Phil’s Diary - [Blog @ http://www.philsdiary.net/]
So what do I reckon to tablet PCs?
Well mixed feelings really. The particular model I was looking at was a Compaq TC 1000. First impressions are that it’s very snazzy, light and compact. The detachable keyboard which doubles as a stand is a very nice idea (and the embedded mouse too). Microsoft with their “tablet edition” of XP have really made good use of the touch screen and pen with decent handwriting recognition, drawing tools and post it notes etc.
It has built in wireless lan, so is probably very cool for use around the house as an ad-hoc PC with a little more portability than a laptop (no need to rest it on your knees or a flat surface to type).
At the end of the day though it’ll be limited to “office” type PC operations, email, surfing the web, MS Office and the like, as opposed to playing games, simply because the interface is that way inclined.
So what about the downsides?
Well first the handwriting recognition. Considering it I’d not trained it, it didn’t have any real problems with recognising what I’d written (a mistake one word in 5, and those were ones I’d been a bit vague on).
However the way it does the on the fly recognition isn’t the best in the world. It appears to have a small text window in which you write. It then recognises what you’ve written and inserts it at the cursor. The problem with this is that the writing window seems to have space for 3 to 4 words tops. Then you have to wait a second or two while it recognises what you’ve written, and then start at the beginning of the box again.
This really does reduce the fluidity of writing as you’re stopping and starting every few words.
Not bad if you want to make a few notes, but hardly what you’d want if you were writing anything of any length.
Nice gimmick, definitely getting better, but still not quite there.
The only other thing that failed to impress was the speed of the thing. It was defiantly a bit slow. Now I’m not sure if Microsoft slimmed down the tablet edition of XP at all, because if not it could explain why a 1Ghz Crusoe (slower than a 1Ghz P3 for example) was struggling a little. After all most PCs sold with XP on them at the moment are fast P4’s.
That said if you ignore the two gripes above it’s definitely a nice gizmo, a little limited in it’s practicality, but still a bit more useful than a standard laptop I’d guess.
Would I buy one? If I were in the market for a laptop, then probably. But as I’m not. I won’t.
What’s rather cool is that they do seem to be popular, and they’re definitely heading in the right direction for a technology that could make PCs more useful. This generation might have a few downsides, but give it a little time and if it works out well enough they’ll replace most laptops, and the above problems may well disappear.
Posted by Phil on April 11, 2003 07:31 PM | Categories: Technology