First look at Microsoft's Tablet PC

Computerworld - For all the hype that Bill Gates has been generating around the Tablet PC concept, you could be excused for thinking the idea is a new one for Microsoft Corp. But in fact, it's a second go-round for the company, years after its ill-fated "Windows for Pen Computing" experiment a decade ago. The current software shows that Microsoft has learned from its mistakes.

The company is expected to officially launch its Tablet PC Nov. 7, with participation from major laptop vendors and Asia-based original design manufacturers.

Soft Touch

The operating system is Windows XP Professional Tablet Edition, a superset of the standard XP Pro. Microsoft has added a program called Microsoft Journal, which is intended to be a note-taking replacement for the pad of paper you would typically take to a meeting. Everything you write on the pad is stored as graphics—called digital ink—unless you highlight an area and ask the machine to recognize what you wrote. Then it takes its best shot at turning your scribbles into ASCII text. This actually works quite well, even on my often illegible handwriting.

Write on! Despite the hype, this useful machine is clearly more than just another laptop.

Each page has a title area you can label, and if you call up a list of recently viewed pages, the index displays the handwritten title you gave each page.

It's easy to change colors and to highlight items as well as handwriting. If you need space between items you've already written, you can simply insert the space and drop the remaining text farther down the page. You can choose to erase as well as write, and if you "scratch out" something you wrote, that gesture gets interpreted as an erasure (though I sometimes had trouble getting this feature to work properly).

One very nice feature of Journal is the ability to start a page with any of several different stationery templates: lined "paper," graph-paper grids, calendar forms, memos. It's an obvious sort of thing that's incredibly handy.

	The TravelMate 100 converts from notebook to Tablet PC.