For many years, the PC industry has been trying to push pen-based computers into the market. Most devices have failed dramatically. But still, the idea seems to be fascinating to many. Maybe it's all about trying to replace the "unnatural" established way of operating a PC with a keyboard and mouse by something more "human".
The current generation of pen-based computers is of course the Tablet PC. The Tablet Edition of Windows XP was released by Microsoft almost four years ago, and by most standards, it can't be described as a huge success. Most Tablet PCs are sold to niche markets such as healthcare and insurance salespeole, not to mainstream laptop users. And the newest attempt to change the Tablet PC into a more consumer-friendly device in the form of the Ultra-mobile PC (UMPC) is simply a downright failure.
Microsoft recently quitely renamed the Tablet PC group. The team is now called -- in typical elegant Microsoft fashion -- "Mobile and Tailored PC Division". Maybe that's a sign that Microsoft is abandoning the original Tablet PC vision. And that's probably a good thing.
GottaBeMobile.com recently had an interesting post about how normal people use Tablet PCs in their everyday work and live. The result: Almost nobody ever uses all the wonderful "Ink" functionalities, because people simply don't understand what to do with them. For most users, the electronic pen is simply an alternative navigational device. Text is still written on a keyboard, not by hand.
I have been a Tablet PC user for many years myself (currently a happy owner of a Motion Computing LE1600), and I completely agree with these findings. I practically never use my tablet's handwriting recognition capabilities, because even with a 95% accuracy, it's almost unusable in practice. Many of the tablet usage scenarios that you read about in brochures (annotating documents, hand-written e-mails etc.) are not really practical. A Tablet PC is ideal to take some notes in a meeting, since then you don't have a "wall" in the form of a laptop screen between you and the other participants. But this feature alone is probably not worth the additional cost of a Tablet PC to most people.
What's wrong with this technology? I'm convinced that the devil is in the details. Very often, it's just minor changes in usability that make or break a product.
Here are a few things that my Tablet PC should have in my opinion:
- Touch screen and active digitzer: Tablet PCs typically have a so-called active digitizer, which means that they can only be operated with a special electromagnetic pen. UMPCs on the other hand have a touch screen that can be used with your finger but which is almost unusable for handwriting recognition. Why aren't both options available in the same device? The active digitizer "knows" after all when I'm using the special pen and could simply disable the touch screen.
- More pragmatic note-taking software: Microsoft OneNote is probably the most frequently used software for note-taking on Tablet PCs. Like so many Microsoft applications, this program offers many wonderful, but almost unusable features that distract from the actual task. OneNote tries to do almost everything with handwritten text that can be done with typed text, but that's both unnecessary and confusing. A simpler, unintrusive way to take and organize hand-written notes would be much more useful than complex collaboration functionalities.
- Better correction features: 95% accuracy for handwriting recognition means: Every twentieth word is wrong. That wouldn't be so terrible -- I probably make more mistakes than that when typing -- if only the correction features would be more elegant. Why can't I just write over the incorrectly recognized word and instead have to click several times simply to correct one single letter?
- Longer battery life: This is obviously desirable for every kind of portable device, but it's especially important for a Tablet PC. What happens if you take notes in a meeting and suddenly your battery dies? That's more than annoying, it's simply a reason not to use a Tablet PC at all. I'm using a extended battery for my Motion LE1600 that gives me 6-8 hours of constant operation, and that's about the minimum to make a Tablet PC really useful.
- Better keyboard options: There are two types of Tablet PCs: The keyboard-less "slates" and the "convertibles" that have a built-in keyboard. Both options are far from ideal. Convertibles are often big and heavy, and for most slates, there are no really good keyboard options. I think the industry needs to do some work on this form factor aspect. Why, for instance, isn't there a simple fold-out stand in the back of my slate? This would cost next to nothing, but make the device more useful.
As I have mentioned, these are just some of the simpler things. One of the really big things is the fact that today's Windows GUI is optimzied to be used with a mouse and a keyboard. The digital pen is clearly still an afterthought, even in Windows Vista. This all somehow feels like the old text-based DOS applications that were able to use a mouse. But the mouse was only used to select menu options, and it took a completely new approach to user interfaces (the GUI) to make the mouse actually useful.
And in much the same way, I think that the Tablet PC needs a new approach for a user interface that is really optimized for this new way of using a computer.
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