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another view -- Tablet PCs Mix Science Fiction and Real-World Friction WashPost
From: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Mon, 11 Nov 2002 05:20:31 -0500
washingtonpost.com Tablet PCs Mix Science Fiction and Real-World Friction By Rob Pegoraro Sunday, November 10, 2002; Page H07 Put an absolute beginner in front of a computer and he'll try to touch the screen to make things happen. The revolutionary thing about Microsoft's new tablet PC is that it transforms this wishful-thinking behavior into reality: You can write on its screen and the thing will respond! This is the stuff of science fiction, and it makes the tablet PC an unusually ambitious venture for Microsoft. It's just not a successful one. Tablet PCs -- a class of laptop-like machines built by several manufacturers to pair with Microsoft's software -- are fabulous in concept but frustrating in practice. In trying to combine the simplicity of paper with the power of a computer, they lose both qualities. My epiphany came during a meeting on Monday. Just as I was about to show off the Acer TravelMate C100 I've been testing, the computer froze. Hard. Taps on the screen and keyboard and a flip of the power switch failed to revive it in time, so I had to conduct my demonstration with a dead screen. My colleagues looked at their paper notepads with a certain amount of smugness. They had good reason to, as did the people in other meetings who watched me struggle to wake the Acer from its sleep mode or pull up the right program. Tablet PCs, at $1,699 to $2,499 from such firms as Acer, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, NEC and Toshiba, are neither cheap nor all that simple. (The Acer C100, at $2,200, wasn't even a good laptop, with a mediocre two-hour battery life in my testing, a power brick that added nearly a pound to its 3.5-pound weight and an external USB CD-ROM drive that required its own separate AC adapter.) All tablet PCs run on a version of Windows XP Professional and employ a flat-panel screen with some moderately expensive circuitry to recognize the movements of a special stylus -- in other words, you can't use your finger in an emergency. "Slate" tablet PCs omit keyboards, while "convertible" designs like the Acer let you flip and fold the LCD back over the keyboard, glass side out. Both kinds let you switch the screen's orientation from landscape to portrait, which eases writing on it while holding it in one hand. Unlike other handwriting-recognition devices, tablet PCs normally leave your scribbles as "ink" on the screen. This divorce of ink from text fatally compromises the tablet PC's usefulness. First, if your writing is unreadable on paper, it will look even worse after being digitized as ink. Second, ink is an inefficient, incompatible way to store words. An 11-page handwritten document measured 422 kilobytes, a lot to download in e-mail or fit on a floppy disk. Ink files can't be edited on anything but a tablet PC, and e-mails written in ink may be unreadable in many mail programs, especially those on a cell phone or handheld organizer. The tablet PC software offers only limited, clumsy ways to transform ink into text. In Windows Journal, the core handwriting-input program, you can select up to a page's worth of ink, then navigate to the Actions menu and select "Convert handwriting to text" (a tricky maneuver with a stylus); the software will offer its interpretation as well as alternative transcriptions of any words it's unsure of. With most other applications, you need to invoke a foreground window called the Tablet PC Input Panel, which accepts your handwriting, converts it in batches and pours the results into the current document. If you leave your ink as is, the tablet PC will still do some transcription in the background, which lets you search inexactly through an ink document: It correctly found one instance of "compact" but thought it had located three more in the words "control," "comfortable" and "computing." Take care to write slowly and precisely in cursive or print and the tablet PC may perform quite well. But if you rush, things go downhill in a hurry. (The tablet PC just interpreted that phrase as "Things go downhill or, a henry!") Its suggestions for alternative spellings can resemble the rantings of an increasingly deranged poet, such as these interpretations of "Christine": "Christie, Caroline, Caustic, Carotene, Carthorse, Christ-ire." At no time can you see a tablet PC's transcription in real time, letter by letter, which blocks you from learning what parts of your writing confuse the software. It breaks the feedback loop that lets users of other pen-input systems -- Palm handhelds' Graffiti, Apple's Ink for Mac OS X and Microsoft's Pocket PC -- improve their accuracy. The tablet PC software, in turn, isn't programmed to learn from your use of it. This setup has been puzzling me all week. Half a decade ago, Apple's Newton MessagePad 2000 transcribed my handwriting with impressive accuracy while running on a far weaker processor. Can't Microsoft do better today? Some bundled programs on the Acer illustrated other promising possibilities for the tablet PC concept. Microsoft's Snippet lets you select part of any window with the stylus, then paste it into a document to annotate; Alias Sketchbook allows quick drawing on the screen with a palette of simulated brushes and pens. The tablet PC also features a somewhat hidden speech-recognition program, which, after I spent a few minutes reading test sentences, generated mostly accurate text in my tests. But you can add speech-recognition and drawing software to any other computer. It's the tablet PC's ink input that distinguishes it, and that sinks it. Its handwriting recognition is worse than a handheld organizer's, while its ink feature doesn't add enough to the utility of paper notepads -- which are far, far cheaper and won't ever crash on you in mid-meeting. Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro at rob () twp com. © 2002 The Washington Post Company ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as interesting-people () lists elistx com To unsubscribe or update your address, click http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
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- another view -- Tablet PCs Mix Science Fiction and Real-World Friction WashPost Dave Farber (Nov 11)