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New Tablet PCs With A Linux Option

Posted by timothy on from the chocolate-meet-peanut-butter dept.

Oliver Wendell Jones writes "InfoWorld is running an article about a new kind of inexpensive (starting under $800) tablet PC that runs your choice of Windows 2000, Windows XP or the Lindows distro of Linux. The PC is called the DocuNote and features an 8.4" touch screen with digital camera and microphone. The PCs are being created by a company called StepUp, which is formed of a lot of people from the old eMachines organization. DocuNotes are scheduled to start shipping in mid-December."

2 of 276 comments (clear)

  1. Company website with pictures... by Thag · · Score: 5, Informative

    Is at http://www.docunote.com/.

    It looks pretty nice, even has a d-pad/mouse, but alas no thumbboard.

    Jon Acheson

    --
    All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
  2. that's not a big problem by g4dget · · Score: 5, Informative
    I don't see why not. There is already handwriting recognition for Linux handhelds (see handhelds.org). Squeak is an open source Smalltalk environment that runs on Linux and is intended to be usable with pen input. The most high-performance handwriting input engines are the ones that define a special alphabet, and those are also easier to implement than unconstrained handwriting. And on-screen tappable keyboards are actually pretty efficient as well. Even if you try to implement mostly unconstrained handwriting recognition, in practice, handwriting recognition is generally simpler than speech recognition, and there are open source speech recognizers (you can even adapt a speech recognizer to handwriting recognition--a lot of the software is very similar). And X11 already has support for different kinds of input methods, so the software architecture is in place as well.

    And many functions of pen computers don't require handwriting recognition at all (ink notes, browsing, e-books, etc.)--just getting rid of that bulky keyboard alone when it's not needed would be worth the pen computer.