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Microsoft swallows tablet concept whole

Microsoft's Julius Sinkevicius discusses the company's strategy for tablet PC
Written by Andrew Donoghue, Contributor
Q&A: Microsoft swallows tablet concept whole
Andrew Donoghue
Microsoft's Julius Sinkevicius discusses the company's strategy for Tablet PC

Microsoft has been extolling the virtues of the tablet PC since mid-2000 and has put its considerable marketing weight behind the technology. But some analysts and hardware vendors claim that the relatively high cost of the software giant's operating system is one of the main reasons why tablet sales have been sluggish at best so far.

But with the release of a new generation of tablet hardware and an updated OS expected imminently, the future is looking brighter. ZDNet UK spoke with Microsoft Tablet PC business development manager Julius Sinkevicius about the evolution of tablets and broadening their appeal.

A new version of Microsoft's Tablet operating system should be along in the spring -- could you give some idea of the tweaks and changes you've made with this release?
It will be called Windows XP Tablet Edition 2004 and it will come out the same time as Windows Service Pack 2 [due in the next few months]. The big improvement we have made is in the Tablet input panel. The Tablet input panel on the current version is usually on the bottom of the screen and so the feedback we have received from our users is that there is a visual disconnect between where you are writing on the screen and where the information is being inputted. The improvement we have made it so launch it in place -- so in any Windows application or on a Web form, when you bring your pen to a field where you want to add information, a writing pad will appear right there and when you write information in it will grow according to your handwriting. And then before it sends your handwriting into the application, you'll get a preview of what the information is. The accuracy is improved because you can see what your writing before the application gets it.

We have also made improvements to the context sensitivity of handwriting recognition (HR). Today when you're writing your information into a field the HR assumes you're using English words but we have made improvements to the engine so it knows that when you're writing an email address -- it will recognise the @ symbol and URLs.

We are also releasing a software development kit. In that kit there will be a tool called the Contact Tagging Tool. That allows you to take any application and mark the context of the fields so the handwriting recognition tool can recognise things like phones number and country names in Outlook for example. It is all done using XML and it's simple to use.

That has been one of the issues raised around Tablets -- the cost of re-engineering applications to be compatible? We anticipate that over the longer run companies will want to do that -- they will want to integrate ink but in the short run instead of making these investments we are trying to build a lot of that into the operating system to make it easier for companies to take full advantage of the platform.

Is the price of the OS going to stay the same because some critics claim the high price point is one of things making Tablet PC expensive and consequently holding back their adoption?
In terms of the OS price there are no discussions in place to change the price of the system. The OS is just one of a lot of components in tablets. For a laptop computer to be a tablet there is a hinge involved so the screen can swivel around or there's screen technology so we are just a small component of the whole solution. In order to drive the price of the tablet lower all the components would have to be involved.

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Get ready for a bigger dose of tablet PCs
Q&A: Microsoft swallows tablet concept whole
Tablet PC Toolkit
1963: Sketchpad - the first program that allowed a light pen to be used to create graphical drawing on a computer is created by Ivan Sutherland of MIT.
1964: RAND Corporation builds the first portable tablet computer - the Grafacon. It is almost completely handmade and cost around $18,000.
1970: Sonic Pen 3-D input device released.
1980: The Osborne 1 "portable" computer released. Not a tablet but one of the first truly portable computers despite weighing 24 pounds.
1987: Apple showcases the prototype of the navigator. Never became a market-ready product but had a book-like design and featured some speech recognition.
1989: The GRiDPad 1900 is invented: the world's first Pen and Display IBM PC Compatible tablet. Based on DOS, the pad featured handwriting recognition and pen-based pointing and selection.
1992: Microsoft releases Windows for Pen Computing -- a pen-enabled, cut-down version of Windows 3.1.
1993. Apple releases the Newton. The first mainstream PDA to feature pen technology.
1994: Microsoft releases WinPad which ran the Windows for Pen OS. Also Palm releases the Graffiti handwriting recognition.
1996: The Palm Pilot is released.
1998: Vadem Clio/Sharp TriPad released featuring a keyboard and a pen. Arguable the first convertible tablet PC.
1999: Aqcess Qbe tablet. Very similar to today's tablet PCs.
2000: Gateway Connected Touch Pad and 3 Comms Audrey released -- Internet access devices which included wireless keyboards and touch screens.
2001: The prototypes of today's tablets began showing up
Toshiba tablet PC gets facelift
Microsoft blamed for making tablets hard to swallow
Acer blames Microsoft for slow tablet sales
Tablet PC shipments fizzle out
Manufacturers want masses to swallow tablet PC
Toshiba Portege M200
HP Compaq Tablet PC TC1100
Acer TravelMate C111TCi
NEC Versa T400
Windows XP Tablet PC Edition
Tablet PCs: the first wave

Q&A: Microsoft swallows tablet concept whole
Andrew Donoghue
Microsoft's Julius Sinkevicius discusses the company strategy for tablet PC.

How do you see notebooks and tablets evolving? Do you see them as two distinct product types or will they eventually converge?
Ever since we launched the product our vision has always been that within five years most portable computers -- meaning laptops and notebooks -- will eventually have tablet PC technologies. We are starting to see that right now; for example Acer introduced a machine last year (Acer TravelMate 250P) that was a full laptop computer and the screen didn't swivel around but it did have a digitiser and it allows you to use a pen.

