Tablet PCs: Write of passage

And now, this week's hostage to fortune. At the Comdex exhibition in 2001, Bill Gates brandished a prototype Tablet PC and announced that it is "a PC that is virtually without limits, and within five years, I predict that it will be the most popular form of PC sold in America". We're 20 per cent of the way to that prediction, and the Tablet PC hasn't even launched. The official launch is this Thursday – so Bill must be in a confident mood.

But what, you may be wondering, is a Tablet PC? Simply, it's a PC with a full-sized screen on which you can write, using a special stylus. Microsoft, whose idea it is (but which is letting PC-makers take all the financial risk of actually making them) calls the concept Digital Ink. Most of the PC makers are being cautious enough to include keyboards on their Tablet PCs, in case it turns out not to be a great thing.

In this way, explains Neil Laver, Windows product marketing manager for Microsoft UK, Gates's forecast can – and will – come true. "I think most notebook PCs will be Tablet PCs, so it will become the de facto standard," he told me. The extra cost of the required technology – about £150 – would soon be absorbed in the price. Whether anyone would use it is another matter.

I'll come to what the experience is like in a moment. But it's interesting to ask why we use the entry systems we do on computers. Keyboards are the predominant form for anything one sits down at. The typewriter originated around 1865. It wasn't invented to enable faster writing, but it did provide uniform writing. It also made it easier to produce multiple copies of what you were typing (using carbon paper, which rose in importance with the machine). It was an office thing. Handwriting was still important for individuals, who wrote letters endlessly; typewriting only took off after the 1880s. When computers became something that people could program directly (rather than through punched cards or flicked switches), the machines needed the kind of recognisable input a keyboard gives.

So the reason we don't write into computers wasn't initially because it would be faster to type; it was because of the need for uniformity. That said, most of us who regularly use keyboards would think ourselves able to type faster than we can write, and more legibly. And now, of course, computers are powerful enough to interpret the non-uniformity of our handwriting.

Using a Tablet PC is a strange experience. On the Acer system I tried, you unlock the screen, which then rotates 180 degrees and fits on top of the keyboard. Underneath is the same computer, but you're presented only with a screen. The orientation of the screen can be changed to portrait, rather than landscape. The screen is not touch-sensitive, but reacts to electromagnetic components in the stylus, so that you can't smear it with your fingers; you don't want the digital ink to be too lifelike.

Writing takes some getting used to. It's like being a novice skater: you can't stop your movement. On paper, the friction between pen and parchment helps you control its motion. On a slick plastic screen with a plastic stylus, one's loops and strokes go everywhere. This might be a temporary problem; as I was only lent the machine temporarily (48 hours), it was hard to judge.

Ergonomics experts I spoke to say that it should be easier to find things with a stylus than a mouse, and that's the experience of those I've spoken to who have used graphics tablets (where you use a pen instead of a mouse, on a separate tablet). Again, I didn't surmount the learning curve.

A neat facility that Tablet PC offers is that you can write something which will be left in your handwriting; in the background, the processor will run a handwriting recognition system so that the words can be indexed by the computer. Some time later, when you want to turn up the memo, a quick content search will reveal it, in all its back-of-a-napkin glory.

The machine will run standard handwriting recognition in the foreground, so you write and it guesses – sorry, works out – what you've written. Microsoft modestly says its system is "the best available" (it'll have to slug that out with Apple, which still incorporates the updated Newton scrawl recognition system in its OSX operating system; people say that's good, too). But the really useful thing, says Laver, is that you don't have to enter the data twice. If you're taking notes in a meeting (it's more polite to scribble than type), you don't have to re-type them from paper into a machine.

He has been using the system for months, and says he's used to doing work while standing up. The tablet format suits being grasped in one hand and written on with the other. That's why Microsoft is looking at the NHS and licking its lips, reasoning that doctors must be ideal users: they could write notes at a patient's bedside, dock the machine, clean up the information and put it on the network. I suspect that'll be strongly dependent on battery life; the only thing worse than a difficult must-use gadget is a dead-batteried must-use one.

It's easy to imagine loads of uses for a tablet-format PC. I'd like one with a program that could recognise shorthand. Instant transcribed interviews? Yes, please. We're still very close to the keyboard age, but someone will find smart uses for writing on computers. Perhaps with voice, with writing, we'll shift away from the standard input form we've had for so many years.

Bill Gates has been wrong about things in the past (I enjoyed watching him in Seattle in 1997, telling us how we'd control our machines with gestures; read it at http://www.microsoft.com/billgates/speeches/ industry&tech/WAscience.asp). But he might have latched on to something here, even though the best applications won't come from Microsoft. They'll be dreamt up by people who don't think of a keyboard as necessary. So start asking your children what they'd like to write on a computer.

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