I suppose our personal concern about the Scribbler, the thing that would keep us from buying it, is its apparent fragility. It is engineered with certain social assumptions, you might say, to the point that we would likely be unable to take it anywhere without breaking one or more pieces! Or even use it at home safely, for that matter!

Consider some classic photos of how we use our tablets:

Now consider this take on the Electrovaya Scribbler:

Danger! Careful! Gently! And that lovely little extremely clever flippable and twistable touchpad thing? We’d destroy it in a week. (Luckily we did not destroy it in the demo model.)

So all in all, as we face the question of what our next tablet will be, given the demise of the TC1100, a Scribbler is unlikely. 

People (aka Warner Crocker at gottabemobile.com) expect us to produce a serious review. Enough of the glamour shots. No more Scribbler with flowers and sunsets and ravines.

We were struck in reviewing the Scribbler how tough it must be to be a Tablet PC designer. Just because everything comes together in one neat little package in a Tablet PC (see perfect egg, here), so customer preference speaks at a hundred different points.  

In regular life, I have a computer; then if I want a thick pen or a thin pen, a heavy pen or a light pen; if I want glossy paper or a nice linen, I go out and buy them. But when I choose my tablet, I choose not just my computer but all these very personal things.

First Impressions

The Scribbler has the feeling of a hefty notepad lying on the knee. It’s a larger unit than the TC1100, with a 12.4" screen instead of the 10.4" we’ve had to accustom ourselves to in the last two years. The fact that the TC1100 does the smaller screen with the same number of pixels gives it a super-crisp visual appeal that we love, but there is a lot to be said for having that much more screen. I (Lyn) found myself reaching for the Scribbler to read and take notes over the TC1100 during its visit to our house, in order to have that extra space. And you get it for almost the same weight–3.5 lbs for the Scribbler vs. 2.9 lbs in the slate mode for the TC1100.

It writes a little different from the TC1100. It makes a scribble scribble sound, consistent with the name ‘Scribbler.’ We liked the drag and the nice feel of friction of the pen on paper, compared to the glossy feel of the TC1100 (of which we’ve never been great fans). I also picked it up for notetaking during its visit to enjoy the feel of the stylus on the screen.

The speakers get big points from us. We’ve grown accustomed to having the TC1100 talk into our bellies, with the speakers on what is the bottom edge when in slate and portrait modes. But it’s still a little odd. Kind of like some strange alternative medicine vibration healing thing. The Scribbler puts the sound where you want to find it: out into the air, travelling to your ear.

The stylus holder, however, is slightly less logical. If you hold the tablet in slate and portrait modes, the pen is awkwardly located on the left bottom side. As a right-handed person, I have to hold out the tablet forward with my left hand and remove the pen with my right hand. This feels strange and non-intuitive. I also worry that the pen will fall out, though it seems fairly secure in the holder.

Indeed, while Electrovaya, unlike HP, figured out that we didn’t want the sound projecting into our stomachs, they somehow thought we’d like to draw out the pen that way.

In landscape mode, it was somewhat less odd, because then the pen would be at the top left–still a reach across with the right hand, but the same as the primary landscape orientation on the TC1100.

(Of course, you have the four orientations available so you can turn things around–but then all the other buttons end up not in their intuitive places, and screen quality isn’t quite the same if it isn’t in primary portrait or primary landscape.) 

It really made us think about the development of tablet technology. Because people have such personal relationships with their Tablet PC and with writing implements, one shouldn’t really have to choose one’s tablet based on the thickness of the pen. It does seem that you can use digitizer pens interchangeably–the TC1100 pen on the Scribbler, for instance–but then it doesn’t store inside the unit, which does seem necessary, given how costly the pens are and how useless the tablet in slate is without one. Perhaps some day the market will be big enough that many other manufacturers will be making many different pens to fit each tablet…ah sweet dreams….

Keep tuned for more review to come…

How we evaluate this piece of hardware is greatly influenced by our experiences of the HP TC1100. For the past two years we have developed a close relationship to our TC1100s and it has been interesting to see this new (temporary) Tablet-PC-Sibling alongside the beloved TC1100.

If you have read this blog even for a minute you know that we have mostly enjoyed our TC110s. They have done their jobs well. The greatest disappointment has been HP’s discontinuation of this particular model which we have addressed here, and here, here, and here. If only Mark Hurd and Patricia Dunn had paid a bit more attention to further developing this model, they may not have had to testify in Congress, not to mention being indicted (Dunn only). Boardroom power plays take away from what is really important to us, the end-users–not to mention that it is quite boring (if one is not involved, at least!).

