Reverting to type?

For a company that keeps talking about innovation, Microsoft seems good at reinventing the wheel. The company is readying the Tablet edition of its Windows XP operating system, designed to run on smaller laptop computers that accept pen input.

This isn't the first time companies have tried to marry pen and screen. Microsoft tried 10 years ago, with Windows for Pen Computing. GO Corp released the PenPoint operating system in 1991, and GRiD Systems competed with both. None offered handwriting technology that was good enough. Apple tried with the Newton handheld device in 1993. It went the way of its predecessors. More recently, IBM shipped the Transnote, a Thinkpad with a pen and paper bolted on to it, which digitised pen input. No one bought it. The only successes are Palm's Graffiti and the PocketPC, both constrained subsets of handwriting.

Microsoft is trying to reverse this history with the Tablet PC OS, and touting portability – not recognition – as its main benefit. At a reviewers' workshop, Bill Gates told me that with greater processing power and storage, users can treat the new systems as their primary PCs, so they don't have to compromise when using the system. For the first time, the processor can provide a truly ink-like experience, he argued.

He's right – on the Acer unit that we played with, the mouse cursor follows the pen smoothly, creating an experience that feels very much like writing with traditional pen and ink. You can choose your ink colour and thickness, and wipe your digital slate clean. It's also light – just 1.5kg.

You can scribble on the screen directly, just like a notepad, using the built-in Microsoft Journal note-taking software, or you can gesture with the pen to call up a text input panel (TIP) at the bottom of the screen, which recognises your handwriting and converts it into text.

But the handwriting recognition isfar from perfect. Even when I wrote in my best, printed script, it was only 80 to 90 per cent accurate. Part of the problem is that the company has attempted to recognise cursive handwriting rather than the single characters you can write with the PocketPC OS. The latter gives you higher accuracy, but is slower. Either way, keyboards are faster – even for two-fingered typists.

More frustrating is that you can't output your notes and diagrams to Word format, only to the "closed" MHT Journal format, or as a Tiff image. The TIP will let you input to Word, but you'll be fighting the handwriting recognition all the way. Perhaps this is why Microsoft executives recently downplayed the handwriting recognition at the expense of the "digital ink" model. "If it works, it's a bonus," said one engineer, advising people to keep their handwritten notes stored as images rather than converted into text.

Those who like to draw images when taking notes will like the pen-sensitive feature. But for note-taking, most people will be happy with a pen and paper.