Sun 25 Sep 2005
(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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3 Responses to “Tablet PC: Love it, hate it - Part 3”
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Life On the Wicked Stage: Act 2 Says:
September 25th, 2005 at 5:32 pmLove My Tablet, Hate My Tablet Series Continues With Episode 3
When last we left the Love My Tablet, Hate My Tablet series over at Stark Raving Calm we’d gotten a dose of Tablet PC love. The third in a series details some Tablet PC gripes. Check it out here.
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utenzi Says:
September 28th, 2005 at 2:06 amWe might have to negotiate on price a bit after a blog post like this one!
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Jonathan Says:
September 28th, 2005 at 10:43 amAm I talking you into or out of buying a tablet?
Like I said in the conclusion, I believe they are the perfect choice for a certain user profile. I just don’t fit the profile. The minute I sell the Motion, I’ll miss a lot of things about it: notetaking, couch/bed/stall surfing, etc. But I can’t afford to keep both a laptop and a tablet.
I also don’t believe that a convertible tablet (basically a laptop with write-on screen, where the keyboard folds away behind the screen) is an answer. It sacrifices most of the portability that the slate form factor offers. Motion sells a snap-on keyboard that I’ve heard is really nice, though.