And Another Thing

Jon Honeyball gives his first impressions of the Tablet PC.

So the calendar goes round again and I'm off to Barcelona for TechEd. I'm sure our Esteemed Editor has been posting from there, so I will save you the holiday photographs!
      There are some items arising which I think are well worth some consideration. The first is the Tablet PC. I'm fortunate enough to have been using one of these devices for nearly four weeks now, having brought one back from Seattle as part of the Tablet PC Reviewers Workshop held there in early June.
      My view on the platform is now quite clearly worked out - it will be huge, but it will be long burn. Firstly, the capabilities that Microsoft has put into the core handwriting engine is nothing short of astonishing. The ability for it to work out in which direction you are writing, to know that a numbered list is just that, to handle freeform text and diagrams is the work of software engineering genius. The downside is that few applications make proper use of it, and resort to a keyboard/scribbly thing which sits at the bottom of the screen and injects keystrokes into the application which currently has the focus. There is a Microsoft Journal application which looks cute at first glance, but which falls a long way short of being anything other than a technical demonstration of what Office 11 should offer next summer. 
      And there lies the conundrum. I'm sure that people will look at the Tablet and decide it is just "too" everything. Too much bigger than an Ipaq, too much heavier, too much hotter underneath, too much storage, too much power and too expensive.
      Then there are those who will look at an Ipaq and see it is an unmanageable disaster area. Try applying Active Directory policy onto a SQL Server database held on the 1Gb Microdrive on your Ipaq, and your visions of an integrated and managed IT solution will come crashing down around your feet. 
      The bottom line is that the Ipaq is a toy, and not a very good one at that, whereas a Tablet PC is a device which can seamlessly work in an integrated and managed business environment. When it does what it does well, it is the closest thing to computational magic that I have seen in many years. The first release hardware will be clunky and lacking battery life. Later incarnations will be better. Office 11 is something that Microsoft needs to actively demonstrate on the Tablet PC as soon as possible, just to ensure that the vision of "Jam Tomorrow" is not a forlorn hope. And it needs to have a showcase of rich application demos which really work - the current SDK collection is miserable at best.
      Most importantly, Microsoft needs to show clear commitment to standing behind the Tablet PC as a long term platform. Then we can see something truly remarkable flourish. 

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