Test-driving Tablet PC

By PETER GRIFFIN

I have seen the next evolution of the PC, swivelled its bits around, doodled all over it, dropped toast crumbs into its delicate parts - and handed it back to its owners with mixed feelings.

There's something cathartic about forgoing the PC keyboard - taking up the stylus and scribbling on a digital canvas in digital ink. It shatters that familiar world dominated by space, enter, delete and tab.

The only problem is, amid spells of smooth sailing with the stylus, you will find yourself yearning for those familiar blobs of plastic. The new way of doing things in computerland is the Tablet PC, but much of the time you'll find the keyboard is far mightier than the pen.

Fully functional laptops at first glance, the Tablet PCs on the market from the likes of Toshiba, Hewlett-Packard, Acer and Viewsonic quickly morph into electronic slates at the release of a few catches or the 180-degree twist of a screen.

I test-drove the tablet version of the Acer TravelMate ($4995), a lightweight, high-performance notebook in its own right, but a user-friendly input device with the screen reversed in tablet mode.

What you have is a version of the Windows XP operating system specially built to be navigated with a little plastic pen. In Windows Journal, you take notes as you would on a pad of lined A4 paper, crossing out or highlighting words, adding amendments in the margins, sketching diagrams or pictures where needed. Lasso passages of text and send them elsewhere or use a search engine to sort through pages of notes.

In good old Microsoft Word, with the wave of your pen over the screen you can bring up a handwriting input pad allowing you to scribble notes that are translated into text - perfectly if your print in block letters, not so perfectly if you stick to your own distinct scrawl.

Export your scribbles to Outlook Express to create emails in longhand, a refreshing change to the bland lines of black text that usually fill your inbox. Or jot memos to youself on the desktop in Sticky Notes.

For the business user the possibilities are endless.

Think of a vehicle insurance assessor examining your smashed car, marking out the damaged panels on a digital map. No more wooden clipboards and data entry clerks leafing through piles of paper as they feed mundane details into the machine.

But for the regular consumer there's little of real interest here. The fiddly aspect of the handwriting recognition will cause more frustration than anything else. Entering a web address into the address line of Internet Explorer using the handwriting feature can be more trouble than it's worth.

The real potential in the tablet PC lies in the features we've not seen yet. Already there's Microsoft's Encarta encyclopaedia, built to peruse with a pen, and MapPoint, Microsoft's digital atlas software that lets you tap on the screen to plot road trips across the US.

The real future for consumers lies in the use of the tablet as an e-publishing device. When Dick Brass, Microsoft's vice-president of technology, breezed through New Zealand last month to preach the Tablet PC gospel he brought with him a device loaded with features the first of the tablet converts will not get to take advantage of.

The former Wall Street Journal reporter's next grand plan at Microsoft is to get major US publishers to jump on the e-publishing bandwagon, churning out electronic versions of their newspapers, magazines, journals and books.

On Dick's Tablet PC are mock up versions of major daily newspapers, broadsheets formatted for the A4 screen of the tablet. Imagine the potential.

Plug in your notebook every morning and download your personalised version of the New Zealand Herald, minus the sections you never read anyway.

Or how about an electronic version of that latest John Grisham novel. E-books have been a major failure so far, thanks largely to the book publishing industry's reluctance to accept the new medium.

Microsoft has made a lot of progress with its Cleartype technology - which makes type on the screen look sharper to the eye.

Finally, there's a device that can be held like a book, is easy to read and can be used as a regular laptop for office stuff.

Not a bad combination - and one likely to save a few Brazilian forests if independent software vendors and Microsoft itself can come up with enough attractive applications to lure consumers down the tablet path.

Websites on pen computing


Microsoft Tablet PC - the official word on the Tablet PC from the Microsofties.


TabletPC Talk - an independent site devoted to discussion on everything Tablet-like.

Tablet PC Developer - for the software geeks who will make the Tablet PC truly useful.

Pen Computing - the ideas behind the Tablet PC explored in depth.

Tablet PC Buzz - news and views on Tablet technology.