A month working with a Tablet PC has convinced Lem Bingley that people who work with paper and pen should use one, and not just as a paperweight.
IT Week, 24 Mar 2003
Given the high-profile debut of Intel's Centrino technology it would be easy to forget that the previous revolution in portable computing - Tablet PC - is barely out of its polystyrene packing.
Well, I haven't forgotten because I've been using an Acer TravelMate 100 Tablet PC for the past month. This device, kindly loaned by Microsoft, is of the combination style. It's just another ultraportable until you flip the screen and set it to work in slate mode.
The Acer's screen digitiser allegedly has a resolution of 8000x6000 - much higher than the 1024x768 image - but it doesn't feel like it. I found the wayward pen one of the most irritating parts of the Tablet PC experience, and constantly felt obliged to recalibrate whenever attempts to tap icons connected with their neighbours.
Recalibration involves tapping cross-hairs in the corners of the screen. It's quick but never actually helped, so recalibration might just have well have been incantation.
The handwriting recognition also proved perplexing. When transcribing into Word, the Tablet did not seem to know the word "you" - surely one of the top 10 English words - suggesting "yon" instead. Judicious use of Word's AutoCorrect function seemed the only way to bring the system into the 21st century. Sadly my sonnet-writing will suffer as I can no longer write yon if I try. After a few similar adjustments, the Tablet is better at reading my writing than I am.
Oddly, the handwriting recognition in Windows Journal, a jotter application, has no trouble with "you", suggesting that recognition is application-dependent. Writing in Journal and then clipboarding to Word should not be, but is, the most reliable way to input text. Maybe Microsoft's upcoming OneNote software will improve matters.
Other aspects of text recognition surprised and delighted. A global search of the file system, for example, inspects Journal files even if they have never been converted. Obviously this depends on recognising handwriting on the fly, and is therefore fallible, but it worked for me much more often than it failed.
This feature finally convinced me that a Tablet PC is worth having. I write reams of notes, mislay an almost equal number, and often can't read my own jottings. Even without handwriting recognition, Tablets promise to replace jumbled heaps of paper with backed-up, date-sorted files. Steering me to the right page is priceless - assistance in reading the result a welcome bonus.
My verdict is that anyone who fills notepads as part of their job should try a Tablet - if their handwriting doesn't resemble the tracks of drunken spiders. And I'd recommend a pure slate such as NEC's Versa, rather than Acer's convertible - there is no need to lug a keyboard. A docking option for text entry back at base would suffice.
The Tablet PC still suffers from being a laptop at heart, however. The Acer is commendably quiet but half a kilo too heavy, it warms the lap but needs the mains every few hours, and of course Windows XP still requires two minutes notice of impending action, so that it can do whatever the hell it does during its fag-break-length boot-up.
But improvements to laptops are coming thick and fast, as witness Centrino. It won't be long before tablets enter the mainstream.
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