The Tablet PC: Wow!

I visited Rio de Janeiro on March 2003 to attend the iLaw 2003 course from Harvard Law. It truly was a very nice experience.

Both the faculty and fellow students were in general very interesting people and I got to meet some personal heroes of mine at the time such as Jonathan Zittrain, Lawrence Lessig, Gilberto Gil (Musician, wonderful singer and Minister of Culture for Brazil…), and, as if that wasn’t already something… I even got to drink some caipirinhas with my personal favourite ‘Cognitive Dissident’… the one… the incredible… John Perry Barlow… Lyricist for the ‘Grateful Dead’, co-founder of the EFF, author of the ‘Declaration of the Independence of CyberSpace‘ manifesto… –those were the days…–, and one of the warmest and most interesting persons with whom I ever had the pleasure of crossing paths…

My readers –all people of exceptional taste and intelligence…– , are as of this point asking themselves: What the heck has all this to do with the Tablet PC? As well as probably: Has this guy been catching up too quickly on his Dry Martini schedule??!

As for the second question: fear not, I rarely have more than two Martinis in any given month… on average…

As for the first one:

One of the participants, not really faculty but sort of a guest speaker was Mr. Jason Matusow, who at the time was a Manager at the ‘Shared Source Initiative’ at Microsoft.

Mr. Matusow was carrying a tablet PC with him and showcasing it as he participated in discussions, presented his slides, etc.

I must recognize that I was really, really impressed with what I saw. Also, Mr. Matusaw was extremely nice and answered all my questions and even let me play for a couple of minutes with his notebook –a toshiba portege I think I recall…–

As I discovered the mac and started playing with ‘Panther‘, all that sort of faded away… though I always kept and eye on the platform by following news, blogs, etc. Among those the very prolific and always interesting jkontherun blog.

Also, at some point, the wonderful hp tc1100 caught my eye. I sincerely can’t recall exactly when and where it happened… but I saw or read about it and I just had to have it.

So one year and a couple of months ago, as I needed a windows machine for a project, I purchased one.

It came with Windows XP Tablet edition. I used it for my Client’s project… played around a bit with it… and that was that. The machine was lacking ram and while Onenote 2003 was a refreshingly nice piece of software, it never really ‘clicked’ on me.

While in Chicago, I decided to purchase an additional Gig of ram as well as upgrade the system to Microsoft Vista and Office 2007.

Wow! and I mean WOW!

Redmond’s new OS version has really impressive handwrite recognition capabilities. In my case both in English and Spanish languages. This way of interacting with your computer is a truly remarkable, exciting and interesting one.

And Microsoft Onenote 2007 is an incredible piece of software. The 2003 version was groundbreaking and remarkable but the 2007 one… well I could write and write about it, but you should really try it for yourself.

As I realize that this is already a pretty lengthy post I’ll save some further observations for future ones… but really… Wow!

Now I only need a few windows versions of my favorite mac apps to feel right at home… Apparently Tinderbox v. 4 is much closer to a windows port of the software than any other version before… We’ll see…

As for Ulysses and Scrivener… well… it’s probably a good thing that I don’t plan to move away from the mac anytime soon.

All the best, TFS