The Business Blog at Intuitive.com

Dave Taylor has been involved with the Internet since 1980 and is widely recognized as an expert on both technical and business issues. He has been published over a thousand times, launched four Internet-related startup companies, has written twenty business and technical books and holds both an MBA and MS Ed. Dave maintains four weblogs: The Business Blog at Intuitive.com, Ask Dave Taylor, Dave On Film, and Attachment Parenting Blog. Dave is an award-winning speaker, sought after conference and workshop participant and frequent guest on radio and podcast programs.

Thinking about the X41 Tablet PC one month later...

I've been evaluating a Lenovo IBM X41 Tablet PC for about a month now and while I still have concerns about performance and occasionally am baffled by the subtleties of Windows for the Tablet PC, I'm finding that it integrates nicely into my workflow.

This morning when someone commented on my X41 Tablet PC entry with the question:

"Dave, interested to know whether you think its the hardware or the OS that is letting you down. Seems like its mostly the OS. Let me know please as I am looking at the x41 vs other Tablet PCs."

I thought it would be useful to move the answer into its own weblog entry, as a logical followup to my two previous articles on the X41 and Windows for Tablet PC: Lenovo IBM X41 Tablet PC: I'm Not Impressed and, a few days later, Windows for Tablet PC Handwriting Recognition is Superb.

To me, the key question is whether the cost and hassles of managing with yet one more piece of sophisticated technology is outweighed by the benefits of the unit. And at this point, I'd have to say yes, the X41 Tablet PC is a good solution. Let me explain my thinking, though...

Rather than look for new solutions with the X41, my goal was really to try and drop it into my existing work environment, where I attend lots of lectures and talks, go to multi-day meetings and strategic planning sessions and spend a fair amount of time consulting with clients on the phone.

The second barrier is that my preferred operating system is Mac OS X, not Windows XP, so everything else being equal, I'd much rather have a Tablet Mac (what I call a PowerPad Mac). But at this point in time, the only OS choice seems to be Windows for Tablet PC, so that's what I'm running.

And you know what? It's a great addition to my professional life, and the combination of light weight, long battery life and wifi connectivity, coupled with the low profile layout, have proven quite attractive once I started using the X41 regularly.

As an example, one area where I've already found the Tablet PC indispensable is with my phone consultations (and phone calls in general): by running Windows Journal I can scribble down notes and to-do items as I go along, all without my clients being distracted by a single key click. Very useful, and doubly so when coupled with a nice headset (and VOIP, but I digress).

Then, instead of having piles of notes disorganized on my desk, I have a folder for each client and a set of easily viewed notes. I am finding that I don't even need to worry about the ability to translate my scribbles into text, interestingly, though I can certainly envision an environment where that would be valuable.

I also review a lot of documents, both in PDF form and as email or Word files. Email can be answered and Word files can be edited or revised, but Grahl Software's splendid PDF Annotator is an amazing program that lets me use regular Tablet PC notational conventions (circling words, scribbling in margins) on any PDF, with it then saving a new version of the PDF that includes the marginalia and commentary. This is almost a "killer app" for the Tablet PC by itself, in my line of work.

But the X41, for all its benefits and sexy design, is still slow. When I wake the unit from standby, I sometimes have to wait 30-60 seconds or longer before it's fully functional, what sounds like a tiny delay but still feels darn long. Launching programs is puzzling too: sometimes I can double click on a file or app icon and a few seconds later have everything going great, but other times nothing happens and a few minutes later I'll "right click" and choose "Open", just to find, a few minutes later, that I now have two versions of the app running. It feels like an old PC in this regards, enough power to run applications, but not necessarily enough to fly, if y'know what I mean.

I also still miss the human factors engineering that I've become accustomed to within the Apple community: a one-button sleep function, for example, is sorely missed. The overall design is typical IBM (though the X41 is the first product actually designed by Lenovo, they're clearly not straying far from the IBM design guidelines yet) and, well, it's boring and pedestrian. Not a show-stopper, but I really want to see a sleek brushed aluminum Tablet PC that has just one or two key buttons on the screen and otherwise feels less like a technological wonder and more like a digital pad of paper.

And, finally, when my evaluatory period is up, am I going to buy an X41 Tablet PC from Lenovo or one of its outlets? That's probably the $64,000 question (adjusted for inflation), and at this point I'd say that I'm leaning towards buying one, but I really want to experience a few different solutions from other vendors: I'm convinced that for all its flaws and hiccups I can work well in Windows for Tablet PC and, down the road, Windows Vista for Tablet PC, but the X41? I'm not at 100% yet...

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