Bill Gates: Microsoft pursuing 'a lot of' tablet projects

&#62; <i>Bill Gates has been an unashamed promoter of pen-based computing for the longest time, and it's fun to see that even cold hard facts are insufficient to shake his confidence.</i><p>Does "hard facts" simply mean that iPhone doesn't use a stylus and is still sold? That says almost nothing about using pen-based input. iPhone didn't have one, so people didn't use one. App creators knew there's no stylus, so they designed UI accordingly. That's pretty much it...<p>Now if MS stepped up with their Pad and introduced a high quality handwriting recognition, people would want to use a stylus for it.<p>PS. I'll give my stylus when you take it from my cold, dead hands. I love using it for web browsing. And I love my task switcher. Not everyone lives S.J.'s dreams.

I have both a tc1100 and an iPad. I find that Windows XP Tablet's text recognition is phenomenal. However, my text input is faster one-handed on the iPad in <i>portrait</i> mode than it is on the tc1100 writing with the stylus. My text input with the landscape keyboard two-handed is almost the same as on a physical keyboard.<p>Also, the user experience on the iPad is much more refined.<p>When the iPhone/iPad ecosystem matures, I expect Apple to reintroduce the stylus. Either that, or someone will develop a bluetooth stylus. (Which would exploit the capacitative touchscreen, but add pressure sensitivity.)

I agree that some sort of pen based solution would be useful. Imagine a screen where we could write anywhere on it then select any area, like a drawing, and paste the text. Being able to compose our own notebooks like Leonardo is the endgame.<p><a href="http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&#38;ie=UTF-8&#38;q=leonardos+notebooks" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&#38;ie=UTF-8&#3...</a>

I love pen input but touch too(touch between options, be able to draw and write).<p>In fact, I think Apple does too, and they are going to enter the market with only touch, and when mass production is ready, add cameras and pen too. They always do things in an progressive evolutionary way.<p>MS tried tablets but not changed the UI enough. Ultra expensive and you need a pen for anything(only one detailed point, we have ten fingers).<p>IMHO Chinese, Korean and Japanese really need the pen for writing.

You can use the iPhone sausage stylus. <a href="http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/08/sausage-stylus-for-the-iphone-now-on-sale-in-the-us/" rel="nofollow">http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/08/sausage-stylus-for-the-ip...</a>