Ok, but somehow Electrovaya intuited that perhaps the day would come when we’d be in the market for another tablet. And like all TC1100 owners, we’re faced with making the leap some day. In the absence of hybrids, will it be convertible or slate for our next Tablet PC?

Back to the Scribbler:

Here is the basic rundown on the goods we received:

• Electrovaya Scribbler SC 3100 slate
• eraser pen
• keyboard
• docking station
• wire stand
• portfolio bag
• software including recovery cd-rom set

We forgot to ask for the outdoor viewing screen! Rats!

Our review unit had 1280 MB RAM and a 60 GB hard drive

Some features of the Scribbler:

• 12.1 inch XGA TFT 32-bit colour with 180 degree viewing angle
• dual array microphone
• intel centrino 1.6 GHz processor with 2 MB L2 Cache
• Integrated Biometric Device for Finger Print Sensor
• intel 802.11 a/b/g wireless network card
• Optional outdoor viewable screen
• superpolymer lithium 75Wh battery

According to our Wildflowers of Nova Scotia book, that’s a New York Aster keeping the Scribbler company on the estate of Melville Manor. 

So those are the facts. The hard-nosed hardware features of the temporary tablet-PC-Sibling to our TC1100s.

Coming next: our impressions and experiences. In the blogosphere, ever so much more interesting than facts! 

Yes, indeed, it is the Electrovaya touchpad that goes with the Scribbler SC 3100. You slide it out of the right top of the keyboard and slide it in to the side of the key board. You can place the touchpad either on the left or right hand side of the key board (useful for those of you who are left handed). Here is a close-up of what it looks like.

Clever, eh?  

We’re not exactly exhaustive, manual-reading kind of computer users. We’re kind of post-literate when it comes to technology. We expect things to make sense by feel. So we had the Scribbler a few days, and we had more than one conversation about the appearance that there was some "thing" that maybe could detach from the clip-on keyboard, before we figured out that it did detach and, furthermore, what it was. Can you spot it hiding in the picture below?

The origami appearance you see in our mystery picture is because the touchpad itself needs to flip inside the frame that has the connectors to the keyboard in order for it to attach on both the left and rights sides. They probably have a whole special team of elves in a special Santa workshop at Electrovaya who build this little gizmo.

What is this device? 

• Electrovaya’s Complimentary UMPC for your cat? 

• A finger trap for curious Tablet PC onlookers?

• A very clever mousing solution for a Scribbler Tablet PC?

Leave us an answer and tune in for the answer this weekend…

It turns out Warner Crocker writing at gottabemobile.com isn’t the only one who misses us. Electrovaya would like to give us some incentive to get more productive on our tablet pc blog. 

They’re asking if we want to review the Electrovaya Scribbler, a snazzy-looking slate number.

Have they visited tabletology?, we wonder. Do they know what they’re asking for?

They do clarify that we’re on the hook for the price of the unit if we don’t return it from Melville Manor Ravine Daycare (our new digs) in the same condition it was in when it left its Toronto home.

Just don’t ask about the dwarves.

Ink in presenter mode.

I.e. you want to be able to see the current slide and its notes and its context all at once, and you want to be able to ink. Because if you can’t ink on the slides, what good is your Tablet PC in teaching? You might as well have an everyday laptop.

First you need to know the hidden PowerPoint trick. At least no one I have ever known, except for Olga who discovered it and showed it to me, knew about this. Are academics just hopelessly behind corporate types in their PowerPoint skills? Anyway, you can present your slides with the projector considered as a second monitor, not just cloning what you see on the Tablet. I’m sure you already know to right-click on the desktop, select Properties, then select the "Settings" tab and extend your desktop onto a second monitor. When your Tablet is docked, it’s your external monitor. In a presentation, it’s the projector.

Now in PowerPoint you go to Slide Show/Set up Show… and under Multiple Monitors, check the box for Show Presenter View. If you already have the second monitor enabled (as per above) and your screen extended there, you’re set; if not, it will prompt you to do that at this point. Now when you go to project your show, you can see your current slide, your notes, and a filmstrip of your slides for context etc.

Hard to believe you’ve been using PowerPoint so long without knowing that was there, eh? But that’s not the main point here. At this point, you’ve noticed you can’t ink on your slides, so you give up and go back to the old system, which probably involves having a paper print-out of your slides for context. Crazy! Crazy Wrong!

