Test driving a Tablet PC
PC World | at | by Mike
For all the hype that Bill Gates has been generating around the Tablet PC concept, you could be excused for thinking the idea is a new one for Microsoft. But in fact, it's a second go-round for the company, years after its ill-fated "Windows for Pen Computing" experiment a decade ago. The current software shows that Microsoft has learned from its mistakes.
The operating system is Windows XP Professional Tablet Edition, a superset of the standard XP Pro. Microsoft has added a program called Microsoft Journal, which is intended to be a note-taking replacement for the pad of paper you would typically take to a meeting. Everything you write on the pad is stored as graphics -- called digital ink -- unless you highlight an area and ask the machine to recognize what you wrote. Then it takes its best shot at turning your scribbles into ASCII text. This actually works quite well, even on my often illegible handwriting.