I recently attended a briefing at Microsoft's Silicon Valley conference center. Many of my fellow attendees carried notebooks, so nobody paid any attention as I opened mine up. However, what I did next drew stares: I pressed the hinges at either end of the display to unlock it, then turned the display 180 degrees and folded it down to cover the keyboard. I was using Acer's TravelMate 100 Tablet PC.
Inside and Out
The TravelMate measures 8.5" * 10.1" * 1.1" (closed) and weighs approximately 2.5 pounds. Inside, Acer has packed an 800MHz Pentium III Processor-M processor, 256MB of RAM, and a 30GB hard disk. The unit features a PC Card slot, two USB ports, a serial port, a 56Kbps modem, 10/100Base-T Ethernet, audio in and out jacks, and a VGA connector for an external monitor. The unit I tested came with a USB CD-ROM drive. An external 3.5" disk drive and other external devices will be available as options.
In notebook mode, the TravelMate offers few surprises. Its keyboard is set back from the front of the unit to make room for a Synaptics TouchPad. The relatively small 10.4" display operates at an unusually high 1024 * 768 resolution.
To use the TravelMate as a Tablet PC, you must unlock, twist, and fold down the display, giving you a device that looks and feels like an electronic Etch A Sketch. As far as I know, this "convertible" design is unique. Other Tablet PC prototypes I've seen have separate keyboards that either connect through a USB port or communicate wirelessly with the Tablet PC.
Unlike earlier pen-based devices, the TravelMate doesn't have a touch screen. Instead, the display is equipped with an active digitizer—an array of fine wires beneath the LCD display that interacts with an electronically active stylus that's specific to each manufacturer's device. One problem with this approach is that losing the stylus can spell disaster. (Acer provides a small backup stylus that fits into a slot in the side of the TravelMate.)
The advantage of an active digitizer is that it provides extremely high resolution—about four times higher than that of the display—which permits impressive handwriting recognition and extremely smooth electronic ink. Tapping the stylus on the display has the same effect as clicking the left mouse button, and double-tapping is equivalent to a double-click. The Acer's primary and backup styluses include an optional button that performs the equivalent of right-clicking a mouse. (You can also generate a right-click by tapping the stylus and holding it over an icon or menu item.) These actions are easy to learn and become quite natural. You can operate in Tablet PC configuration with the display set to either Portrait or Landscape mode.
Windows Journal
Because the keyboard is hidden in Tablet mode, you must use the stylus for data entry. Using a new application called Windows Journal, which lets you write on the display in electronic ink, I took some 20 pages of notes during the aforementioned briefing. The notes resembled the handwritten scrawls that I might commit to a pad of paper. However, as I wrote, a text recognizer was executing in a background thread. As a result, I can now use text keywords to search the notes I took. I can also copy text from those notes and paste it into Notepad or Microsoft Word—though as Figure 1, page 36, shows, the results are variable. The device had much more success with my wife's neat handwriting than with my scrawls. I have trouble reading my own notes, so I'm not surprised that the computer's results aren't exactly precise.
I spent a lot of time using Windows Journal, which has a simple UI that resembles a piece of notepaper. You simply use the stylus to write (or draw) on the digital paper. When you fill a page, you tap the "page down" icon below the vertical scrollbar on the right side of Windows Journal's window for a fresh page. A toolbar provides pen, highlighter, eraser, selection, white-space, and flag tools. You can use the pen tool to select the color and weight of the "ink," and you can use the white-space tool to "push" ink down on a page—or off to another page.
The good news about Windows Journal is that it's truly usable for note-taking. The bad news is that getting text out of Windows Journal can be frustrating. Windows Journal can save text only in its unique .jbt file format. To retrieve text, you must select the text you're interested in—no more than one page at a time—and use the Edit menu's Copy as Text option. A dialog box appears, showing what Windows Journal thinks you wrote. (Windows Journal highlights words it's unsure about.) At this point, you can make corrections to the text. To place the text on the Windows clipboard, you click Copy. You can then paste the text into any Windows application and begin the formatting process, which can be extremely time-consuming if you're dealing with anything more than a paragraph's worth of text.
If you don't need the system to recognize your text, or if you want to extract a diagram or sketch, you simply select what you're interested in, tap the Edit menu's Copy option, and paste the resulting ink in Windows metafile format. You can use this procedure to good effect in email, though your coworkers might be surprised to see your handwritten notes on their screens.
Windows Journal provides a File/Export As option that lets you export text in two formats: Web archive (.mht) and .tif. Unfortunately, Eastman Kodak's Windows Imaging application doesn't recognize the .tif format that Windows Journal emits, and although Adobe's Photoshop Elements will at least open a Windows Journal .tif file, the results are unreadable. Fortunately, I found that I could use Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) 5.5 to open Windows Journal files exported in .mht format.
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