another view -- Tablet PCs Mix Science Fiction and Real-World Friction WashPost

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

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



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