Pipe Dream: Netbook Tablet PC
At JPT, we like to keep things fresh and new. Therefore, we are debuting a new segment to our coverage today. Pipe Dream pieces will describe devices that Evan and I wish existed and could be made with today’s technology, but no one currently does.
Yesterday, I was in class and noticing that tablet PC’s are slowly starting to catch on with college students. Having taken many classes where hand written notes are still a must (diagrams and formulas don’t lend themselves too well to being typed with a keyboard), I completely understand the appeal of a tablet PC.
In spite of the convenience of having a tablet PC though, they are still a little too expensive for the added functionality they give. Also, most tablet PC’s are too small to be everyday computers. Since tablet PC’s are work best as a secondary computer, it would make sense to combine tablets with another class of computers that work best supplementing full-size machines, netbooks.
Netbooks have slowing gotten cheaper since their inception. Over Black Friday, newer Atom-based models were available for $300 or less. Even assuming the added cost of a digitizer and hinge mechanism, a netbook tablet could definitely be had for less than $500.
Such an aggressive price point could be exactly what tablets have needed to really catch on. I can really see a large potential market for an ultraportable computer that can do 90% of everything you do on a computer with the addition of handwriting support.
I am aware that Asus is working on a touchscreen Eee PC for next year, but a touchscreen is only half of the way to a netbook tablet.
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Like the new segment. Am looking forward to future pieces!!
Thanks for your post on this subject. I have a lot of academic papers I need to read through, mostly in PDF format. I end up printing them to paper, taking highlighter markets and pens of different colors to them (to annotate / take notes as I read through and find the most useful parts to me) and then I usually end up typing up notes in a separate OpenDocument document about the notes I’ve taken. The problem is that my handwritten annotations stay on printed paper, so my desk ends up accumulating printed PDF documents (some of them very large — 50 pages or more). So my annotations are not digitized. Nor can they be shared (I would like to be able to share annotations with colleagues for collaboration purposes). It strikes me that the tablet is a great tool to use in this academic context of taking notes in classrooms and also annotating academic papers. But its still an expensive proposition (for example, I’ve read great reviews about the new HP 2730p tablet but HP sells that as an enterprise / business PC at prices that push the $2000 envelope). Besides the hardware, the annotating software is an important factor too. I’m a big believer in ISO documentation standards. OpenDocument is now an ISO standard as is Adobe’s PDF version 1.7 … annotations that are digitally added to a PDF can be structured as FDF (Forms Data Format) whereby FDF is actually part of the PDF specification (but FDF separated from an original untouched PDF itself). This is great because FDF can then be versioned in a repository on a server such as running subversion. This might be a bit overkill for most students wanting to take notes in a classroom, but perhaps not. Even some of the higher end Master’s degrees are becoming more multi-disciplinary (such as Financial Engineering where people are entering into those programs with backgrounds in math, computer science, physics). Hence, being able to collaborate and form study groups among students is becoming increasingly important in an increasingly complex world where the problems to solve such as global climate change require collaboration and team work. Is there anything about there, tablet PC – wise, that is both relatively less expensive (hardware) and software wie which saves hand-written annotations and notes into ISO standard documentation formats? I’m sorry, but the days of being locked into Microsoft’s proprietary Word formats and schema are finished. The world can not stand any longer for proprietary lock-ins (imagine a future scenario 5 years from now — sorry Mr. Al Gore, but the notes our brilliant scientists took in 2008 about global warming have been lost because he used at that time a tablet PC that required a proprietary document format which is now deprecated and we can’t easily get to these notes, so they are now lost, so the water is rising rapidly and Bill Gates has digitally locked us out of knowledge. Oops. And by the way, Steve Jobs is no better because he doesn’t like pens and styluses and doesn’t believe in tablets and all he thinks is that multi touch is nirvana and solves all problems).
oops, correction to my original post above, I meant to write:
“taking highlighter markers”
not markets!
Even though I’m a fast typist, maybe I should have hand-written that sentence?
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