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If your job involves frequent meetings or lots of "management by walking around," you know how useful it would be to take handwritten notes comfortably and unobtrusively--without later having to transfer them to your desktop PC.

Microsoft's answer is a clipboard-shaped ultraportable running Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, with a stylus and a digitizer screen that let you take notes much as you would on paper. I tried out five preproduction tablets--from Acer, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, Motion Computing, and ViewSonic--to see whether those vendors (and Microsoft) had gotten the platform right. The Acer and the Fujitsu ran shipping versions of Windows XP Tablet PC Edition; the others used betas.

I could see myself using a tablet at trade shows. Weighing roughly 3 pounds (or slightly more), a typical unit is light enough to carry all day for note-taking and then to use at a desk for writing and filing stories.

Many of the tablets have Wi-Fi (802.11b) wireless, ethernet, and 56-kbps modems built in; all have an included or optional keyboard. All use subnotebook processors such as Intel's Ultra Low Voltage Pentium III-M, plus at least 128MB of RAM--plenty of computing power for typical office work, though a bit slow for graphics-intensive tasks.

Write This Way

Windows XP Tablet PC Edition lets you write on screen in three ways. The operating system ships with Journal, a utility with an interface that resembles a legal pad; working with Journal comes closest to the experience of writing on paper. The Tablet Input Panel (TIP)--a window a couple of inches high that stretches across the width of the display, something like the pen-input window on a PDA screen--works with any Windows application. A Write Anywhere option turns almost the entire screen into a TIP.

Finally, pen-enabled applications should be available when (or shortly after) the first Tablet PCs ship in early November. These range from third-party offerings (such as Alias Sketchbook, Zinio Reader, Corel Grafigo, and Franklin Covey TabletPlanner) to Microsoft freebies like Office XP extensions and utilities like Snippet. This last application allows you to circle and annotate sections of Journal notes, a Web page, or an Office document, and drop the snipped section into an e-mail message or other document.

The TIP recognizes and transforms handwriting into editable text that appears in whatever application you're working in. It includes a software keyboard, and lets you switch quickly between writing with the stylus and using it for highlighting, editing, and moving the cursor.

In Journal, "digital ink" records an image of your writing (or drawing). Journal offers few editing functions and doesn't perform handwriting recognition on the fly. You can insert extra space on your page, but I found this tricky to do. You can't select and correct your work on the fly with the stylus, either; you have to switch to an eraser tool to delete your writing, or to a lasso tool to select and then move or delete entire sections.

You can convert the handwritten Journal notes you select into text, and export them to other applications. One cool Journal feature is that your handwritten notes are searchable: I didn't believe it until I successfully searched some notes for unconverted text.

I wrote a long e-mail message fairly comfortably using the stylus, and the handwriting recognition engine in the TIP worked surprisingly well for me; it even recognized some words that I judged illegible. Recognition in Journal was less successful, though, and other PC World editors ran into difficulty with the TIP's handwriting recognition.

Touching Experience

When the stylus tip is positioned within about an eighth of an inch of the screen, you can move the cursor and objects, but you have to touch the tip directly to the screen to write. Having worked in the past with touch-sensitive pen-input devices, I found it difficult to get used to resting my palm on the screen. All the devices have hardened surfaces, but if the vendor offers a thin screen protector, I recommend buying it.

Tablet PCs come in two basic designs: a "convertible" notebook, with a screen that can be twisted around to lie flat on top of its keyboard for use as a tablet; and a slate, to which you attach accessories like a USB keyboard or docking station. Most docking stations hold their tablets upright--so they can serve as monitors--while adding ports and drive bays.

Acer's tablet is a convertible; Fujitsu, HP, Motion Computing, and ViewSonic opted for slates (though you can latch the HP tablet onto a keyboard and use it much like a notebook). Most slate makers sell keyboards and docking stations as options ranging in price from $40 to $50 for the former and from $200 to $300 for the latter.

Windows XP Tablet PC Edition hardware specs require bezel buttons to handle such functions as Ctrl-Alt-Delete (soft reboot), and switching from portrait to landscape mode. But each tablet implements these differently. I found the Fujitsu Stylistic's buttons the easiest to understand and the most logically placed.

Will my next portable PC be a tablet? Probably--because I like having a computer with me in meetings and on the subway and because Tablet PC Edition's pen input worked for me. The tablets command about a $500 premium over a standard notebook, but for true corridor warriors, the extra productivity may justify the price. And if Microsoft is right, we may eventually have no choice in the matter: The company believes all notebooks will have tablet capabilities within five years.

SUMMARY

Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC Edition