Tablet PCs: The Future of Notebooks

Bill Gates thinks digital ink will be as common as the graphical interface by the end of the decade. But will consumers bite?

Introduction
Heralding a new three-pound portable from HP, Bill Gates called it "a major advance in portable personal computing." HP called the product "a super portable personal computer with enough battery power to last during a flight across the United States." Yes, the year was 1993 and the product was the then-new HP Omnibook 300, sporting a full-size keyboard, Windows in ROM (along with "instant on" versions of Word, Excel and file transfer software), and boasting up to nine hours of battery life.

Fast Forward
Fast forward to November 2002: Bill Gates is again touting a major advance in portable computing -- this time, based on the company's newest superset of Windows XP Professional, dubbed Windows XP Tablet Edition. In some ways, these new Tablet PCs are light years ahead; in others, such as battery life, weight and bootup time, the new machines have actually regressed.

Form Follows Function
There are already three distinct form factors of this emerging class of machines. One looks like a traditional subnotebook PC, except the screen swivels 180 degrees and lays flat on top of the keyboard, converting the unit for pen-based tablet input. The second, primarily designed for mobile forms entry, note-taking and other vertical applications, is a tablet sans keyboard; typically, the keyboard is added externally, via a docking station, USB or wireless add-on. And the third, which we think holds the most promise for mass-market acceptance, is a "three-in-one" design, in which the notebook-style keyboard can be removed entirely from the unit. The tablet can then be attached to a docking base, allowing the pivoting screen and an external keyboard (and, optionally, an external display with mirrored or "extended desktop" display mode enabled) to stand in for a desktop PC.

Caveats
Subnotebooks are popular in Asia, but it remains to be seen whether consumers in North America will accept a tiny 10.4" screen, after being pitched ever-larger LCD screens and higher resolutions for the last few years. Fujitsu, which probably has the most years of Tablet PC experience under its belt (the company has been making tablet computers since 1990) claims size and weight are the critical issues defining the usability of a tablet. Fujitsu says, ideally, a tablet should fit between the crook of the elbow and the hand, allowing the unit to be comfortably held in one arm. By this measurement, 10.4" (e.g., about the size of a pad of paper) is the optimal size, and three pounds is considered the maximum acceptable weight for extended mobile use. We'll go on record as hoping 12.1" screens become the dominant form factor in this emerging class of "convertible" PCs, once construction of such a screen form factor can be achieved at a reasonable weight.

Limited battery life is another potential sticking point for a class of machines targeting mobile professionals. To address this issue, HP has built what it calls a "bridge battery" into its TC1000 family of tablets. You can suspend the machine, swap batteries and start up again in about 15 seconds flat.

Handwriting Recognition
Microsoft has invested a lot in the technology. Said to be a pet project of Bill Gates', the tablet PC team ballooned to as many as 200 people during development over the last four years. The company reportedly hired people from Redmond and other cities around the world to come in and write for an hour and a half each day, up to 2 days a week, to refine the handwriting recognition software. Their hours of training seem to have paid off: the handwriting recognition engine in Tablet PCs requires no training, and is at least as good as anything else ever to reach the market. Which is not to say that its perfect. It is fundamentally a "word recognition" system. This makes it well-suited to recognizing common words and names, but when entering URLs or other oddball data, watch out. Gates is clearly sensitive about this potential annoyance. After all, nobody wants a device that doesn't work properly. At the product launch, he even mentioned the infamous Doonesbury cartoon lampooning the flawed handwriting recognition of Apple's pioneering Newton.

Gates singled out the Newton as having set back the acceptance of pen computing 10 years. However, he's optimistic that the problems have finally been licked. Certainly, the company has learned a lot since the 1992 introduction of the first version of Windows for Pen Computing," which served primarily as a beachhead and, if you will, a category killer, effectively putting smaller competitors such as GO out of business.

Of course, the big question is: will customers find enough advantages in a Tablet PC (which typically costs about US$250 more than a standard notebook) to justify the expense? Do corridor warriors really want to use handwriting to enter data into a computer? After all, you can buy a lot of pads of paper (or Palm PDAs, for that matter) for the price of one of these units, and it's not difficult -- or expensive -- to simply scan handwritten notes or diagrams and send them to others.

Some people say they they've noticed what seems to be an effort by Microsoft and its partners to push PC prices back up. Are the days of the $2500 computer gone forever? Will customers balk at the high price of Tablet PCs?