See the long discussion at TabletPCBuzz.

It turns out that Classroom Presenter from the University of Washington lets you do what you want to do. Yay!

I could write one of those funny posts about how horrendous the documentation is. Take a look here at the quick start guide to get the gist of it. (I do hope that link becomes obsolete soon!)

But let me be practical, and cut straight to the goods, and give you the quick start guide. This is assuming that you are into it for the inking, and not for the elaborate system of instant classroom feedback, which requires a whole room full of happy TC1100-using students, because of course you can’t get the TC1100 any more, even if your institution could afford to equip a whole room with them.

So install your Classroom Presenter that you have downloaded from above, and enable your second monitor display (your projector is second monitor as with Presenter Mode in PowerPoint), open your ppt slide deck that you’ve already converted to a csd deck (because those instructions are more or less clear). And here’s the magic step you are hard-pressed to find in the documentation: in your Classroom Presenter, go to Tools/Properties and select the "Display" tab (of course!) and check the box for "Enable Dual-Monitor Output."

I guess if you have flashy slides with animation etc, it doesn’t work so well. (That’s supposed to be a lo-tech frown, but something  here in WordPress converts it to a hi-tech frown.) "Try not using images!" That’s practical advice! Just give me back my blackboard if that’s where it’s come to.

Earlier this year C., a colleague of mine (see viral map), purchased an IBM Tablet PC after seeing my TC1100. She had never l heard of or seen Tablet PCs but was intrigued and purchased it soon after she met the tc1100. We’ve been working on a project here for two weeks in Paris and Rennes and I got to meet the newly purchased IBM Tablet PC firsthand. It’s quite light and sleek. Lynette is convinced that the resolution is not as good as our TC1100 though she prefers how the writing feels to the TC1100. It seems like a reasonable alternative once my TC1100 bites the dust, though I am still hopeful some manufacturer out there will produce a hybrid model. Lynette is possibly eyeing a Motion since she is quite the slate user.  

No one asked once about the Tablet PC despite many hours of hanging out at brasseries though there were stares. No one asked. Perhaps more inhibited? Or not that hard core on technology like we are? This was quite a different experience than at home in Halifax at the coffee shop, Steve-o-reno’s. Today, the very nice man at the hotel asked if there was wireless close by because it was obvious that I must be doing something out there at all hours of the day. Yes yes there sure is.

Here the TC1100 meets the IBM Tablet PC at an empty brasserie on Bldv du Montparnasse in Paris.

Au revoir from Paris where the duck and wine is excellent, where fruit is tasteful (yummy cherries and figs and more!), where zebra crossings are for zebras and and not humans, and where getting a taxi is a rare feat (I am sure that if there was less regulation on the taxi business it would defintely increase economic activity in Paris)!

A few days before I left for France I posted a question on the Tablet PC
Buzz asing how I could work best in Paris on my email and documents given
that my TC1100 had to go into HP repair. Well this is how things got
resolved.

I purchased a 4gb verbatim flash drive. I wasn’t looking for any kind of
self contained operating system but it came with Ceedo. James Kendrick
suggested I use Migo but since the flashdrive came with Ceedo I thought I
give it a try. Well, overall it wasn’t that great. I can see the
potential though.

First of all there seems to be a problem when I plug the verbatim in the usb slot and run Ceedo on a tablet PC. This is the error message that comes up ("to open TCServer.exe under Ceedo, all other TCServer processes must be closed"):

 
When I plugged it in to a non-tablet pc this error message does not occur.  

So how was I able to manage all my work email? Well since I was meeting
Lynette and her TC1100 in Paris, she agreed to let me use it while I
stayed in France. She left Paris for Montreal last week sans Tablet PC, a
strange thing indeed. I put all my working documents on her Tablet and
also created an additional account in Outlook and was therefore able to
access all my email and write new ones with abandon (thank to mostly free wireless generously donated by the French).

Lynette’s TC1100 will be returned to her when we meet each other at the
Montreal airport tomorrow and board the same flight to Halifax. I suspect
that she’ll be eager to put her hands on the TC1100. All in all, let’s be
very clear: leaving me with her tc1100 for over a week was the ultimate
sacrific and I am grateful for that! Would you hand over your tablet for
a week without having access to any alternative except perhaps webmail (yikes!)?

