I helped two different neighborhood kids with their new school notebook/WiFi configurations this week. Neither college-bound student had picked a Tablet PC as their mobile computer (one did purchase a ThinkPad X40 though). Not very surprising, I guess. Only one of the two had even heard of Tablet PCs before. Nevertheless, they both got a big kick out of taking my Toshiba M200 for a test drive.
What did they like the most? Using ink in Messenger. Both students have no less than three separate chat programs running by default on their systems. And they each could envision themselves scribbling messages back and forth with their friends.
An older sister of one also dropped in with a few tech questions of her own (her audio was crackling on her desktop so she couldn’t listen to mp3s) and when she saw the M200 she was all into it. Asking where she could get one, how much they cost, and on and on.
While giving a Tablet demo to one of them, it struck me: What better way to showcase a Tablet than to hand a Tablet over to the person you’re showing the Tablet to and use a second Tablet that you hold to interact with the demo unit? Send ink messages. Call via Skype as they walk around. Maybe use a webcam and a shared session in OneNote. I wonder if this would all be too complicated? Doesn’t seem like it if things are preconfigured. Hmmm.