brainscat.com

I’ve had my Tablet PC for about three days now, and have been using it heavily to get a good handle on it and I thought it would be a good idea to pass along my impressions. Later in the week, I’ll write about specific software packages.

On Form Factor

First off, I’m happy to report that the form factor for taking notes is just as inobtrusive as I hoped it would be. In the past few days, I’ve taken notes in classes and jotted thoughts, and each time the tablet has felt plenty comfortable.

I can’t say the same though, for extended periods of reading. The tablet is inferior to most books, because it’s heavier. It also loses out to reading off a laptop because you can always rest the laptop on your legs and adjust the angle of your screen accordingly. With the tablet, you have to hold it with your hands and it gets heavy, or tilt your neck down, which leads to cramping.

Web Browsing

The tablet feels most natural in portrait mode, but I’m finding that a lot of websites don’t like the fact my browser width is less than 800 pixels wide. The inaccessibility of some sites, combined with the fact that writing recognition doesn’t handle urls well can make browsing take longer than normal. Let’s just say, “bookmarks are your friend.”

Handwriting Recognition

It’s great when writing English words, otherwise, it sucks and you have to use the character by character handwriting editor. Like urls, shorthand for note-taking is quickly mangled if you try to convert it to text. I suspect this is because writing recognition works much in the same way that predictive text for phones does, selecting known words from a dictionary based upon the combination of “probable” letters. Notes are best left in ink, in my opinion. It’s better to have partially working send over ink you can read than to have converted text that makes no sense at all.