The makers of a new product called the DocuNote must be hoping so. StepUp Computing, a company started by the cofounder of budget PC maker eMachines and several former executives from the company, is betting that would-be Tablet PC buyers will be willing to settle for a smaller touch-sensitive screen (note: that's an analog resistive 4 wire touch screen, not EMF) and a subset of the features of a full-blown Windows XP Tablet PC, in exchange for a lower price and lighter weight. The Docunote comes with an 8.4-inch SVGA TFT colour screen, 667 MHz Transmeta Crusoe TMS5600, 256MB SDRAM, a 20GB hard drive, stereo speakers, microphone, external stereo jack, VGA, IRDA, USB, Ethernet and PCMCIA ports and even a built-in 250-Kpixel colour camera, yet weighs only 2.2 lbs. It will sell, says the company, at prices starting under US$1000 (around $800 sans operating system).

Interestingly, the Lindows website shows a DocuNote running LindowsOS and claims "the LindowsOS tablet will be an affordable device priced close to $500. " That certainly sounds like a price point that might pique the interest of some potential buyers. The company version of the tablet running LindowsOS will be available "near the first part of the year." An optional leather case, weighing an additional 1.1 lbs., includes a built-in 77-key USB keyboard. Hopefully, the DocuNote won't suffer from the kind of quality control problems that ultimately doomed eMachines. InfoWorld has details....

The "Cool Factor"
Microsoft thinks the "cool factor" will play a key role in helping it to achieve its goal of selling 100,000 Tablet PCs in the first year, and they're probably right. Rotating the screen on a Tablet PC/convertible notebook is likely to impress a potential client, and writing on a tablet (or, for that matter, a legal pad) is undeniably less intrusive at a meeting than tapping away on a keyboard. Our guess is that most people will end up using a keyboard most of the time to enter textual information, and use the stylus for what it's really good for: marking up documents, highlighting sections of interest, and sketching illustrative diagrams. In other words, it's not all about handwriting recognition.

Office Integration
One of the key innovations of today's Tablet PCs is the smooth integration of pen functionality into the operating system and key Office applications. Microsoft clearly sees software as the key ingredient upon which its efforts will succeed or fail. Whereas Apple seems to have stuck its "Inkwell" handwriting technology into Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar for no particular purpose, for Microsoft, it's all about the applications. (Well, that and selling more XP licenses.)

The centerpiece of the effort is a new piece of Microsoft software called Journal. It allows handwritten notes to be turned into editable text, annotated, highlighted, search, emailed and sorted with the help of user-definable flags. With it, a tablet user can import a Word document for annotation or markup, then forward it onto others. Remarkably, text can be entered -- and recognized -- at almost any angle, and handwritten notes or diagrams can be moved around on the page at will. Right- or left-handed input is supported. There's also a "write anywhere" feature that allows pen-based input into any Windows application.

Microsoft has also developed a set of Pen extensions for Office XP that add markup features and other gestural support to Word, PowerPoint and other Office apps. With the extensions, which the company says will be a standard component in the forthcoming Office 11, you can write and send ink e-mail messages in Microsoft Outlook version 2002, insert handwritten notes into Microsoft Excel version 2002 worksheets, or write and draw in Microsoft Word version 2002 documents as you would with pen and paper. Several third parties, including Ontario-based Corel and Alias|Wavefront, have released pen-based apps providing further capabilities. There are even some pen-based games available at Microsoft's Tablet PC web site.

Also in Windows XP Tablet Edition, which the company says is a superset of Windows XP Professional, is a program called Stickies, which allows handwritten notes, or notes with voice annotations to be recorded.

Voice Recognition
In fact, voice recognition is another key feature of Windows XP Tablet PC Edition. Microsoft seems to be downplaying this aspect of the OS, perhaps fearing that high expectations might lead to disappointment. But it's in there: you can use an external microphone (or, the built-in mic present on some Tablet PC models, such as the Acer C100) to issue commands to perform various tasks or even use a built-in dictation feature, presumably based on Microsoft's investments in ill-fated Lernout and Hauspie.

There have been quite a few Tablet PCs announced -- we count at least 18 different manufacturers already onboard the bandwagon, each with at least one Tablet PC product family. PC Buyer's Guide had a chance for some hands-on time with several models, including tablets from Fujitsu, Acer and Viewsonic. Earlier this week, we spoke at length with Daniel Reio, HP Canada's Product Manager for corporate notebooks and Tablet PCs, about the HP/Compaq TC1000. This innovative model is a "three-in-one" convertible, capable of looking and acting like a fairly standard notebook, or by detaching the keyboard, operating, with the help of an EMF (electromagnetic field) stylus and a tempered glass screen, as a true 3-pound tablet PC.

