Tablet PC finding its stroke
eWeek | at | by Mike
The PC industry's woes may be cured by taking two tablets and calling your local laptop vendor in the morning. Beware, however. The side effects of these tablets may still give some users bad headaches. Tablet PCs, subnotebooks running Microsoft Corp.'s Windows XP Tablet Edition, are best defined by their pen interfaces. Users' experiences with the pen are what will determine the Tablet PC's success. In eWEEK Labs' tests, we found the experience to be satisfactory, although many improvements are necessary before Tablet PCs become a full-fledged success across the board. The pen input device is impressive: The Acer features a tablet developed by Wacom Technology Co. that is pressure-sensitive (and thus writes darker when users press harder) and it produces fluid anti-aliased text.
After entering text in block form or cursive, most users will want to test the device to see how well it can read handwriting. For most people, it's a good experience-but for some, it's abysmal, recognizing only 70 percent or so of the characters entered. Optimally, with good handwriting, the recognizer should correctly transform 95 percent of all text-less than OCR, but still excellent considering the wide variations in handwriting.