Long time author and blogger (since 1998) Jeff Duntemann gives a the ThinkPad X41 a whirl at the Denver airport (Jeff has purchased his own X41, though he’s waiting for it to arrive):
I’m intrigued by handwriting recognition, though I don’t expect to use it much, as my handwriting looks like the path of a drunken earwig on a dusty table. So I took the stylus in hand, and wrote a line of inconsequential text twice. The first pass was in my usual fast printing, which I’ve done with great success since my college blue-book era. The other line was the same text, but in the best cursive handwriting I could muster, which was almost illegible even to me, and I knew what it said:
IN 1948, MY GRANDFATHER GOT AUDITED. (This an old Morse Code practice phrase.)
Click the button. Wham! The X41 processed what I had written, and …The X41 could read my writing better than my printing. I hadn’t expected that
Yep. For most people this is the case too. I know it is for me. In fact, I’ve adjusted my writing so that I write cursive more often when using the Tablet–simply because it can recognize it better. I rarely use my all-caps-engineering-style print anymore, which I practiced all during my college days to non-perfection. Oh, well. Like Jeff, with my Tablet I kind of feel like I’m back in 6th grade.