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Bricklin on Tablet PCs

Posted by michael on from the passing-fad dept.

t482 writes "Dan Bricklin gives his first impressions of the Tablet PC. 'The most important thing to know about the Tablet PC, as far as I'm concerned so far, is that Microsoft did a great job...of naming it.' and then goes on to give a fascinating history of pen computing."

25 of 255 comments (clear)

  1. Question... by Rew190 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Where exactly is the market demand for these?

    1. Re:Question... by Anonvmous+Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      "Where exactly is the market demand for these?"

      Me^3.

      - I'm an artist. I use a tablet to draw with right now. The ability to draw right on the screen would totally rock. Right now Wacom sells LCD tablets that plug into your VGA port, but they're in the $3,500 range.

      - I attend lots of meetings and drag a laptop around with me. I'd prefer a TabletPC so I can jot sketches along with notes. Right now I use paper and a scanner to do this, I'd like to skip the paper step.

      - I wouldn't mind having a Tablet PC around the house. The tablet form factor is much easier to tote around than the 'laptop-that-doesn't-really-sit-well-on-your-lap' approach.

      I don't know if I represent a 'whole big market' or not, but I can tell you that office-life would be easier with them. I'm certain these will start appearing in my office within the next 12 months.

    2. Re:Question... by puto · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Hospitals, medical offices.

      Any records that docs might need instead of putting the chart on the door, each doc gets his own and you can send it his patient list, their chart, all the details, ASAP. No need for records to send up the chart. No need for stationary PC.

      A Doc could have all his info point and click.

      Puto

      --
      The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
    3. Re:Question... by kh0ng · · Score: 5, Insightful
      There was a roadshow of the tablet on our university some days ago. They said the Tablet-PC would open "new markets", since people who usually avoid using computers because of the mouse (Have you ever tried to teach it to you mother? :-) now have a more "natural" way of interfacing with it - the pen. It's also more practical for carrying around than a laptop, since you can use hold it e.g. in your left arm and use the right hand to interface with it.

      They said one of the design goals was that it should be able to do everything that a normal pen-and-pad method can do. That includes the use-with-one-hand from above, but also hot-plugging (so you can always take it out of the docking station and run away...). Some of them can be used as a laptop as well, simply by turning the display around.

      They were pretty nice, and remindet me of the Pads they use in startreck. There are, however, still some useability-problems. The resolution of the EM-Sampler that checks for the pen is not very good at the edges, resulting in a "shaking" mouse cursor when holding the pen still. Another one is the right mouse button - the ones I held in my hands thought you want to press the right button if you didn't move the pen for some time. This resulted in context-menus that popped up when writing slow. Anotherone is the problem of your hand that overlapps some part of the screen when using the pen. Its annoying if menues keep opening right under your hand, so you have to move it away again to see whats on the screen.

      The text recognition was nice, but they mentioned a error-rate of 10-15%, so it's not really very useful, especially when writing fast. My opinion is that it's nice, but still needs some time to get "mature" and really useable.

    4. Re:Question... by EvanED · · Score: 5, Insightful

      >>What student would buy this instead of a PowerBook G4?

      Maybe because it's a tablet PC. I'm not sure about you, but I couldn't type notes. I need to write them. Which means that the G4's out.

      >>the tablet PC is $2,000 more than anybody would ever pay for it.

      Of course, I could have said the same thing about ENIAC: it was $450,000 more than anyone would pay. And I'd be wrong. Because there were people (the gov't) who built it. There are people who will buy the tablet PC because there's nothing else like it on the market, at least that I'm aware of. And the people who can afford it will spur development of more models that won't be expensive.

    5. Re:Question... by brunes69 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Why the hell couldn't you type notes? Even a very crappy touch typist (like 50-60 WPM) can type much faster than you can write or print. Typing for an hour is also alot easier on your hand than writing with a pen for an hour.

    6. Re:Question... by DuSTman31 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The thing about prices is that they change.

      The primary market for these things seems to be for people who need to be able to record scribbles in a lecture or meeting. This is probably not a concept that needs huge amounts of computing power. People's buying decision will probably me made not on computing power, but mainly on price.

      The main consequence of this is that the prices of the most popular models will go down with competition, not up with increased specs.

      I agree it's not the sort of thing one would choose as a main machine, but as a second device for specific tasks, and that £2000 may be a bit much for a machine for this role, but the price they'll be in two years time probably won't be.

