Are You Ready for Windows XP Tablet PC Edition? First Impressions of Microsoft’s Radical New Productivity Platform Eric Grevstad
Mon 11/11/02 -- For years, desktop users lucky enough to own deluxe LCD monitors with pivoting stands and matching utility software have enjoyed switching from a traditional landscape (horizontal) to portrait (vertical) view to read a whole Web or word processing page without scrolling. Soon, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates declared as he strolled onstage at last Thursday's Manhattan launch event, all portable PC users will do the same -- thanks to Windows XP Tablet PC Edition and the versatile new computers that run it.
Tablet PC Edition isn't a major new operating-system release the way Win XP itself was; it's a superset of Windows XP Professional with support for the new generation of pen-input portables from HP/Compaq, Toshiba, Fujitsu, Acer, ViewSonic, Motion Computing, and other hardware vendors.
These machines -- divided between clipboard-style "slates" that plug into external keyboards and "convertibles" that resemble today's laptops with screens that turn around and fold down to conceal the keyboard beneath a high-tech writing pad -- use special digitizing pens, more sensitive and more immune to hand-brushing-against-the-screen accidents than the touch screens of PDAs and earlier pen PCs. Thanks to 802.11b wireless networking, they boast access to office e-mail and Web info even when yanked from desktop or dock and carried to a meeting or used for magazine or e-book reading in bed. They also boast price tags $200 or $300 above pen-free notebooks.
Tablet PCs run all the same programs other Windows XP computers do, in addition to a grab bag of -- perhaps 20 at first, with more to come -- applications specially designed for pen control and digital ink (handwritten or -drawn data). Everyone from Gates down downplays the importance of handwriting recognition or converting handwritten to typed text, though Tablet PC Edition does it far better than the joke-fodder Apple Newton did or all but the latest Pocket PC handhelds do, and its potential for symbol recognition -- e.g., letting Japanese users dash off the myriad characters of the Kanji alphabet -- is impressive.
Microsoft's own marquee application is Windows Journal ("Notepad" was already taken), a scribble-and-doodle program that turns the Tablet PC screen into a lined pad where you can write, draw, and erase on an infinite number of pages. Cutting and pasting paragraphs, maps, or whatever to create new documents is fun, but searching for entries is even more so -- you can find all your handwritten references to the company budget or Harry Potter, even the ones scrawled sideways in the margins.
Microsoft also offers a small selection of Tablet PC Edition downloads and PowerToys, including a nifty "snipping" tool that turns the pen into a Clipboard lasso to circle or frame any area on any screen, then paste it into another program or (after scribbling a comment or two) send it as an e-mail.
The unexpectedly bad news about Tablet PCs is the first products' minimal integration with Microsoft Office, via a free download pack for Office XP only. You can import a Word document into Journal and mark it up like mad, but it's then trapped in Journal instead of Word (digital ink in Word itself is restricted to boxes in the margins, though PowerPoint does somewhat better). Microsoft makes a big deal about the personal touch of handwritten instead of typed e-mail messages (which can be received by any HTML e-mail client, not just by fellow Tablet PC users), but the reality involves a clumsy combination of Outlook and Word's WordMail feature. Office 11, the next version of the dominant suite, promises much more extensive digital ink functionality, but it won't arrive till summer 2003.
Even more worrisome is that, while touting ink as a new data type destined to become as common as HTML, Microsoft apparently plans to keep it as proprietary as its customer-shackling, changed-at-whim Word DOC and Excel XLS file formats: Journal can export TIFF and PNG bitmap images of pages, but uses a proprietary JNT file format for inking and annotating (the company plans to offer a read-only JNT viewer for download).
