I’m writing this on my Fujitsu Stylistic 5010, which is a pure slate (no keyboard) Tablet PC with a 12.1″ screen and a 1GHz Pentium M CPU. I’ve been using it as my primarily computer for the past 13 months, with a very high degree of satisfaction. I recently wrote up my experience of it for my colleagues in the New York CTO Club, and figured it might be of interest to others.
I carry it everywhere, and find it to be lighter than a laptop, longer battery life (3.5 – 4 hours), and much more versatile. It is well suited to meetings and office applications. In meetings, I take notes by hand using OneNote, which is a terrific piece of software from Microsoft that does a remarkable job of letting you just write but then rearrange what you’ve written as well as convert to text or just run searches against your handwritten notes. The current crop of MS applications support voice and handwriting in varying degrees. Visio and Word are both very friendly to “ink” both for comments and inserting sketches directly.
I have also used it for voice recognition by plugging in a good USB headset and the combination of that with pen is powerful, eliminating the need for a keyboard in many cases. This was my original motivation in getting it, to deal with a bad RSI/carpal tunnel problem a year ago (which is now much better). I sometimes travel with the folding stand (very light) and a small USB keyboard, at which point I have a portable desktop. At home, I use a USB hub with a nice ergo keyboard and trackball and other USB devices ready to go, so I just plug in one USB cable and it’s up.
My configuration has 512MB RAM, a 40GB drive, built-in Wifi that works very well, IrDA that I never use, and external video support that lets you dual-display clone for presentations or extend your desktop to a very nice large size across two displays. Tablet PC OS is Windows XP Pro, with some nice additions. SP2 added great enhancements for the Tablet, including even better handwriting recognition (it was already excellent) and UI.
Power-wise, it’s been fine, though a little slow for software development. I have run IDEs and compilers and databases on it, but it’s a bit pokey compared to more modern hardware.
Overall, it’s a superb advancement of computing technology for folks like me that in the span of a day move through email, browser, word, excel, ppt, visio and then in and out of meetings where I’m taking notes, sneaking wireless email checks (no one knows you’re not jotting ideas), connecting to various networks (I like TrendMicro’s software firewall with multiple profiles), and always just grabbing it and going to the next thing.
After doing this every day for over a year now, the physical device has held up very well, nothing has failed and the only real complaint I have is that the plastic screen protectors quickly get scratched up from the pen and so you either have to change them (honestly I’ve only done it a few times) or live with them, or just peel it off and use the screen directly (much nicer but a little more risky I suppose).
I surveyed the models a year ago and came down to Motion Computing and Fujitsu, based on power and screen size at that time. I chose Fujitsu because they had been producing devices like these for industrial applications for years and seemed to have a better understanding of usability; that’s certainly been borne out by my attachment to it. I have never regretted getting the pure slate form factor (no attached keyboard), since USB and a stand are much better ergonomically for working at a desk anyway.
I should mention that people still seem to respond to it as “cool” and exotic. I can’t believe they haven’t taken off more yet, but expect they will in the next few years. I think it will take awhile before a new generation of software applications really take advantage of what the pen and voice interfaces make possible.