So no Ceedo and Verbatim did not help sufficiently though I did need a
new flashdrive. I think Ceedo does have potential but it would need to be
able to run Office and Outlook without a hitch. I also posted a question
on the Ceedo forum asking them about the tsc server issue. I had hoped
for some response from Ceedo support but nothing was forthcoming before I left for France and I just checked the form website and no rsponse has been posted. Not sure if Ceedo understands the importance of customer relations.

What Ceedo looks like when you want to remove the flash drive:

Check out more on Ceedo by reading today’s article by NYT’s David Pogue.

And as to my TC1100, I received an email from work yesterday that my
TC1100 has been ruturned. And repaired, I presume. Yay!

Here you see only part of the dome of the Hotel National des Invalides, an old soldiers home. Clearly, veterans were treated quite differently during Napoleonic reign.

Brasseries in Paris tend to have signs in the windows advertising free wireless. And that is exactly where I am right now with my Cafe Creme (latte equivalent with a twist). Though as you can see, many wireless setups are security enabled. In the offices I visit I see many Dell computers and a few have laptops as well. However I have not seen one Tablet PC as of yet.

In general, Paris is la cite de wifi gratuit – there are always a few people who kindly leave their wireless wide open, so that you can sit in most cafes, parks, squares, and be in touch with the rest of the world without paying. Of course the charm of the local environment does make escape via the internet less necessary than in some settings!

The other day I stood on a corner with my tablet, headphones on, someones donated wireless and skyping some friends in Canada.  

From the Seine side 

and the front:

Gender?

Well, all are women except one.

Here is a chart of Tablet PC uptake by field. Technically the chart is more complicated because of cross-appointments etc. But this will do for now.

Where?

What can be gleaned from this? Well, probably not much except that we influence the adoption of new technology by those with whom we work at the university. And you can infer (backwards) that we work somewhere in the intersection of epidemiology, health policy, medical sociology, bioethics, philosophy, and law!

So the TC1100 got on a plane, flew across the Atlantic.  A little cappuccino in the new coach station at Heathrow to fortify us for our adventure.

And the TC1100 took its book proposal for "The betrayal of fantasy:  HP and the TC1200 that never was" to the venerable Oxford University Press. 

But we didn’t get past the Security. 

The letter carrier didn’t seem phased by our antics.

Go here for more mockups. 

This ad shows life with a tablet pc the way it is. It isn’t about about delivery boys and physicians doing electronic prescribing and … It’s about life and having all your info and all your connections all with you all the time. Taking a great photo and downloading it to the tablet; scribbling a note on it and sending it around the world. This is how we use our tablet pcs!

Origami tablet pc with Alias Sketchbook. 

Check out the cool video here!

[photos courtesy of jkontherun] 

OneNote (Owen Brown)

OneNote (Chris Pratley on the user-oriented view of OneNote) 

Outlook (Michael Affronti)

Outlook (Will Kennedy on the super feast new search feature in Outlook (and it IS really fast!) 

Outlook (Melissa MacBeth on Tasks and Time Management in Outlook– I LOVE the new ToDo bars and the Navigation Panes– perfect for the screen limited Tablet PC users) 

Office (Jensen Harris on the snazzy new interface of Office)

Excel (David Gainer on what is new in Excel) 

video at Channel 9 on new UI for Office 12 

Microsoft on the new UI for Office 12 

For the past 2 weeks I have been using Outlook 12, Word 12, Excel 12, PowerPoint 12, and OneNote 12 as my primary programmes on my tablet pc, both for work and other purposes. 

Installing and a new found love

Any glaring problems with installing? The only 2 immediate issues at hand for me were that I had to uninstall two add-ins for Outlook from both MindManager as well as Adobe Pro 7. Both mindManager and Adobe work fine otherwise. I can live with this as I don’t use these features much and I am really thrilled with many of the new features in this Beta version. In order words the benefits of installing Office outweighs the harms. Though, of course, I am fully aware that this is a beta version and snags could come along the way.

The most obvious newness about Office is the retooled user interface. It’s sleek and feature rich and I like the blueish colour in Word. I love, love, love, love the new ‘Ribbon’ that most of the Office programmes will have. Jensen Harris of Microsoft refers to the Ribbon as "a strip across the top of the window that exposes what the program can do." I appreciate this feature because I really did not enjoy the constant playing and futzing around on my Tablet with all the moving Office tool bars. The bars would not ’sit still’ and as a visual person I really like to see as many of my features as possible yet having things look organized. This became even more annoying on my Tablet PC when rotating from landscape to portrait and back. I have wasted many a minute to fix the toolbars so that I am less distracted. Of course, I could have choosen to leave the toolbars messy in Word 2003 but that would require more psychological energy than fixing them!

