W510 with touchscreen as Point Of Sale station POS

[Charles Krug]

This is just meant to be informational:
Our business has a visitor's center with a few Posiflex all-in-one POS stations. Even though the systems & touch displays are integrated, these terminals are still far from portable. Several times a year, we need to set up a station in another building or a picnic area, so the idea of building a new POS station around a notebook with a touch display generated a lot of interest. The first thing I found is that the availability of touchscreens in a particular model can be short lived. Several manufactures offered the displays for a time, then discontinued them. This includes Lenovo, which had offered the Multi Touch screen on the T series for a while, but not anymore. I can understand why such a feature may not be especially popular, but it's useful on a POS system. Turns out the W series still has it as a CTO option, and it was free during a January promotion. This is a very nice machine, and while it adds to the portability of the station, there are still the peripherals: cash drawer, printer, barcode scanner, magnetic stripe reader and the pole (customer) display. The cash drawer is particularly bulky & heavy, but everything can fit into a good-sized plastic tub for transport. We probably will not soon replace all the existing terminals with this notebook configuration, but it will be interesting to see how this new system works out during our summer events.
Jim

[ausmike]

hi there..
just curious if you checked with IBM Business > , especiallyt ....errr The POS Dept
...might be of intresting to you to do so....
as I have seen lots of 'em around ... and lots 'cheaper' and much more multi-fuctional for the lesser price than a W Series machine ,,,, and with built-in onternface to your BACK OFFICE systems interfave capabilities.

However its an instresting exercise to do ,,,, for more fun !

[Colonel O'Neill]

Could always consider picking up a T400s/T410s with multitouch used; they're lighter and don't have the additional CPU and GPU power that the W510 entails.

Probably should also add some sort of screen protector; I don't think the screen was designed for such heavy usage.

[ausmike]

G'Day Colonel;
Salute .....

FYI .... if you near Markham ; or Richmond Hill Area of YYZ ..... I would drop in the IBM POS display at their Canada Head Office ,,,, and view these ........IBM POS
And In particular ..view the SurePOS 500 Series

they have touch screen - and seems lots cheaper than any THINPAD LAPTOP ... and run faster since they are {removed} OS system.....

[Charles Krug]

There are several makers of dedicated POS systems -- a few include Posiflex, Elo, HP, Dell and of course IBM. I reviewed a number of product lines, but none seemed to emphasize portability, which was our objective. What we put together is semi-portable, with room for improvement. Time will tell how practical a system it is . . .
Thanks for the suggestions!
Jim

[bussoft]

Today, many companies do have handheld wireless pos systems that you can use. Take at look at http://www.businessoftware.com/handheldpos and http://www.digitaldining.com/pos/PrdHandBody.html