So who's attending the Tablet PC launch event?

[Newsboy]

I'll be there, Rochester Convention Center, Rochester NY. Here's hoping for lots of great SWAG!

[Jason Dunn]

I hereby dub you the Official Pocket PC Thoughts Tablet PC Launch Correspondent. :lol:

Let us know how it goes!

[RickP in AZ]

I'm hittin' up the one at the Arizona Biltmore here in Phoenix, AZ. Can't wait to see some goodies... Oh, like the Bluetooth keyboard and mouse...

[Newsboy]

Ok, will do!

Boy, guess I really DO have to go now. Ha!

[Newsboy]

Though, I will say, I feel silly attending this event. I already played with a Tablet PC at RCS Computer Experience in downtown Manhattan, last weekend. The Acer TravelNote. I wasn't that impressed, but then, having used every CE device since my Compaq C-140, I'm a bit jaded. Old hat for us folks I guess! Plus, it was pretty heavy to carry on a forearm.

[yvilla]

I'll be there, Rochester Convention Center, Rochester NY. Here's hoping for lots of great SWAG!
Hey, I'll be at the Rochester event too. Hope to see the HP, Toshiba and Fujitsu Tablet PCs all there! :x-mas:

[Newsboy]

Not 100% positive I'll be there, I have a ton of stuff on my plate at work, and this is kind of an "extraneous" item...though if I am, look for a guy w/ bleach blonded hair, slim glasses, and a dark goatee!

[D-Man]

I'll be there, Rochester Convention Center, Rochester NY. Here's hoping for lots of great SWAG!
Hey, I'll be at the Rochester event too. Hope to see the HP, Toshiba and Fujitsu Tablet PCs all there! :x-mas:

I, too, signed up to attend the event in Rochester, NY. Not sure if I will attend, though, as I recently broke my foot. Hobbling around the Convention Center on crutches would not be fun!

How many people from Rochester, NY do we have here? :!:

[Newsboy]

According to the memberlist, two people from Upstate NY, and six from Rochester!

[Khufu1]

I will be at the Chicago event today if I don't get attacked by rioting CEO's Conference protesters.
-Drew

[Newsboy]

For the record, I did not make it to today's event in Rochester. Too much other stuff going on at work. Sorry Jason!

Though from playing with the ACER unit in Manhattan on Sunday, I was underwhelmed. To me, there just seems to be far too small of a market for this product to get excited about it. The price is too high for most corporations to justify, nevermind individual end users. The unit I tried was a bit too heavy to see me carrying it around the office or the building, nevermind holding it on my forearm. The locking hinge on the Acer unit seemed incredibly flimsy, I have no doubt it would break in very short order, particularly if dropped (say, off of someone's forearm? :) ).

The Tablet PC's claim to fame is the ability to write notes on the screen and later recall and share them with other users. I think a better (and lighter!) product for this purpose is the Logitech io Digital Personal Pen. Like the Tablet PC, it can record your notes written on a paper pad, and later upload them to your desktop PC for distribution and archiving. I'd be far more likely to carry around a WiFi PocketPC and a Logitech Pen then I would a Tablet PC.

I might seem to be a bit harsh, but I just don't see this product taking off the way MS intends it to. This device is probably headed towards a tiny niche market much as the Handheld PC was. I expect the new $150-300 PPCs to make a much bigger splash than this.

[yvilla]

For the record, I did not make it to today's event in Rochester. Too much other stuff going on at work. Sorry Jason!



For the record, the Rochester launch event is on November 14. You didn't miss it yet!

[Newsboy]

<=== Moron.

Then I will be there I guess! I'll be sure to wear something distinctive. Hey Jason, do they sell PPCT hats? Maybe the same blue as the top of the site? With a little embroidered PDA and the PPCT logo? :)

[yvilla]

According to the memberlist, two people from Upstate NY, and six from Rochester!

D-Man, Newsboy and other upstate New Yorkers: I've wondered for a while if there were enough of us for a PPC user group. What do you think :?:

[Newsboy]

I agree, and was thinking the exact same thing. Someone start a thread.

[yvilla]

I agree, and was thinking the exact same thing. Someone start a thread.


Done. In User Groups. (Now, I better get back to work!)

[aussie]

I attended the event in Toronto yesterday and was suitably impressed. Of course if they can't impress you at the launch then they would be in trouble.

It really looks like a powerful business tool. The intergration between journal and the other applications was impressive.

here are some tidbits;

- 5 second resume (believe it when I see it - XP takes 30 seconds on my 1.8G laptop and boots me to the login screen)
- completely tied to Office XP - so if you dont have it you are out of luck. Most major corporations I know of have not upgraded their corp desktop to Office XP yet.
- the sylus works like an eraser when turned up side down (cool). Also some mention of a button on the stylus that acts like a "right" mouse click (how does this work?)
- they are going to offer a free download of a "journal" viewer that will allow non tablet pc users the ability to view journal entries - similar to the excel and word viewers I guess

[Newsboy]

Okay, well tomorrow is the event! Looking forward to going!

