Rob Bushway: “When I went for my physical this past week, the nurse took all my vitals using an M200. She typed on it the whole time, never once using the pen. I asked her if she ever used the pen to input ink or navigate the menus and she said no. Then the P.A. came in with her M200. She typed everything out, but used the pen as a navigational device, hardly ever using the touch pad. When she closed it, it was with the tablet screen down.
When I went to my kids pediatricians office several months ago, their doctor was using an M200 as well. He didn’t even know you could hand write notes on it and asked me about the TIP icon that kept popping up all over the place – he found it annoying. He used the pen as a navigational tool and typed all of his notes. After showing him about journal and what the TIP is used for, his eyes got really big and the inking experience opportunities suddenly became real to him.”
This brings up the age old question: Is the Tablet PC more about mobility or ink?
I think up to this point mobility has won out. Why? Intel’s Centrino. Centrino kept air in the Tablet market. It provided the battery life, performance, and connectivity needed to make Tablets practical in day to day use. Take away the Centrino and I have serious doubts as to whether Tablets as we know and love them would have survived.
Ink needs its “Centrino” either on the software or hardware side. In terms of software, OneNote was close and maybe will reach that point in its next iteration, but so far we’re seeing good-to-great niche solutions, not whole market changers and enablers like the Centrino. In terms of hardware, we’re stuck when it comes to ink. In fact, the hardware is going sub-Centrino if you ask me. Wacom just about owns all the digitizer market for Tablets, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it makes me wonder if we’re seeing the types of innovation and price advances we’d get if there was more competition. For now, about the only growth in digitizers is on the low-end with touch digitizers. Unfortunately, touch digitizers don’t provide the quality of ink we really need to have a “Centrino” experience.
The short of this is that there’s still more work to do in order for ink to become as widely accepted and used as we all know it should be. For us software developers that means we need to keep driving ourselves forward, like Josh Einstein is doing with his TEO product. As for the hardware, maybe as Vista grows in installs we’ll see a change here since the market opportunity will be larger. If not, it’ll take Microsoft and third-party developers to keep innovating and reshaping what is practical and useful with ink. If this innovation continues, the digitizing hardware will follow.