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April 28, 2006
Some new photos
For those of you that are interested, there's a few new photos on my Flickr account.
Posted April 28, 2006 06:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
April 26, 2006
Going Mobile
Recently, I got a Tablet PC courtesy of my boss. (Thanks, Dan!) This is my first ever blog post written by hand. Literally -- by hand, with a stylus, in digital ink, on the tablet. So far I have only corrected the handwriting recognition twice in this paragraph. I'm finding that it actually does better if I don't try to compensate for bad handwriting. Damn. Okay three times. :)
There's really no comparison between the handwriting recognition entry and typing. Typing is FAR easier. Lower case L's are a bitch, too. But I am impressed with the quality of the recognition. The tablet PC is definitely is useful for taking notes in a meeting, though. Clacking away on a keyboard during a meeting is annoying, but note-taking on a tablet PC makes no more noise than on paper. And I have the advantage of (1) the notes not disappearing into the impending avalanche of paper stacked on the corner of my desk as do all my paper notes and (2) the eminently useful searchability of the notes. Still, typing wins in 90% of the use cases, but it's nice to have the digital ink option for those last 10%.[*]
What I really like is the light weight of the tablet PC. This tablet, a two-year old hand-me-down Acer Travelmate C110, is geared towards mobility, so it's tiny. Sure you can recline on the couch with a laptop, but it's usually a precarious balancing act and you can only deal so long before the battery heat starts burning a hole in some body part. With the tablet, it's not much heavier than a thick hardcover book, and I have to say -- web browsing with your feet up is a really different experience. At two years old, this model is getting a little outmoded even; I can imagine that the new "Origami" ultra-mobile PC's announced by Microsoft last month are going to generate a new form factor.
In the past, I've had discussions with friends and colleagues about the impending doom the publishing industry faces as books become digitized in the way music and video have. Their response has always been, "But the experience of reading a paper book is what will save it." Balderdash, I say! It's just a matter of the device's form factor. Once a device capable of displaying text at a high enough resolution can be reduced to something approaching the size/weight of a trade paperback, people will just as quickly abandon the printed book as they have abandoned the cassettes, VHS, CDs, and DVDs. . . . especially if they can get fast and easy wireless access to downloadable books via the Internet. Long tail anyone?
My recent tablet PC experience convinces me that we're getting much closer to that ideal form factor that's going to shake up the publishing industry for good.
[*] Full disclosure: the latter half of this post -- basically everything after the asterisk -- was not written by hand on the tablet PC, but really for no other reason than I had saved it before I finished, forgot about it, and finished it a couple days later when I was already working on a laptop. :-)
Posted April 26, 2006 06:51 AMPosted April 26, 2006 06:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)