Tablet PC to Surface

If you know me then you know I have been a fan of the Tablet computing form factor for over 10 years. I started working with tablets in in 2001 and have built software for these devices for over 12 years.

I wrote a book to help developers to get started building software for the Tablet PC in 2002. It received a lot of attention in the little community of tablet PC enthusiasts that existed at the time and I ended up working with the Tablet PC team in Redmond for a few years.

This is the first convertible Tablet PC I owned, the Acer C100. It was a great little device and I wrote Getting Started with Tablet PC Development on this device. I also wrote most of eXtreme .NET using this Tablet.



Once I started working with the Tablet PC team at Microsoft I was able to get my hands on the Toshiba M200, pictured below. This was a amazing convertible table for its time and provided the main platform for my work with Tablet PCs for the first few months of my work.

I then discovered the joy of a pure slate tablet. The Sahara tablet from TabletKiosk that I next acquired was my primary mobile device for a couple of years. I still have it on my desk in my home office and it works great. It was a beautiful writing experience in a form factor that just made a lot of sense. The screen is approximately US letter (or A4) sized and applications such as OneNote are an absolute joy to use with the rich inking capability of the active stylus.

Then the hiatus began, In 2006 I got involved in other projects that required some different thinking, and while my heart was still longing for an amazing tablet experience, the hardware didn't keep up with what I needed to achieve on a tablet. My trusty Sahara kept going and I did get a Toshiba M400 that I used for a while. I found the combination of smartphone and laptop was doing enough for me. Smartphones had got smarter and acted as better mobile devices than a tablet and the laptop was my machine for getting 'real' work done.

Then in 2010 Apple unveiled the iPad, I saw the potential but was disappointed by the lack of stylus support.I still bought one and started filling in the gaps for some of the missing functionality I wanted.

The iPad is still really a companion device. It is not my full-time work device. Yet is is clearly possible for a tablet to be your full time work device. The new Sahara Tablet PC from TabletKiosk is an amazingly powerful PC, supporting touch and active stylus. This is more than powerful enough to do everything you can do on PC and work as a tablet. The screen is a decent size and it supports an external monitor for when you are at your desk.

I am sure you a now thinking about the new Surface product from Microsoft.

I bought the first generation Surface Pro device and found it painful to use, the screen is just a bit too small. I love the active stylus support but find that while Windows 8 has had the shell redesigned for touch I still need to spend a lot of time in Outlook, Excel and Word and these applications on the desktop are far from touch optimized. I am also not a fan of the keyboard.

In my opinion if a tablet requires a keyboard to make it useful it is not in fact a tablet at all, but some type of laptop.

Saying all that, I purchased a Surface 2 device earlier this week and have been using it for the last few days while attending meetings. It is light and much faster than the Surface RT. I also got a keyboard for the Surface 2, but I have thrown it away. I want a tablet, not a laptop. The keyboard experience is useless, and if I wanted to use a keyboard I would take a laptop to the meeting.

One of the main differences of using a tablet in a meeting vs. a laptop is the fact I can lay it down flat on the table. It then doesn't act as a physical barrier between me and my colleagues in the meeting. A slate laid down flat on the table will change the social dynamics of the meeting. It is clear to other people you are not hiding behind your screen but openly engaged in the meeting. This means I have not yet even used the kick stand on the Surface 2. I think it is possible I never will.

I will try to keep you updated with how I get on with the Surface 2. Right now I can see myself using it in certain circumstances and it will have a place in my work life for a while.

Social networks, sharing and your personal information

The latest wave of social media frenzy is about sharing your location and knowing where your friends are, or have just been.
This is something that I have discussed and presented on many times before. In fact in 2003 I presented proof of concept applications on the Microsoft smartphone platform ( then it was actually called Microsoft Smartphone) and the Microsoft Tablet PC platform. These applications enabled the user to post their current location to a blog or shared feed. I have used a number of variations of this to keep my 'Where was Dr. Neil' page updated.

In the last couple of years the rise in popularity of Facebook and Twitter have lead to an increase of related location sharing services. Services like foursquare or Facebook's own checkin system enable you to share your location with the world. This is great for those occasions where you want everyone to know where you are. These systems are mostly an all or nothing solution, either share with everyone or no one. So when you just want to let a couple of people know where you are located it's is back to the old text message or even resorting to call them.
It is for this reason we built Locus. Locus enables you share your location when you chose and with whoever you chose, including Facebook and Twitter.

