(Continued from Part 3)

OK, I’ve given a few reasons why I love and hate my Tablet PC. Here’s the reason I’ve come down on the hate side, and why I’m selling mine:

The Tablet PC is terrible for writing.

Ironic, no? Unless you’re the type of writer that writes every word out longhand first, this machine is not going to be much help. Sometimes I do lean that way. I wrote the first 4 or 5 SRC posts by hand on the Motion and then converted them to text. However. By the time you run the recognition engine on your chicken scratch, fix all the wrong words, and delete all the random line breaks, you may as well have retyped the whole thing — and retyping has its own benefits. A post often begins life in my Moleskine notebook. I do most of the editing with fresh eyes as I’m transcribing into the computer. You don’t get the same effect when you’re correcting the tablet recognizer’s typos.

When I bought the Motion, I was looking for an ultraportable machine, something that could replace my generic Windows laptop. I wanted a machine I could program on, and something that might change the way I looked at portable computing. For two years, the Tablet PC did just that. Despite its immaturity as a platform, the tablet is perfect for many users: managers, students, medical professionals, artists. Anyone who moves around a lot, and needs to jot things down literally on the go, would be very happy with a Tablet PC. That’s not what I’m looking for anymore. I want to write, and I want a machine that gets out of the way and lets me write. I’ll need something portable that also happens to be a good platform for development using open-source tools — just in case I find myself doing odd software jobs while making the career jump.

Which leads me back at long last to the Powerbook. I’m hoping for one more update to the line before they switch over to Intel processors next year. That’s the rumor, anyway.

So, anyone want to buy a Tablet PC, with docking station and sleeve, for $700ish?

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