    7. Re:Question... by Dark+Lord+Seth · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Actually, that wouldn't be such a great idea, considering the fact the tablet PCs would need to remain updated. How would you ask? I'm pretty sure the majority of people on here would reply to my question with "wireless netwworking". However, do remember these are hospitals we are talking about and you're not even allowed to carry regular mobile phones around due to interference with possibly sensitive equipment. (at least not here in The Netherlands) Do you think they'd allow the building to be saturated with possible harmful wireless transmission?

      --
      Hate me!
    8. Re:Question... by brianerst · · Score: 2, Insightful
      Hey, a /. subject I can actually intelligently contribute to... what a novelty. >=-)

      For 9 years (from 91-2000), I was the lead developer of the Chicago Board of Trade's Order Routing System, which allows clerks in the phone booths ringing the trading floor to send orders into the pit (and for pit clerks to send fill information back out) via pen-based interfaces. COMET (the booth device) and Electronic Clerk (the pit device) both have used various incarnations of the Microsoft Windows For Pen Computing platform.

      This is definitely an environment that needs pen-based input. The booths and pits are UNBELIEVABLE space constrained, and adding PCs with keyboards was just not an option. At the beginning of the project, there wasn't any handheld hardware to speak of (although the CBOT had partnered up with Sharp(?) for some custom handheld tech for another project), and the first wave of tablets were just coming out. Given the severe amount of jostling going on in these trading pits, handhelds had some big downsides as well. We ended up mounting devices to the railings of the pits (or flush mounted them into the desktops for the booth clerks). We evaluated both PenWindows and Go (I liked Go, but we knew they were going to fail in the marketplace) and used a whole bunch of different devices. Dauphin (sweet tech, lousy company), GRiDs, NEC VersaPads, Amitys and others in the beginning, eventually migrating to Fujitsu Stylistics (best of a bad bunch). We got to learn all sorts of things about digitizers (like the active digitizers with battery-powered pens would interfere with each other if mounted too closely, while tethered pens put out enough juice that if you held one in your left hand, you could use your right index finger as an input device).

      Like many (most?) Microsoft products, the initial version of PenWindows was rushed out to kill a competitor, and then they sat on the tech for years before killing it. The last "release" of PenWindows was on Win95 (we eventually ended up just copying the Pen DLLs to Win98 when Win95 hardware stopped being produced). The functionality of PenWindows was crap - I ended up writing a number of custom controls that wrapped the basic BEDIT controls so we could have good-looking displays.

      When they finally pulled the plug on Pen development altogether, CBOT started migrating to CIC's PenX controls for Win2000. (I left around this time - but they've dragged me back for some part-time consulting to help with the latest release). They've spent 1 1/2 years migrating to Win2000 + PenX, only to see Microsoft obsolete them just weeks before the big new release.

      All that said, given an appropriately pen-centric application (minimizing data entry and screen movement are really important in pen-app design), a well-written pen app is amazingly productive. A booth clerk who has used the COMET app for a while can easily enter orders in under 2 seconds, while a pit clerk can manage thousands of orders from dozens of sources very easily. I was always amazed at how fast these guys worked - I was probably the only developer who could approach their speed, and they'd clean my clock anyday. Nothing like having responsibility for orders worth tens of millions of dollars to help focus the mind...

  2. The biggest problem... by dconder · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The problem with tablet PCs right now is the battery life. The whole advantage of a tablet PC is it lets you use it on the go, but if you have to plug in every two hours to recharge the batteries, that defeats the purpose.

    I think there are some applications for tablet PCs now, hospitals, etc., but in order for them to reach mainstream-acceptance, they need to tackle the power/battery issue.
  3. I'd entertained by Freston+Youseff · · Score: 3, Insightful

    the idea of buying a tablet PC during the now-dead Internet Appliance boom. I finally realised the offerings at the time weren't worth the money. A company, Qubit Incorporated (dead link, given for posterity) based out of Denver, Colorado had some very attractive offerings and made a very large splash at Comdex 2000. It would appear Qubit is now defunct. There seems to be very little actual demand for Tablet PCs, and demant will probably remain very low until they become *very* cheap.

    --

  4. Re:Wow! by mao+che+minh · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Only Bill Gates, of course. No one can match his uncanny vision and technological sense. He is a mastermind, and respect all of his decisions - especially when it comes to marketing.