I truly believe the pendulum will start to swing the other way now, with private personal information becoming more valuable. This value will start to be realized by the consumer and leveraged by the consumer to their own advantage.

When will you start to take more care of the information you share and who you share it with?

What is a table for?

Let me ask you a question, what is a table for?
It may seem like a strange question yet it is not something we typically think about.
Furniture is taken for granted, in fact sometimes the word furniture is employed to mean the adornments in or on an object. You could say someone with lots of facial jewelry has 'furniture on their face' or, as I have heard it said, they have 'face furniture'
In our everyday lives we utilize furniture to enhance comfort and to perform functions, it is these functions that are worth exploring.
Think of all the things you do at a table. Eat food, work on your computer, layout a puzzle game, hold a meeting, and many more 'events' occur at a meeting. Consider which of those events take great advantage of the horizontal surface that is presented by the table. Playing puzzle game with friends, or holding a meeting at a table is something that clearly requires a horizontal platform. The horizontal nature of a table with multiple sides open and available for people to sit, presents the ideal place for holding a meeting. It enables eye to eye contact, allowing all participants to engage in a much fuller conversation. Such a large portion of communication between people is non-verbal and by facing the other parties around a table we can pick up on these subtleties. We can understand from proximity and quick glances of the eyes the nature of personal relationships between people.
Many technical solutions ignore the human interactions that are crucial for us to work together and create far shallower modes of engagement. Instant messenger, for example, provides a mode of communication between multiple parties, each siting at their own workstation. The nuances of passion, humor and disgust during the conversation can be hinted at with the use of emoticons. These provide a limited set of clues to hint towards the users feeling as they make a statement. The vocabulary of these is not just limiting but also deceptive. A person may want you to feel they are being jovial while really they are sad. You would only ever pick this up if you actually with the person. The telephone can provide a better medium for judging the mood of someone, through the tone of their voice and through other audio clues.
Yet nothing bis better than sitting at the table with someone for truly understanding their feelings and position on a topic. Most digital content is still presented using vertically oriented displays, yet these displays act as barriers to the optimum personal communication.
When working with the Tablet PC team at Microsoft in 2003- 2005 one thing became very clear, the slate form factor could radically change the dynamics of a meeting room. In a typical meeting at Microsoft people will bring their laptops and sit around a table, each staring into their own screen. This is incredibly anti social and detrimental to the level of engagement of the people in the room. In a meeting where each participant had a slate device the device did not act a barrier between the individuals at the table. Tabletop computing now has the opportunity to take this to the next level. By sharing the content directly on the tabletop the number of barriers is further reduced. A personal screen can present personal distractions during a meeting (email, IM, etc...), on a shared screen the focus can be on just the content desired.
Today I presented these concepts to a potential client showing the nsquared business pack for Microsoft Surface. It is clear that these applications can really change the dynamics of a meeting. Even as we were discussing the requirements of the project we were sketching out the ideas on nsquared thoughts. Tabletop computing should start to bring new ways of human engagement to our meeting rooms in the coming years and this will help us to work better together than many earlier technologies.

Another codecast interview

Last month when I was in Redmond I managed to catch up with my friend Ken Levy who drives the CodeCast podcast. We went for a great lunch at an indian restaurant and afterwards he set the ipod to record and we chatted about a number of topics, including Microsoft Surface, tablet devices, Microsoft Translator and the Messenger Connect SDK. All products I have been busy working with over the last couple years.

You can download the podcost from here.

Vista on the iTablet

This weekend I took the challenge of installing Vista on my iTablet. Up until a little birthday present arrived in my inbox last week I had been told that the iTablet would not support Vista due to BIOS issues. Well it appears that the BIOS issues can now be resolved with a BIOS update from Amtec (the OEM).
I am always fearful of flashing the BIOS, it used to be something that would often leave a computer dead and useless (in the old days). This was a painless enough process that could all be done under Windows XP.
I was considering installing Vista on a spare hard drive just in case it all went wrong, but in the end decided to simply back up my data and zap the whole machine for a clean install of Vista. I am now super glad for it. The iTablet has a new lease of life and seems to work even better than before, faster response etc...
The screen rotate hardware button is the only thing I havent got working yet. Anyone out there solved this?

Toshiba R400 in the hands of two Aussie Influentials

Uber Tablet does it again with the Toshiba R400 in the hands of two Aussie Influentials
How does he manage it?
Great work boys!