There are times when I start journal entries only for my own benefit. That is, to force my train-of-thought into a slower, more logical process in order to work something out clearly in my head. This is one of those times and it concerns tablet ‘ink.’
There are a lot of ‘ink’ fans in the ultra mobile PC community. A lot of the leading mobile PC journals and portals have been in the game for longer than me and lived ‘ink’ from the early stages. They consider the Microsoft Tablet PC as the Grandfather of the Microsoft Origami ultra mobile PC and this is probably one of the reasons why i’m reading so much pro-ink commentary about UMPC’s. Hugo Ortega recently wrote in his journal a very ‘pro-ink’ piece urging people to think ink.
…we must always remember that the ability to take handwritten notes, therefore allowing them to be printable, emailable, shareable, erasable and editable, is also the ability to empower free thought
I think what he’s saying is that you can ‘write’ and then have it converted to ASCII which means it becomes more useable than , er , ink! Rob Bushway – Gotta be mobile wrote:
What we are really interested in is transparency in inking functionality throughout the mobile experience from ultra-mobile device to 17” laptop, from Windows Mail to Outlook, to Search boxes to the Inking on the desktop
Rob is right. Inking needs to be available across-the-board otherwise, as it is at present, you can’t really use ink without another input mechanism. I don’t see that happening. It requires extra programming skills (or understanding of new API’s) to achieve.
Now don’t take the above comments out of context. The two of them have great views about mobile computing but its an example of how ink-focused people can be sometimes.
A was never a tablet PC fan. The technology was superb but I rarely go and buy something unless its going to be useful in my life and it was clear from an early stage that the tablet had no place in my life. It was big, heavy, expensive and required of me to write. Holy gucamole! (as they say over there.) Holy sh*t! (as we say over here!) I gave up writing a long long time ago. I was never any good at it and as a left-hander, no one could ever read it. How on earth could I expect it to be any better on a tablet and what were the chances of a tablet ever turning my rats nest of squiggles into something my mother would’nt criticise. Think reverse mirrored hyeroglyphics in cockney rhyming slang. Thats how much sense my wrting makes to a tablet. Or a ‘fight with squid’ as one of my colleagues put it this morning.
I’ve tried writing on a screen. I’ve tried graffiti and all sorts of methods but it doesnt work for me. I was never able to write an @ sign or \172.16.16.1 without ending up with an error and resorting to the on-screen keyboard. I have had plenty of years to try it out too. I’ve been using PC’s since the days of writing CESIL for punched-card processing and have always been looking for better input methods. Yesterday I had the chance to try out the ‘ink’ experience on an Origami UMPC. 100% of my sentences required editing after recognition and i really wasn’t suprised.
Why do some people love the ink then? It enables the removal of input hardware, I get that bit but is that the only reason? Is it more ‘human’? Does it give you copyright protection? Is it because it’s a silent operation? Can it be faster? Why do tablet PC users all own stowaway keyboards?! (Actually that bit was a guess but I bet its true!)
Even if I did miss the point, it doesnt matter, becuase I think I probably represent a typical consumer when it comes to choosing a consumer computing device. Consumer device. Mass-market device. We’re not looking at vertical markets any more. Simplicity, capability and style is what people in the consumer market are looking for and when you start marketing Origami ‘tablets’ at customers and telling them that it does ‘ink.’ its not really going to get anyone excited. Most ‘writing’ today is done at the keyboard and there isn’t a schoolkid around that doesn’t prefer buttons to a pen.
‘I was never a tablet PC fan.’ is what I said above. I’m a tablet ultra mobile PC fan now though and I believe that tablet ultra mobile PC will take off in the next 2 years. It’s got nothing to do with ink. Its to do with cost, customers and marketing and the cheaper devices that result from the increased activity in the product cycle. Tablet PC’s found their niche mainly in ‘vertical markets.’ That is Doctors, Engineers, Estate agents. They are devices that give the users measurable efficiencies which can easily be converted into monetary savings. $3000 to save 20 minutes per day for 2 years is a no-brainer. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work in the consumer world where time is not directly related to money. The new breed of tablet PC, the Origami ultra mobile PC is simply going to utilise cheap, efficient, ripening technology to enable mass-marketing of new products (and therefore huge efficiencies) to a new customer base at a lower price. And thats pretty much it.
I’m not anti-ink. I just believe that ink is not the main selling point for the new wave of UMPC’s. Lets not focus too much on it and lets concentrate on the whole range of values a cheap ultra-mobile PC brings to customers and look forward to the day when we argue about eye-gesture-enabled devices!
