Flutterby™! : NEC Tablet PC 2003-02-07 19:07:33+00

NEC Tablet PC

2003-02-07 19:07:33+00 by Dan Lyke 3 comments

Last night I went down to Santa Clara to have dinner with Robert Scoble and take a look at the upcoming (March) NEC Tablet PC. I've cobbled together some first impressions.

Hmmmm... Being back in school has really made me a fan of paper and pencil again. I can draw up a map on the same sheet of paper as I use to take notes in PoliSci as well as draw up 3D diagrams for multivariable calculus (and scribble notes and equations to the side) and I don't have to scrounge for the right font each time my Abstract Algebra prof throws another odd Greek letter at us.

However, I do wish I had Maple on my machine in the GIS lab. There is alot of visualization of this 3D stuff that's just hard to work out on paper. And even though I can get someone to the Vietnamese restaurant across town with my pad of paper and pencil, I can't shade the map based on the density of Vietnamese-Americans along the route to the restaurant (a trivial task in ESRI ArcGIS).

I guess I'd have to play with one to see if it really could hold up. Of course, I doubt it would be able to handle the crush of the 50lbs of text books I lug around as well as a standard legal pad...

I carry a 'purse' a lot, with my Zaurus on one half, and a large post it note pad (about the same size as the Zaurus) on the other. There are LOTS of things you can't do with the Zaurus, and leaving notes on doors, drawing maps to hand to someone.. and doodling work better on paper. As I believe doodling to be an outward manifestation of the subconcious working on data, doodles are important thing. - I was at a meeting with 3 senior electrical engineers last week. The two whos pads I could see both doodled in precise squares and lines, cubic progressions of a tightly regimented thought process, and they filled them in patterns. I felt at home :) I've got a 'jot' program for my Zaurus, it's just not the same feeling/flow as a good ink pen on paper.

It'd probably take the right software, but the impression I got from the tablet is that it might actually be close enough to paper. But if a pad is $.27 and a mechanical pencil is $5.65, the surcharge for the tablet PC so that the important bits don't have to get transcribed later is a little steep.