It seems a bit pointless for me to even have this thing if I'm not going to bother to ever put anything onto it. Oh, well...

I'd never actually seen anyone use a tablet PC as a tablet before today. A trainer was showing off a software product to a new Customer, and the users were all quite wowed by the Microsoft handwriting recognition engine. The trainer wasn't quick to point out that the handwriting recognition was Microsoft's code, though. The users kept commenting on how "amazing" the handwriting recognition was that "his company" put into their program... *sigh*

I think back to Pen Windows ten-plus years ago, and the flop that it was, and I wonder if the same thing is going to happen to this current crop of tablet devices. I've never particularly found the ergonomics of the "paper and clipboard" interface to be favorable anyway, and the idea of precariously balancing a two-thousand dollar tablet PC on my arm while trying to write, in lieu of a fifty-cent clipboard, doesn't make it sound any more appealing.

I suppose some people will find the handwriting interface to be "friendly". For my money, I type a lot faster than I write, and I'd just as soon type. I do sketch a diagram or somesuch onto paper now and again, but those items either (a) get made into "real" drawings with a structured drawing program, or (b) aren't important enough to be saved. Only occasionally will I have a paper drawing that needs to be saved in the paper-state, and for those I just scan them and toss the paper.

I can't imagine many application of these tablet PC's couldn't be done with a thinner type of device. For data entry and reference purposes, I'm not sure why things like compute power and local storage are really particularly necessary. I'd much rather administer a fleet of stateless handheld terminals than a fleet of poorly-networked, sometimes-on tablet PC's. Just think of the fun, pushing down the latest anti-virus updates, printer drivers, Windows updates, Office updates, and the rest to a fleet of tablets. (Then again, I'd much rather herd cats than administer fleets of Windows PC's anyway. Sure, I do it for a living, but that's why it's called "work" and not "play".)

I do recognize that I'm overly opinionated and not the best use-case example for these kinds of things. I suppose anything that drags medical records into the late twentieth-century is a good idea, though.