I should note that not all Office programmes will get the new Ribbon look. Go to this post by Jensen Harris for the who and why.

What I like the best so far

In the past few years I have used MS Outlook email with no problems. I always found the calendar, appointments and tasks quite a hassle to use to the point that I became an inconsistent user of those features. Why? I really had to mouse and click around to get a sense of what the tasks were, my emails and appointments. The UI in Outlook now brings together in one screen, e-mail, tasks, and appointments. This is hot! Now I don’t have to flip back and forth to find this appointment or write this email. I can stay in the same screen view much longer than before. And what is nice for people who use Tablet PC’s and have less than say 17 inch flat panels, the tool and task bars can be set up in such a way that even with my 10 incher tablet pc, I can view it all at a glance!

The picture above of Outlook shows you how my email navigation pane is on the left. I could choose to have all my Outlook folders showing but I like this better. I can set up the navigation pane which allows me to only show my favourite folders, in other words I can choose to only see incoming email from those I have designated as favourites. I really like this because it reduces the distracting emails. I can look at them later when I wish to do so and all I have to do is click on the navigation pane. Note the picture is a bit scrunched up so even on my TC1100 I do get to see way more than is currently showing. 

Note that in Outlook email there is a grab and drag feature (see more below). While the ribbon feature is present in Outlook it is not immediately obvious until you start writing emails.

Also the new search feature in Outlook is super fast and handy. I had to find some email  today from 2002 and found it it no time. The old Outlook search feature was painfull in comparison! Yay! 

To Do Bar

I love the To Do Bar in Outlook 12. Again, it’s because Outlook now allows for a single page view of email, tasks and appointments. Appointments are clearly shown and lots of colours to choose from. Tasks are also integrated into the Outlook single view.  It is great to stay on the same view and quickly add tasks. It’s all about integration and a single view. When I use a docking station at work, I use the flat panel for Word or Firefox, etc and the docked tablet is set to my outlook. A small glance from my ever watchful right eye sees all that I need to know.

Grab and drag

I have written previsouly here and here how much I love the grab and drag Firefox extension. Why? When I surf around on the web I am usually in slate mode and control of web pages is higher with grab and drag than with trying to find the side bar constantly. It just feels like a more natural way of moving around on the screen. Smooth and intimate. Of course only a Tablet PC allows for such qualities. In one of these earlier posts I wished for the grab and drag feature in MS Word. Well my wish has come through! Yay! And not only in Word but also in Outlook. Though it will probably be more useful in Word because of reading papers and other documents. I have always disliked reading Word docs on the screen because of the difficulty I have navigating around using the side bar. Yes there are some other features currently to help you navigate but grab and drag is a superior solution for me. The picture below shows you the Ribbon style in Word.

Inking

The picture above shows you what the inking features look like at a glance in Word. While I am not entirely sure I have a feeling that some of the inking features in Word will be expanded. As of now, there are way way more colours to choose from and you can more easier choose the weight of the lines. Also it is possible to stay in grab and drag mode while making comments in the beta Word version. Nothing much else to report on inking so far but that could be because I haven’t noticed it. The same goes with Outlook. The basic inking features now available in Outlook 2003 are similar in this Beta version. I really do hope that some major refinements will be made. I have not really been happy with the inking capabilities in either Word 2003 or the Beta. I know they can be better.

Regardless of some of my complaints, I am very excited about Office 12 so far. I know it will really make a difference in my work.

As an aside, while I have been eager to try out Inkgestures in the Office Beta version, it does not seem to show up anywhere on the toolbar. 

In the near future I’ll have a write up on OneNote 12.

See more pictures here at Fosfor gadgets.

Do you see the poll on the right? Why don’t you make your choice and leave us a comment justifying yourself.

I’ll go first.

Hybrid (shocking eh?)

Why?

Choice. Choice. Choice. I can have it as a convertible or as a slate, pending needs. And when I have it as a slate it’s a pound lighter.

Ok, your turn.

I check and rechecked my Technorati account and as far as I can see I have done everything to make sure that Tabletology.com is properly claimed and processed. Does anyone have any suggestions?