In late 2002, the tablet PC launched amid claims that it
would revolutionise the way people worked and bring pen technology
into the mainstream. Bill Gates predicted, "Within five years, most
mobile PCs will have tablet PC functionality."
With just over a year to go, it looks like this prediction will
not come true. The tablet specification has failed to sell, and it
has not opened up the anticipated significant new application
areas. As an alternative to proprietary pen technologies, it has
consolidated its position, but that is all.
Almost four years on from launch, Microsoft is producing a
second version of its pen extensions as part of the Windows Vista
operating system, but will this change the prognosis of steady but
low growth?
At present, tablets are used primarily in sectors such as
healthcare, local government, utilities, petrochemicals, financials
and education.
Analyst company IDC said suppliers have concentrated on vertical
applications such as transport, logistics or field service, where
tablets could have a big role to play. In many of these instances,
the PCs have been ruggedised which is why the specialist companies
have benefited from the tablet market.
There is demand for tablet PCs but, according to IDC figures, it
represents only about 1% of the total notebook PC market. By 2010
this will have grown to 3%, IDC said.
Andrew Brown, IDC programme manager for mobile computing and
mobile devices, said, "The market is pretty stagnant but we do see
the volumes creeping up steadily year after year."
However, he added, "The volumes may be doubling each year but
they are still very, very small."
For the most part, the role of the tablet PC is to get
information that is traditionally written on paper forms into the
system more quickly. By transferring those forms into a pen-enabled
digital format, products such as Microsoft Office Infopath 2003
have allowed an electronic workflow to be created.
The arduous task of typing in the day's paper forms has been
eliminated and this time-saving is where much of the return on
investment lies.
Cambridgeshire County Council's Social Services Department, for
example, uses tablets to provide a mobile information-gathering and
sharing system. Its elderly-patient care team comprises several
agencies that use collaborative software to harmonise the service
they offer to clients. Before the advent of the electronic service,
an elderly patient would be visited separately by a social worker
and a healthcare worker, and most of their questions would be
duplicated.
The council's ICT department devised a tablet application, the
Cambridgeshire Assessment Tool, to create a single patient record
that could be shared by the visiting team - with the additional
benefit that because the tablet uses a pen, the change was less
noticeable to team members and clients.
The department reckons the tablet-based system saves the
council £3m a year by eliminating assessment duplication and has
reduced administrative costs by £850,000.
Key to success in Cambridgeshire, however, is that the front end
of the system has been developed in-house. If the tablet is to take
off as a product that can be deployed across different industry
sectors, this flexibility is vital, but expensive.
Beyond custom applications, the industry is looking at
developing specialist tablet applications. Ken Chan, product
manager at Toshiba, said, "We partner specialist developers and
introduce them to businesses that are looking for bespoke
applications. We have not gone as far as putting in our own
software because everybody has a slightly different twist on what
they want."
Instead, Toshiba uses specialist developers to implement custom
applications for end-users. Chan said, "I think our customers are
pretty happy to accept the fact that the tablet PC adds a little
more dynamic usage to the notebook and, to them, that is
justification enough."
To many potential users, though, justification is bound up with
price and the tablet PC is still costlier than normal laptops.
"While the cost of the pen module has come down, it is still higher
than the standard machine," said Brown.
One option for the industry is to offer handwriting features as
standard on laptops. "The idea of all components just becoming
standard fittings is fine but every little component makes a
difference to the price," said Brown. "Adding anything non-standard
is a gamble."
Another suggestion for reducing the price to end-users is to
replace the electromagnetic screen and pen used in tablet PCs with
a cheaper passive touchscreen similar to those used in PDAs and
mobile phones. A touchscreen also means that a tablet PC does not
become unusable if the pen is misplaced - any stylus can be used.
However, some industry observers feel the passive touchscreen is
dated and does not offer the accuracy possible with electromagnetic
fields.
For now, then, the choice to go for a tablet PC remains an
additional outlay, the case for which has to be argued. The
Cambridgeshire example shows that paying a little bit more can be
justified if there is a compelling need and the realised savings
are high enough, but the implementation costs are inflated by the
need for bespoke software.
This, however, is where Vista comes in. The new Windows
operating system will be accompanied by a pen-capable Office Suite
containing forms creation software that can be integrated into a
collaborative workflow, making it a much simpler option than the
bespoke applications route.
This will also further enhance Microsoft Onenote - arguably the
only true tablet PC application - which is the equivalent of a word
processor for the pen-driven world.
The hardware challenges are also being tackled. Effective
handwriting recognition has always been a bone of contention with
users. Vista offers an advance on Windows XP for tablet PCs because
the recognition can be tailored to a particular user, in the same
way as speech recognition systems.
So how would an application like Onenote best be used?
David Bradshaw, a principal analyst at Ovum, said, "The ideal
situation is that you sit in a room and take handwritten notes. Not
only can you file the handwritten text away but also accurately
search it."
At the moment this is only possible once the contents have been
recognised. Bradshaw said, "The ideal would be if the recognition
system was reliable enough to use it in a raw state without having
to go back over the notes and correct them."
Although Onenote does have a search feature, it searches
handwritten files by converting the writing to text. So a word
that is incorrectly recognised becomes invisible to the search
engine. This is better than nothing but Vista's trainable pen input
should improve the hit rate.
In the meantime, objections about practicality and cost may both
be tackled by a new, smaller tablet PC on the horizon. Despite
their relative portability, tablets have been criticised for still
being too heavy for sustained use when carried like a clipboard,
and computers based on the Ultra-Mobile PC (UMPC) specification
devised by Microsoft's Origami Project are starting to appear at
shows and conferences. These are much smaller and lighter versions
of the tablet and look like oversized Gameboys.
But although the UMPC will carry the whole Windows Vista
operating system, Brown does not believe such a device would prove
popular with end-users because it would fall between two stools -
between high-end handheld devices and ultraportable notebooks.
"They will have even less impact than tablet PCs," he said.
"The cost of UMPC systems versus usability is not an equation
that really works for the majority of users," said Brown. Although
they may be popular in countries such as Japan, he does not expect
European end-users to use such a device as their main work PC.
Microsoft's original vision was that specific new roles would
give more end-users access to pen technology and provide a
horizontal element to what has been traditionally a vertical market
product. "Microsoft pitched it as being something for knowledge
workers and corridor warriors," said Brown.
At the moment, the main attraction of the
tablet PC is its "wow factor". It attracts attention wherever it is
used and it may yet be word of mouth that makes or breaks the
technology.
Bradshaw said, "I think you will see people using it at a
conference, for instance, and there may be a tipping point
phenomenon. If enough people see it, then it could take off. If it
does reach the point where people see it working for other people
then, yes, it will start to gain widespread adoption. But I cannot
say that has happened yet."
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