l was in a meeting recently with a large group of executives from one of Australia’s biggest companies. Half of the executives had iPad, (tablet envy anyone? ). Early in the meeting as l was feverishly taking notes on my tablet pc (Active digitizer of course). One of the execs turned to us and said,

"Wow, you really use those things don’t you!"

Interestingly none of the 7 iPads did anything during the meeting. Why?

This is not an isolated experience. I observe it all to often. Every plane flight l take lately, l get up and have a scan around to see what the iPads are doing… I’m yet to see one doing work on any of my regular flights. I’ve seen plenty of solitaire though…

In the meantime I used my last 3 hour flight to process 250 emails… Contacts created, appointments calendared, meetings requested, emails sent, spread sheets analysed. Perth to Melbourne seems to go in about 5 mins thanks to my Tablet PC and the power of the Active Digitiser Pen!

What my experience tells me is that even the slickest touch experience cannot come close to accomplishing what the Digital Pen can. Touch input is blunt, slow, frustrating and dumb. The only thing it has is convenience. That’s good, but it’s not enough alone…

Active Digitizer = Heavy Lifting

For a science / education perspective on why active digitizer technology is still the best method of input for real work, check out this article from John K. Waters. – Style, but no stylus.

I should add of course that I own an iPad amongst dozers of touch tablets. I’ve also been working with touch input for nearly 20 years now, and the last 10 with tablets and PDA’s – In other words, I’m no stranger to what’s possible!

If you’re thinking about a tablet for work, then it is important to know the distinction as you’ll see by comparing the following two videos.

In the first video, you’ll see a guy promoting a stylus that is predominantly marketed at the iPad – and no doubt, they’ll soon be marketing it to the new wave of android based tablets too.

Typically, these devices have capacitive touch screens, meaning that the touch screen activates when you make contact with your fingertip. Generally they won’t work with your fingernail or any other pen or stylus.

There are a couple of major issues with the capacitive stylus work around:

1. The capacitive tip is thick and blunt
2. The touch screen response is slow and can result in bad approximations of your ink strokes
3. You have to avoid touching the screen with your hands

In other words, these devices are not designed for note taking, drawing or handwriting recognition.

As you’ll see from the following video of a Motion Computing F5v Tablet PC that has a Wacom Active Digitizer, the pen is responsive and fast, and the output includes small, fine lettering. Excuse my messy handwriting!

Why does it matter?

1. The are several major productivity gains that the Tablet PC form factor can offer:
   1. Note taking
      1. Searchable notes
      2. Unlimited storage
      3. Can be synchronised with audio recording
   2. Handwriting recognition for interacting with programs and websites
      1. Usually twice as fast as typing on a virtual on screen keyboard
      2. Allows easy data collection in the field
   3. Capturing sketches and drawings.

As you can see, Tablet PCs are designed for note taking, handwriting recognition and fine, fast input. Consumer tablets on the other hand excel for gaming and casual web browsing, but fall down when it comes to input.

What we really loved is how zippy and responsive the multi-touch screen is. So we took a video of a number of Windows 7 multi-touch goodies including:

• Microsoft Collage – This really shows how smooth and slick Multi-Touch applications can be under Windows 7
• Microsoft Virtual Earth – Another touch goody from the Microsoft Surface team, included in the Windows 7 Touch Pack – Very fast app as you’ll see
• Multi-Touch typing on the virtual keyboard of the Tablet PC Input Panel
• Handwriting Recognition – The best kept secret of Windows
• Touch web browsing.

The Fujitsu T4310 is an absolute pleasure to use. It has a very fast Intel Core 2 Duo processor, but it also has a great 5+ hour battery life.

Take a look at the video here:

Take a look at the following video from a long time Tablet PC user in Malaysia who compares the resistive touch screen on the Fujitsu UH900 to the capacitive touch screen on the Lenovo S10. During the video he shows:

• Writing with a stylus pen on the resistive touch screen – good experience on the fast and small UH900, although not quite as good as active digitizer
• Writing with finger on the the capacitive touch screen – no leverage, very hard to sustain for longer than a few seconds
• Writing with a pogo stick on a capacitive touch screen – like using a crayon.

Fast forward to about 6:30 to see the pogo stick (crayon) in action.

From this video you will see that a capacitive touch screen is fairly useless for pen-like or fine input – think sketching, drawing, note taking  and handwriting. To resolve that problem, Windows Tablet PC manufacturers include an active digitizer on their capacitive touch screen Tablets.

Installing windows 7 on the Motion F5 was a snap! There were no tricks to it. Just connect an external DVD or USB drive, install Windows and off you go… Grab the standard drivers and software from the Motion website.

Whereas Atom based tablets will struggle to run Windows 7, the new F5 (and C5 of course) is more than capable of running it smoothly. Take a look for yourself:

Windows Vista handwriting recognizers are available for 12 languages, including

• USA English
• UK English – Yes, the English recognisers are actually different and localised
• German
• French
• Spanish
• Italian
• Dutch
• Brazilian Portuguese
• Chinese (Simplified and Traditional)
• Japanese
• Korean

So that’s what is already available now.

We are planning to ship new and improved languages for Windows 7, including:

• Norwegian
• Swedish
• Finnish
• Danish
• Russian
• Polish

That is what’s coming with the release of Windows 7 – very soon…and the list continues to grow!