I just happened to come across this post from Michael Gartenberg from November 2003!

“Julia Lerman’s notes from the PDC written on her Tablet PC. There’s no way I could have linked to her yellow pad. Such is the power of pen based computing.”

read about it here!!

Well – now I have a Toshiba M200 and will soon ahve to give up my sweet little baby AcerC110. :'( I am actually fantasizing about asking my client if they want the Toshiba in exchange. But maybe I won’t. I definitely don’t have the same emotional draw to the Toshiba. Though it’s a way faster processor, longer battery life, larger screen and full size keyboard, it just doesn’t seem as – all I can think of is “tight” – as the Acer. I can’t describe it. It’s not because the Acer is more compact. The only think I can really gripe about is the touchpad. It stinks. It lags all of the time. I ahve asked around and others have the same problem. The model I got (M200) doesn’t come with a DVD player and the one I have for the Acer (which I was hoping to trade for the extra battery I bought) has a firewire connection. But alas, the Toshiba doesn’t have firewire (and no there is no such thing as a firewire to USB adapter – don’t think I haven’t spent 2+ hours googling for signs of one). It seems to start up 100% of the time in portrait mode, even when you are in keyboard mode.

But it’s much faster, much better battery life, bigger screen and only 1.1 lbs heavier. And it’s silver – ooh aah. I’m sure when I get used to it I’ll be cooing about it as well. I have to say though, in 20 or so years of computing, I have never talked about a computer the way I do about the Acer. What on earth *is* it about that tablet???

That’s all I can say about it at this point because I had to stop playing with it and do some other type of work.

The .NET Rocks! Tablet PC Listener Giveaway!
http://www.franklins.net/dotnetrocks/

Watch Chris squirm over here.

Not for lack of submissions, but I think just a little confusion about the actual ending date. So you have another month to dig in to the TabletPC SDK and submit a Tablet App to this $100,000 contest. This is not a utility contest – but a real live app …the more mass appeal, the better.

If you go over to the MSDN site (msdn.microsoft.com/tabletpc) you can start learning quite a lot. They have posted the video of Arin Goldberg’s excellent presentation on using the SDK. There’s a lot more in there (in the SDK) than you can imagine. Just think – you don’ t have to spend the rest of your life writing the same boring old data entry applications!

Stay tuned to that site. There is going to be a lot of new content coming down the pipes from some big names in the .NET, nay, Windows programming world. The TabletPC buzz is just getting louder. I am also going to add an article or two as well.

I think I want one of these…

http://www.oqo.com/hardware/basics/

My husband was reading more about the FIeld2Base’s ConstructConnect application that he pointed out to me about a month ago. He is really fascinated by this technology. In addition to the fact that you can use the tablet pc on a construction site to redline blue prints and send them back to anyone who needs them, there are some other pieces of the inking and mobile technology that have really piqued his interest.

One seems to be that inkable forms are created by scanning the existing paper forms that people are already used to filling out. The other is that cached data, documents etc. are automatically uploaded whenever the user/tablet is in range of a wireless or cell connection. That means that the unit has to be always on and always polling for a connection. The connection is actually to Field2Base servers which then either emails or faxes the forms or sends the data to the client’s processing system.

I remember seeing a wireless pocket pc demo from MobileDevCon 2002 where the pocketpc would go in and out of range of a wireless connection to a company network. It knew when to persist data, when to upload data and when to leverage a live connection to the network.

The application I have written for my client does not work quite in this way. The data entry portion of the app is explicitly designed to be used off line with persisted data (xml files). When the user has a connection to the internet or the network, they can then upload their data through a web service and also download the info they need for the next day.

The more I learn about this technology, the more I want to rewrite entire chunks of the application. Hopefully I’ll have an opportunity to do that sooner than later.

Scott Watermasysk was asking around about the hefty Gateway Tablet PC. He said he just wanted it for email etc. I  nearly whacked him upside the head (not really –he lives far away and my arm’s not long enough to reach all the way up there) and asked why on earth he wanted such a mammoth to do email? 🙂  I told him about the little love of my life, my Acer C110 and he just got one. Soon I have to give my Acer back to my client sniff sniff and will have a Toshiba M200 (1.1 pounds heavier), but I will be using it for more than email.

Don’t get me wrong. The Acer is a powerful little box. It’s just that because it is so small, it’s a little hard to crank out code on. The keyboard is 80% and the screen is small (and everything on it is tiny as it likes to be at 1024×768. So unless you have a burning need for a large screen (and full sized keyboard) and you are looking for something VERY portable that is still a convertible, this is definitely a great way to go.

Elizabeth Grigg does one of her great postulative posts and this time she is targetting the tablet pc – why hasn’t it taken off yet and if that is the issue anyway?

Peter Rysavy loves tablets more than anyone I have ever met. He is sad that people don’t just love them like he does. I think Robert Scoble understands that when Peter is unhappy about this, it is just as (or maybe more) valuable to those who are trying to market the whole concept of ink as when he coos about them. He’s just frustrated. Tablets are more than the next new thing or something cool or a meme to him. He really truly loves  and believes the technology. I think that Carl Franklin should write a blues song for Peter’s as-yet unrequited love.