's no question that it's a fantastic piece of engineering and it works remarkably well, but we can't see ourselves using it as our only portable Mac, let alone our only Mac. And that makes it a very expensive luxury.