  5. Dirty Fingers... by monadicIO · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I've never used these devices, but won't the screen turn really oily/dirty since your hand/palm rests on it while writing stuff? Also, the normal lcd display has distortion when you press it hard. Isn't this a problem with the tablet PCs?

    --

    The law of excluded middle : Either I'm foo or I'm foobar

  6. Thin Clients by Rudy+Rodarte · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I really think the tablet PCs would have to be thin clients to conserve battery life. I also don't think that a M$ OS is the way to go. The bloat in OS would just use up so much memory and processor cycles, that the battery life would suffer. A thin client, with just a web browser(intranet, limited internet) and maybe a few small apps, such as a calculator, or life support monitor, etc etc. This is assuming that a sales person or a medical professional is using the device.

    Anything goes if someone is watching DVDs and running SETI@Home in the background while downloading the latest Harry Potter. I wouldnt expect the battery to last that long at all. Then again, the same goes for normal protables.

    Another factor to consider is heat. If the WinXP OS is running all sorts of junk in the background, the system will heat up considerably. Much like thier desktop brothers, the new pentiums and athlons /**You forgot my processor, you insensetive clod!*/, the new processors get HOT. Would you really hold a system like this, if it was reaching 150 degrees F? I wouldn't

    But then again, this is nothing new. I think I've seen people with devices like this before. Usually, its all proprietary programs. They seem to work well, since its just a thin client with connections to a server somewhere.

    --
    What, me Tweet?
  7. Just another attempt ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Tablet PC are just another miserable attempt to squize money from a stagnating market. It's the classical geek toy that after a week will land inside a drawer with 1" of dust over it.

  8. I think this guy missed the point. by Guspaz · · Score: 3, Insightful

    He goes on about how there has been no innovation, and even if this is true, there has certainly been progress. He's comparing Tablet PCs to desktop attachments and PDA-style devices. This is the first time we're seeing this quality of hardware at this kind of price with a world-standard OS. Many of these Tablet PCs can even convert back and forth between laptops. Comparing them to an 8088 unit from decades passed or an LCD graphics tablet is a poor comparison.

  9. Re:It's called paper. by EvanED · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If I have five notebooks full of notes, can I pull up an application that will search through them in a minute or two to find a particular fact that you want?

  10. Opportunity to Crack the Desktop by Crispin+Cowan · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Tablet PCs strike me as an opportunity for Linux to crack the desktop market. From what I've read of initial impressions of Tablet PCs, the thing that sucks the most is the crappy Microsoft inking software, that is neither easy to learn to write for (sucks worse than Graffiti) nor will it learn your writing style (sucks worse than Newton).

    So, if an open source project were to arise that did a better job of writing recognition, it could be a "killer app" that gets more of the mainstream PC users interested in Linux desktops.

    Caveat: no, I'm not going to do it. My research area is security, not HCI.

    Crispin
    ----
    Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
    Chief Scientist, WireX Communications, Inc.
    Immunix: Security Hardened Linux Distribution
    Available for purchase

  11. Why the tablet? by Reality+Master+101 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I'm seeing a lot of questions like "Why would anyone want a tablet when you can just buy a laptop"?

    The answer is simple: Because laptops SUCK for working in your lap.

    Laptops are the most misnamed device ever. They are portable PCs. Useful, but difficult to use in any position other than in front of you -- like a PC.

    --
    Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
  12. MS Bashing Continues by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Can we please bring the MS bashing to a reasonable level? Someone took a quote from the first paragraph of the review and slapped it into a story. If anyone bothered to read the article, they would see that he didn't have *anything* bad to say about the Microsoft part of the product. Of course, he had some suggestions about how to improve the hardware aspect of the product, but I was unable to find one instance where he critized Microsoft.

    Let's be reasonable here. If Microsoft does something stupid or evil, let's post it. But if Microsoft puts out a new product, and the hardware manufacturer does a less-than-spectacular job of implementing it, don't blame Microsoft...

  13. Re:Take off the 'I hate Microsoft' goggles... QWZX by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Or maybe you just need to go outside, take a DEEP breath of fresh air, and unplug for a while.

    Sorry, but Microsoft ain't that bad. Sure, I don't like some of the things they've done, but they just don't matter that much. Or to put it another way, software don't matter that much in the great scheme of things, and Microsoft matter way less than that.

