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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."

12 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.

  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. 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.

  4. 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?

  5. 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".

  6. 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