(Continued from Part 2)

Last time it was all about the love. Today, as promised, here are my top few tablet gripes.

  • No one has yet come up with a decent user interface for the pen. There are some decent third-party apps, but Windows itself is still very pen unfriendly. Column-based menus are a pain to navigate. Entering ad hoc text into, say, an IM, is aggravating. You can peck at the onscreen keyboard, use Graffiti-style single character recognition, or write your text out longhand and hope the tablet understands what you wrote. There is no way to teach it your personal handwriting. I hear this may be improved in Windows Vista.

  • The Motion is SLOW. It’s barely adequate for development at a blazing 933 MHz. I finally got a desktop machine at work, so that’s not as much of an issue anymore. Newer, graphics-intensive apps like Google Earth tend to crash a lot. Yes, I know there are newer tablets that perform much better.

  • I don’t go to many meetings. That sort of negates its usefulness in that arena.

  • Orienting the screen in portrait mode is the most natural for me, but most Web pages and applications are optimized for 800×600, not 768×1024 — leaving the tablet user with some horizontal scrolling to do.

  • The display driver doesn’t play well with some apps. Like I mentioned, Google Earth tends to crash, among other things.

  • I can take notes in my handwriting, organize them just like I would a paper notebook, and search them later — but the format is proprietary. If I decided to leave the Tablet PC platform, I’d have to change my entire organizational paradigm. If I leave Windows, all the notes I ever took with the tablet are history, unless I print them all out. This is great for Microsoft, but not so good for me. So I never really committed to Journal or OneNote fully. I don’t want to get locked in — something I’m facing with PersonalBrain right now.

I’ll leave my biggest personal gripe (which may or may not be an issue for others) for the next post.

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