And, with the addition of an optional (and, to our thinking, rather overpriced) docking base and external keyboard, the unit even transforms into a reasonable semblance of a desktop PC, capable of swiveling its 1024x768-pixel screen from landscape to portrait mode at will. With NVIDIA GeForce2Go graphics, "extended desktop" dual display support, speedy USB 2.0 support and a wide choice of optical drive options, including any of the company's current corporate Multibay CD-RW, DVD-ROM, Combo drives, or even the HP DVD200e DVD writer, the HP/Compaq TC1000 is a techno-luster's pinup model.

EMF Stylus -- or not
The pressure-sensitive stylus on most of the models we tested has a programmable barrel switch able to function as a right mouse button, or perform a variety of other tasks. As with Wacom tablets and their styli, the pen includes an "eraser" on the other end, allowing easy corrections. doesn't even need to touch the screen to move the mouse pointer around. Tapping acts like a mouse click, and the EMF pens don't need batteries -- nor do they cause spurious response from the digitizer tablet surface, as older "pressure sensitive" designs did. The Tablet PC pen is compatible with all applications supporting Wacom pens and tablets, such as Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, CorelDraw. Conversely, new applications designed for the Tablet PC, such as Alias|Wavefront's free version of SketchPad Pro, work with existing PCs and Wacom tablets.

However, not all Tablet PCs use a Wacom-style stylus. HP's TC1000 foregoes pressure sensitivity and the polysilicon tablet surface common to other Tablets in favour of a tempered glass writing surface and a digitizer pen from Finepoint. Thus, the TC1000 is the only Tablet PC we've seen that does not provide pressure-sensitive stylus support. This introduces some feature limitations when third-party software, such as SketchPadPro, is used. The Finepoint pen has its own AAAA battery, which, the company says, lasts about six months. This is the same pen technology used in Compaq's previous pen-based Concerto notebook. Daniel Reio, Compaq Corporate Notebook and Tablet PC product manager at HP, says the advantage of this type of stylus is the fact that it does not draw power from the main notebook battery, thereby prolonging battery life. He claims the company's target audience for the product doesn't see pressure sensitivity as an important feature.

Conclusion
After examining a variety of Tablet PCs, we found a few attributes that all our favorite designs included: a detachable keyboard, a swiveling screen and high-speed USB 2.0 or FireWire connectivity options. Thanks to a solid implementation of several key features on our list, we expect that we'll name the HP TC1000 as our editor's choice when we get a chance to evaluate a production model. The designers at Compaq did many things right: it's one of the few tablets to support the important new USB 2.0 standard, it uses a highly energy-efficient processor, and its NVIDIA graphics chip provides a far better (albeit more wattage-hungry) 3D engine than units based on Intel or (ugh) Lynx3D graphics chips. Having a screen protected by tempered glass is a feature we'd like to see on all LCDs, and the fact that the bezel around the screen is flush with the digitizer surface makes the unit much better suited to pen input than, say, the more traditional notebook screen of the Acer C100. Although the HP TC1000 lacks the FireWire connectivity built into some competing products, this feature can easily be added via its onboard PC Card slot. The lack of pressure-sensitivity, however, could represent a more serious shortcoming for some users. Potential buyers should be sure they don't want this feature. (The issue could theoretically be addressed by connecting an external Wacom drawing tablet to the unit's USB port, but that kind of defeats the purpose of having a Tablet PC in the first place, doesn't it?) See pcmag.com for additional comments about the TC1000 and the Portégé 3500.

One thing about Toshiba's Tablet we've noticed: it is appallingly easy to scratch. On the demo model we examined, the silver-colored area where the buttons are at the bottom of the display area had lost much of its silvery surface, revealing an ugly black plastic underneath, and one of the very cheap-looking silver-colored plastic tabs -- that didn't match the surface, anyway! -- glued over the screws near the buttons had fallen off too. Yecch.

We also expect to hear, in a year or two, that some tablet PC notebooks will develop display problems, based on the extra stress placed upon the wiring and connectors caused by swiveling the screen back and forth. (Acer says its tests guarantee the C100's screen should rotate comfortably over 15,000 times.) On many current notebook models, premature display faults are already a problem -- you might want to consider getting an extended warranty, should a Tablet PC be right for you.

Here's a summary of some of the models we evaluated:

* Transmeta's Crusoe processor uses some system RAM (HP says 24K) to translate instructions into x86 format. This "code morphing" translation causes the processor to run slower than its megahertz rating might suggest. See Transmeta's Marketing of Megahertz for details.

For Further Reading:

• Tech TV: First Look: Windows XP Tablet PC Edition  (Nov. 7, 2002)
• Slashdot: Some notes from the Launch (Nov. 7, 2002)
• Tablet PC Talk: Hardware comparison
• Microsoft's Windows XP Tablet PC Edition Specifications for more operating system details.
• See www.microsoft.ca/tabletpc for further information.