All the features of a notebook PC—sans keyboard
At COMDEX Fall 2001 in Las Vegas, Ira Snyder, general manager of Microsoft's Tablet Platform Group, and I hovered over the speaker's table, which held our array of notebook computers and PDAs. The notebook PC on which I planned to run a Windows XP demo was running smoothly and my Microsoft PowerPoint slides were appearing properly, but no matter what we tried, Snyder's notebook wouldn't send video to the projector. I offered him the use of my notebook for his presentation, but he waved me off. "It's OK," he said, pointing to the two Tablet PC prototypes he'd brought. "I'll run it from one of these." What Snyder proceeded to do was quite impressive.
Features and Functionality
As the photo on page 83 shows, Tablet PCs resemble oversized PDAs. A touch-screen and stylus are the input instruments. (You can attach an external keyboard for touch-typing, and some devices might offer a built-in keyboard.) Under the hood, the Tablet PC contains the guts of a complete notebook PC. Although Microsoft hasn't yet made final specifications public, the prototype units that Snyder showed me sported 600MHz processors, 128MB of RAM, and 6GB hard disks. The OS is a superset of XP Professional Edition, upgraded to support the touch-screen and stylus. Two major new programs achieve this support: an enhanced version of the Microsoft Transcriber handwriting recognizer that's available in the latest Pocket PCs, and a new application called Microsoft Journal, which lets you use a stylus for note taking.
The key to Journal—and other stylus-centric applications—is its direct support for a new data type called Ink, which tracks the stylus's motion against the touch-screen. Ink is more than just a bitmap image that shows you where the stylus moves. To support Ink, the Tablet PC's touch-screen digitizers must provide at least five times the display's resolution and must sample the stylus position at least 133 times per second. Journal (or any other Ink-enabled application) can store Ink, display it as a bitmap, or turn it over to Transcriber or another application for text recognition.
You can take a Tablet PC to a meeting and use the stylus to take notes in much the same way as you write on a pad of paper. Later, you can select portions of your notes and instruct the Tablet PC to recognize your writing as text but ignore other information, such as a diagram or map. You can add Ink support to other applications—Snyder demonstrated an Ink-enabled version of MSN Messenger that let him include diagrams in instant messages. Tablet PCs also accept voice input: You can record meeting notes and use voice-recognition features to perform commands.
Tablet PC batteries must support Sleep (or Suspend) mode for at least 72 hours, without causing data loss, and resume in less than 2 seconds. The display must let you switch between portrait and landscape modes without requiring a reboot. (I watched Snyder perform such a switch before he launched PowerPoint at COMDEX.) And any docking station that you use with a Tablet PC must support surprise removal.
Tablet PCs take advantage of XP's built-in features, many of which—according to Snyder—are designed to support the new form-factor. The most important of these features is probably Microsoft ClearType font technology, which vastly improves the onscreen display of text on LCDs. If you have XP, you can try out ClearType: Open the Control Panel Display applet, go to the Appearance tab, and click Effects. Ensure that the Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts check box is selected, and choose ClearType from the drop-down list. Click OK to exit the Effects dialog box, then click Apply. You'll see a noticeable difference in clarity on a notebook PC's LCD; the effect is less impressive on a CRT display.
Microsoft has an interesting list of partners (including Acer, Compaq, Fujitsu, and Toshiba) that are signed up to manufacture Tablet PCs. Snyder couldn't tell me exactly what the devices will cost—price will depend on the vendors—but he expects the price to be slightly higher than that of a conventional notebook PC with comparable specifications. Expect the first Tablet PCs to ship in the second half of 2002.