We recognise that not everyone will have note-taking requirements with a need to use a pen all the time but they might need one occasionally. And it's not just for note-taking it's for navigation too. There are around 40 OEMs in the market today making tablets and we are starting to hear about evolution of that technology into mainstream notebooks. Up until recently most of the tablets have been 10 inch or 12 inch screens but last November, both Acer and Gateway released 14-inch tablets with integrated DVDs. With Acer the difference between their tablet PC and their notebook is around £75. A user could walk in and buy it and not even know they are buying a tablet and able to write on the screen.

Analyst Meta Group recently claimed that tablets are not really suitable for general workers yet and are really only worthwhile for specific niches such as education, healthcare and manufacturing. Does Microsoft agree with that observation?
We definitely saw early uptake in healthcare and education. But as the middle wave of tablets integrate Centrino technology and the predominance of wireless and the strength of the machines, we are starting to see some companies putting tablets on their standard lists as the thin and light notebook. Also Office 2004 has ink integrated into it and that's designed for the broader information worker. So definitely early uptake in the niche areas but we are still positioning this as a general information worker machine.

When do you see that 'broadening out' happening?
Enterprises' evaluation cycles are pretty long compared to a consumer. We have seen a lot of pilots, companies 20, 30, 40 at a time, bringing them in house and doing a full evaluation. As the second wave of tablets came out in November last year -- with the new Toshiba and the HP Unit incorporating the Centrino technology -- I think that is going to drive adoption. A lot of it has to do with their adoption of Windows XP too. As we are a super-set of Windows XP, it's not as simple a case of saying I am bringing tablets into my environment, it's a case of bringing Windows XP and Office 2004 into the environment.

What's Microsoft's take on how long tablets have actually been around for and how long the development cycle has taken?
We began a ten-base Windows initiative about a decade ago but that was based on a whole different set of principles. The handwriting technology that is in Tablet today has probably been in development for about a decade in Microsoft Labs. One of the reasons we waited so long is that we felt for Tablet to be successful it had to be a full-functioning Windows machine. The screen technology had to be rich enough to capture handwriting in a very high-fidelity type of way. About 2000/2001 we felt we were on the brink of all this coming together. Three or four years ago we couldn't get a machine that had that much power; that had a longer battery life. Now we feel the technology is all coming together especially the battery technology.

Is there any emerging technology you would like to see incorporated into tablets over the next couple of years?
We know that there is fuel-cell technology coming. It's very interesting but we don't know what that means in terms of mobility -- can it work on a plane? Are there security concerns because of the fuel involved? Biometric devices are definitely interesting -- we have already seen a few implementations of fingerprint readers. But we know that that technology in certain instances can be spoofed. Also the advancement made in the small CCD cameras on smartphones -- is it possible to have some kind of retinal recognition. Also in the world of LCD technology we hear about formable and bendable screen technology and there also always improvements in screen technology. Also the pervasiveness of Wi-Fi makes Tablet very compelling. Anything that allows you to increase the range of input options is really interesting to us.

Previous page


Get ready for a bigger dose of tablet PCs
Q&A: Microsoft swallows tablet concept whole
Tablet PC Toolkit
1963: Sketchpad - the first program that allowed a light pen to be used to create graphical drawing on a computer is created by Ivan Sutherland of MIT.
1964: RAND Corporation builds the first portable tablet computer - the Grafacon. It is almost completely handmade and cost around $18,000.
1970: Sonic Pen 3-D input device released.
1980: The Osborne 1 "portable" computer released. Not a tablet but one of the first truly portable computers despite weighing 24 pounds.
1987: Apple showcases the prototype of the navigator. Never became a market-ready product but had a book-like design and featured some speech recognition.
1989: The GRiDPad 1900 is invented: the world's first Pen and Display IBM PC Compatible tablet. Based on DOS, the pad featured handwriting recognition and pen-based pointing and selection.
1992: Microsoft releases Windows for Pen Computing -- a pen-enabled, cut-down version of Windows 3.1.
1993. Apple releases the Newton. The first mainstream PDA to feature pen technology.
1994: Microsoft releases WinPad which ran the Windows for Pen OS. Also Palm releases the Graffiti handwriting recognition.
1996: The Palm Pilot is released.
1998: Vadem Clio/Sharp TriPad released featuring a keyboard and a pen. Arguable the first convertible tablet PC.
1999: Aqcess Qbe tablet. Very similar to today's tablet PCs.
2000: Gateway Connected Touch Pad and 3 Comms Audrey released -- Internet access devices which included wireless keyboards and touch screens.
2001: The prototypes of today's tablets began showing up
Toshiba tablet PC gets facelift
Microsoft blamed for making tablets hard to swallow
Acer blames Microsoft for slow tablet sales
Tablet PC shipments fizzle out
Manufacturers want masses to swallow tablet PC
Toshiba Portege M200
HP Compaq Tablet PC TC1100
Acer TravelMate C111TCi
NEC Versa T400
Windows XP Tablet PC Edition
Tablet PCs: the first wave

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