« Jury Service | Main | Microsoft wants your cellphone »
November 20, 2002
Tablet PC
Dan Bricklin has been playing with one of the new Tablet PCs.
A decade ago Bricklin did a lot of work producing software for earlier attempts to produce a mass-market tablet PC device, so it's interesting to read his first impressions of Microsoft's latest effort.
Bricklin's major insight is that the time might just be right for the Tablet PC because nowadays so many of us primarily use PC-type devices to read information (be it email, the web or reference materials), rather than to do a lot of writing and content creation as was the case a decade ago. If you're in a position to lug around an A4-sized unit, a Tablet PC with a wireless network connection is much more useful for those purposes than a laptop.
It seems to me that there are two big questions about the Tablet PC:
- How many people - or businesses, more to the point - will be prepared to spend money on a Tablet PC when it's clearly much better suited to taking brief notes than heavy-duty report writing?
- How quickly will Tablet PC makers reach a consensus as to the best inking technique, button placement and so on? This is important because users won't appreciate having to retrain themselves every time they switch laptop models, and businesses won't want to have to support three or four systems of user input.
Posted by John at November 20, 2002 09:53 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://soreeyes.org/mt/mt-tb.cgi/14
Comments
they do look extremely cool, don't they. ahhh, techno-lust.
Posted by: Kristen at November 22, 2002 12:58 AM
I think that the idea of a tablet PC is very nice indeed, but the current models are too bulky and heavy.
One of the problems is that they're essentially based on laptop technology, using power-hungry and heavy components like hard disks for mass storage and running a modified version of an operating system designed for desktop PCs. I'd really like to see someone like Palm approach the problem from the opposite end, scaling up the technology used in a PDA and using software designed from the start to work on a tablet PC. (Psion did scale up one of their PDA models a couple of years ago, but it still had a keyboard.)
Posted by: John at November 22, 2002 12:32 PM