If anyone else from the Rochester User Group is there, look for the guy with the charcoal "Boblbee" backpack. You'll know the pack when you see it!

http://www.boblbee.com

[ipaq adam]

I went to the Rochester event today. Didn't see you, Newsboy. Looking forward to a Rochester Pocket PC User Group.

I was maybe 65% impressed with the Tablet PC. I already do stuff with Wacom Tablets (just an input device linked to a desktop, pronounced "WACK em"), and I kinda like tablets for art-related tasks.

Today, I wanted to see the Tablet PC's handwriting recognition in action. Watching a guy write "Hello" and having "Hullo" show up on screen was disappointing. At one point, a woman demonstrated how flawlessly a user can input into an electronic form, but she ended up putting a digit from her fake social security number into the name field, and didn't bother to correct it. One presenter admitted that he was too nervous to show us speech recognition.

So it didn't seem like handwriting recognition was much of an improvement over the Pocket PC. I usually use an on-screen keyboard on the Pocket PC, and I'd probably end up doing that with the Tablet PC.

As slim notebooks go, Tablet PCs rock. They give a use extra features that make slim notebooks truly practical. But from the software end of things, there's still some way to go. For enterprise customers, Microsoft seemed to have the thesis, "Data entry through the Tablet PC is more efficient, practical, and less error-prone." This is not the case.

I would have really liked to win the Acer TravelMate C100 Tablet PC they raffled off. At this point, there is no way I'm willing to buy a Tablet PC. I have more important (and cheaper) things like a Media Center desktop to save up for. My iPaq will have to tide me over for now.

Links:
Wacom: http://www.wacom.com/index2.cfm
Acer Tablet PC: http://www.acersupport.com/notebook/html/tabletpc.html

[Sven Johannsen]

Seems the presentations are very dependent on the presenters (DUH). At the Denver launch, virtually all the demoed HRW worked well, if not flawlessly. The presenters were competent enough to quickly demo fixing errors. Had the opportunity to try it myself on some of the display units. It seemed better than Caligrapher to me, and the experience was nicer than the small screen or a detached tablet (I have played with the HWR embedded in Office XP using a Wacom).

The speech recognition demo was well done. One presenter spoke some pretty simple phrases. The second asked the audience if they were impressed (of course not), so he pulled a page out of the morning paper for his partner to use. The recognition kept up accurately with his normally paced reading. The morning paper text certainly wasn't rehearsed, but you could tell the presenter was comfortable with dictating and vocal punctuation. He had practised, and it came off very well.

[yvilla]

ipaq adam, I was there this morning too, but also didn't see Newsboy.

My thoughts are this: For someone who has to take a lot of handwriten notes, whether in school, or on the job, the Tablet PC may be really phenomenal. For example, I'm an attorney, and spend most of my day in court. At a hearing or trial, its yellow pads all the way, and a whole pile of different colored pens, markers and highlighters too, so that when its time to sum up I can go back through my notes to (hopefully) find all the important points to make. That stuff never gets (or needs to be) transcribed into text, so handwriting recognition doesn't matter to me at all. But the idea of dispensing with all those pens and pads of paper, and having instead a Tablet PC to take those notes on, and of even being able to do a search for key words or points in those notes later on, is blowing me away. Imagine--over time, with all my saved, handwritten notes, I'll have a database of prior testimony that I can search too. The same cop is testifying at a different trial a year later--bingo, I may be able to search my notes and trip him up with an inconsistent statement about some important point.

Anyway, I'm sure that others who do a lot of handwritten work will be excited about the Tablet PC too. I know that artists, etc. are already too.

[ipaq adam]

For someone who has to take a lot of handwriten notes, whether in school, or on the job, the Tablet PC may be really phenomenal.

I can see your point. Hopefully the Journal "Ink" format is here to stay so future generations can read the piles of notes we create. The format is supposedly searchable, even in handwritten form, which is surely a plus in being able to find specific notes written months ago. I need to step back and take a wider look at the Tablet PC's uses.

And Sven, it's good to hear that the presentations went well in Denver. Maybe I'm being too critical, or had my hopes up too high. I guess the presenters in Rochester were technicians or business consultants, and I can't really blame them for some mistakes. They did a good job in the end, and were able to get the crowd fired up.

But what confused me (and here I'm getting hung up on handwriting recognition again) was that, as far as I can tell, for non-ink-enabled applications you only get a small portion of the screen (the input panel) to write on. Mac OS X's handwriting recognition is phenominal, and you can write anywhere on the screen, in any application. OK, I ban myself from any further handwriting recognition discussion. Besides, talking about the Macintosh platform can get me into big trouble in these parts.

Although these kids in Rochester tried hard, it looks like I'll have to move to Denver to see a solid Tablet PC launch. But then I can't help start up the Rochester Pocket PC User Group. Yeah, looks like I'm staying here.