My three year experiment with a Windows Tablet PC came to a screeching halt Wednesday at the end of work when I did the unthinkable: I inadvertently dropped a Coke Zero into my machine.
The machine is dead: long live the machine.
Here is what I learned in the three years of using my Fujitsu Lifebook T4020D Convertible Tablet PC:
- I have always and will ever more love using a Wacom Pen Tablet.
- Having a tablet is perfect for sitting on the couch and surfing the web. It is the right size for power-surfing and blogging.
- Pen-gesture browsing rocks!!! (Think iPhone gestures: very cool!)
- Microsoft Office OneNote 2003 and 2007 is the second coolest
application on the planet for capturing snippets of web-pages and
screens and annotating them.
- PDF Annotator has never gotten enough airplay. There is nothing
like typing a letter in OpenOffice, saving as a PDF, then signing the
document with my personal signature just before emailing it to someone.
No printers were ever used in the transaction. Add the ability to send
faxes through an online fax service and you are a very powerful Road
Warrior.
- The convertible form-factor was perfect for all those meetings with the person sitting across from me needed to see the screen. I could run presentations right from the screen, mark them up with digital ink and save for posterity.
- The tablet form-factor is the most "Human" form factor in that in meetings I didn't have the psychological barrier of my laptop screen between me and my clients. (The "Laptop Effect" is thus: if the person across from you can't see your screen, they always feel like they don't know what is on your screen or that you are not 100% focused on them.)
- Microsoft XP Tablet PC was a little rough around the edges compared to Vista.
- Pen-based handwriting recognition stinks. Everything, and I mean everything, I wrote had to be converted from digital ink to text and it just never quite worked. Also, I was constantly fighting with the input-panel to get it to recognize my writing. Sorry, Bill G., but it just never worked quite right.
- Skip bluetooth unless it is for an external keyboard.
- Batteries. Batteries. Batteries. I never had enough battery life to leave the power cord at my desk. I was always replacing batteries due to cooking the battery in my travel case or the lithium-ion problem. Battery technology simply hasn't progressed to the point to make a device with a hard-drive and DVD drive viable for a ten-hour day of work.
- Tablet PC's should not be used for audio or video production. Their power conservation technologies, despite not really working well, makes the machine horribly under-powered. I was always dropping frames or having drop-outs in recordings because the machine wasn't able to keep up. (I would record 4-8 tracks of audio at once.)
- I was constantly battling proprietary driver issues that could not deal with the Tablet PC display orientation changing.
- The things was too hot to hold in your hand.
Despite all the hype and high-technology put into Tablet PCs, I still think it is too bleeding edge to be a viable solution for pen-based capture of all that I do: Executive and Program Management, Über-surfing the web, Audio Production, Multimedia Development, Video Production and Software Engineering. It just couldn't wear all those hats. Having said all that, I have no regrets. It was the perfect tool for just sitting back and surfing the news. I think the new Sony Reader Digital Book (lousy name) is a much better form factor for eBooks. The MacBook/MacBook Pro is a much better form factor for wearing all those hats. It just works.
