Scrawl to Screen, With a Pen

A LAPTOP may make a powerful portable office, but as a pure note-taking device, it is not universally considered an improvement over handwriting. In meetings, the laptop’s screen becomes a wall that psychologically isolates you from the group. For people who don’t touch-type, handwriting is faster, too. And then there’s the clicking of the keys – a distinct liability when it comes to note-taking in, say, church. If people at Microsoft are reading this, they’re surely whooping and high-fiving; these, after all, are the very problems that the company’s Tablet PC design is intended to address. The company’s research says that most office workers still take pad and pen to meetings rather than laptops. The Tablet PC does a poor job of handwriting recognition, but Microsoft claims that nobody cares about that. Its research says that most people refer to their handwritten notes as handwritten notes, and never bother retyping them into the computer so that they can edit, copy, paste, format and use a spelling checker. Full Story