Over the past few months I've played with several different Tablet PCs. I say played because - despite asking nicely - I haven't been able to borrow one for long enough to put it to work. I'd like to learn if a tablet offers any advantage over my current combination of Psion Revo, Toshiba Portégé and spiral-bound notepad. But for the moment I just don't know how useful a tablet would prove, and I'm not about to spend a couple of grand trying to find out.
On the face of it, I'm prime tablet user material. I spend hours in meetings making notes on paper, many of which I mislay immediately afterward. I'd fire up a laptop and clack my way through meetings but that would have me pigeonholed as an obsessive, so I use the discrete Revo when I think I might need an enduring, searchable record. But the Revo is simply not as versatile as a bit of squashed plant fibre. You can't even draw a diagram next to some text without all sorts of task-switching and key prodding.
So a quiet merging of paper and PC seems like a good idea to me.
But I'm oddly unconvinced by the Tablet PC. Its design layers the metaphor of pen and paper over a fairly conventional laptop. And it's hard to write on glass with a pointy stick when the "ink" appears a few millimetres beyond the nib, at limited resolution. My handwriting is not great, but it's not as bad as it looks on a Tablet PC screen. This forces me to write in ponderous, larger-than-life letters, filling up the screen too quickly.
Discarding the metaphor, and focusing instead on user goals, might have been a better design approach. If the goal is to write and draw comfortably but to have the result digitised, interpreted and stored, the result should surely be a laptop-cum-flatbed-scanner.
The problem with this idea is that it wouldn't work. The Tablet PC can decipher handwriting with reasonable results only because it preserves metadata lost to a scanner. It not only examines the marks made, but also how they are made. By evaluating my scrawl as a vector set rather than a pixel map, the Tablet PC makes superior guesses.
So maybe a better option would be a digitising pad, usable under a piece of real paper, side by side with a conventional laptop screen.
The odd thing about this design is that IBM built it, and offered it for sale, two years ago. Unfortunately, IBM's ThinkPad TransNote was not a popular product and it has since been withdrawn. That failure is why IBM is not bothering with a Tablet PC product. "It was too early (for pen-input) then and it's still too early," IBM insisted just a couple of months ago.
But I think the TransNote failed due to half-baked execution. It was the size and weight of a desktop replacement but offered a tiny 600x800 screen. It was held together with velcro but cost £2,000 + VAT. It wouldn't balance on your knees and, bizarrely, didn't do handwriting recognition.
I think the TransNote concept merits another try. NEC has built a wonderfully light and thin Versa Tablet PC. Panasonic sells a tiny 1kg ToughBook with a 768x1024 screen. Toshiba's twist-screen Tablet PC feels impressively solid. If a new TransNote were built to the same high standard as these Japanese jewels, it would be a real killer product. I might even spend my own money on one.
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