I was an early adopter of the Tablet PC - buying a Toshiba Portege 3500 when it was first released. It was a pretty neat machine at the time, a little underpowered, but it generated the required WOW factor when I used the Pen in presentations and training sessions (half way through a presentation, I would swivel the screen round and start drawing a diagram with Corel Grafigo, and watch the audience's collective jaws drop). My kids loved it too - drawing using Alias Sketchbook Pro and fighting over whose turn it was next (not sure if that is a sign of it's success or just the usual sibling rivalry). Moreover I enjoyed sitting in my lounge and browsing the web with the tablet in slate mode, and at work I took judicious ink notes in meetings using OneNote.
But there came a point when I stopped swivelling that screen around and just started keeping it in normal laptop mode. That might have been after I tried to read my notes back from a meeting, and realised that leaving them in ink, rather than trying to convert them to text might have been a mistake, since I could hardly read a word. It might have been the slowness of that machine to change the orientation or display the input panel and the frustration of waiting the screen to redraw (the 3500 has a slow graphics chip with shared memory). It could have been something to do with the fact that I didn't have a wireless projector so switching the screen around in a presentation could cause the projector to go flying, or at least move the image 5 foot to the left, if I wasn't careful. Or it could be that the geeky trendiness and wow factor just faded away...The 3500 was given to my wife and children and I moved on to a powerful Acer laptop instead - enjoying the fast graphics card, and tons of processing power.
Of course I recently decided it would be a good idea to put SP2 on all my machines, particularly ones used by my family. So on it went to the 3500, and with a Tablet PC, SP2 gives you a new o/s - Tablet PC 2005 for free! So suddenly my interest was revived in pen input. And there are some good improvements that have made me want to start using it again. Firstly and most visually the Input Panel is much improved. I mean really really really improved. Instead of it being docked at the bottom of the screen which made for a frustrating experience (click into a text box, display the input panel, wait for the screen redraw, check focus is still in the textbox, start writing, pause during writing, the damn panel puts the text in but I hadn't finished, now it thinks I am writing two words not one and it got the first part completely wrong - this was particularly true with things like uk email addresses - Ian@bbits.co.uk for example - it would most often come out as Ian@bbits conk - which I hope was faintly offensive - so delete the text in the textbox, start over, oh sod it, switch to keyboard!) it now floats a little icon near textboxes, or anywhere you can enter text (including things like a Word document, and the IE adress bar) and when you click the icon the panel appears right there, and you can start writing. Secondly the panel is much better designed, it shows the words it has recognised as you type in the panel, and it's easy to edit them by clicking on them if it gets it wrong. And thirdly the recongnition seems to be very much improved (and I am still using the US recogniser rather than the UK one which I haven't downloaded yet).
In fact I have written this entire post using the pen input and it has been a reasonably pleasurable process. The input has not got in the way of my creative thought (if that's what I can call it) and I also had a go at writing a page or two in Word which was even better because of the better integration when editing text. Moreover input of email addresses and URL's seems to work effortlessly now and that's a major benefit to me.
So now I have decided that I would like a slate model to use for presentations, wireless browsing, and note taking, together with a possible dabble in arts things like drawing in Sketchbook Pro or editing in Photoshop. Trouble is which one to get?