  14. if patents hold up, pen computing is in trouble by g4dget · · Score: 4, Insightful
    If the patents listed in Dan Bricklin's column hold up, then the pen computing area is in trouble. In particular, with Microsoft's purchase of Aha!, they own some pretty fundamental patents.

    Furthermore, with the release of TabletPC, Microsoft has shown again that they simply can't innovate. Microsoft's TabletPC software is the same old stuff we had 10 years ago, only in a more bloated software incarnation. The only thing that has really gotten better is the hardware and processor speed, as well as the quality of real-time graphics those machines support.

    Few if any of those patents should hold up if challenged in court, since most of the techniques had been used for quite some time by researchers before that. This is the usual case of a bunch of upstart startups not knowing what has been happening in academia and patenting like mad (Bricklin is aware of this). But that won't stop those patents from causing great harm: the threat of a lawsuit from Microsoft or Compaq/HP is sufficient to scare away investors from startups and to cause bigger players like Palm, Sony, or Apple to avoid certain features or functionality entirely.

    While Compaq/HP holds some important patents, they are in bed with Microsoft. That means that Compaq/HP will willingly license their patents to Microsoft. Microsoft will use their patents to force other companies to adopt their TabletPC even if those other companies would have wanted to develop their own pen software. And for companies like Apple, who will likely develop their own software, Microsoft will use the threat of lawsuits to limit functionality and stifle their creativity: "you can only use our patents if you make this part of your software 'compatible' with ours".

  15. Slick by m1a1 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I can't lie. I think the tablet PC's look pretty slick, but they are also kind of tricky. I really don't need a laptop. It is too big for me to whip out in my Circuit Theory class and IM my girlfriend to come to pick me up after class. However, a palm pilot is just right. I can pull it out, do something simple, and put it away.

    Some of my friends don't like the palm though, they want a laptop. These are a good bit more expensive than a normal laptop, and don't seem to be that much more functional. So my friends who want or already use laptops, still think their laptops are a better deal. I just can't see anyone buying these while they are much more expensive than a laptop.

    People who need a handheld will buy a handheld, and people who need a laptop will buy a laptop. This doesn't fully meet the needs of a palm-user, and it charges the laptop user more for functionality that is arguably useless.

  16. Go's PenPoint was one of the great OS innovations by K8Fan · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Bricklin is concentrating on application development for PenPoint, and winds up giving short shrift to the OS it's self. It really was an innovative operating system, possibly the most unique one in the last 20 years. (OK, I realize that is a bold claim, and will produce a lot of argument, but bear with me...)

    PenPoint was the first commercial OS where the user didn't interface with "applications" and "files". The primary interface element was the page. The user started with a blank page, and if she started writing, it would start translating the handwriting into test, like a word processing application. But if she drew a box, it would start graphing. The user could move through pages with a "flicking" gesture; use proof-reading typographical marks to edit. Very clever.

    Microsoft borrowed some of the embedding for OLE, but they didn't actually get it. Or maybe they got it too clearly. They saw that an OS that didn't follow the application-launcher paradigm meant smaller sales for their Applications division.

    Anyway, I didn't own one of these, so I may have gotten some details wrong. I just remember being impressed by the ideas behind it and was pained to see Microsoft's sorry-ass "Pen Windows" appear, kill PenPoint, then disappear like a serial killer.

    --
    "How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
  17. Re:Huh?? Wacom by tftp · · Score: 2, Insightful
    There is a comment from another Wacom user below. He notes that the cost of the draw-on monitor is about $3500. Also, I doubt that the device is portable and low power.

    I used tablets (digitizers) myself years ago, and they can be made reliable, or cheap, or lightweight. But when you try to combine all that, and glue it on top of a LCD panel (which is not that hi-res after all) then the cost becomes intolerable.

    As I said, a notebook and a pen are still the best tools for the job. I remember the notes that I took on electrodynamics, quantum devices and other math-rich subjects... there is no way to convert them to text, ever. It would take tens of minutes to typeset just one formula! In such case tablet has no benefits whatsoever.

    In general, students won't benefit from the tablet PC. It can be used, as already many people mentioned, in relatively expensive vertical markets, such as factory floor automation, hospitals, warehouses - where tasks are rigidly defined, and operators access the same forms and the same data day after day. It will be useful (because it is - these areas are already served by existing wireless terminals).