Absolute Beginners Guide to Tablet PCs

The student is in college, and uses the Tablet PC for her everyday computing, including class notes. Her school requires every student to have a laptop, but the student chose the Tablet PC because it does so much more.

Toolkit

• Convertible style Tablet PC This style of Tablet PC is ideal for high text demands.

• Computer-ready backpack The student uses this to carry the Tablet PC and books.

• Digital camera This can be used to capture pictures of college life.

• Logitech QuickCam for Notebooks This still/video camera is ideal for video chats.

• Logitech Internet Chat Headset The student uses these for online voice chatting, video conferencing, and speech recognition.

• Sony ECM-ZS90 switchable stereo zoom microphone The student uses this microphone to capture audio in lectures and meetings.

• FranklinCovey TabletPlanner This program is used for time and task management.

• Dragon Naturally Speaking This program is perfect for higher-quality speech recognition.

• Microsoft Office 2003 The student uses this to prepare documents, email, presentations, and spreadsheets.

• Microsoft OneNote This program is great for creating free-form notes and for brainstorming.

• Adobe Photoshop Elements This program is used for photo manipulation.

• Microsoft Visio This program is ideal for creating diagrams.

• Windows Journal This program is ideal for taking notes and sketching ideas.

• Microsoft NetMeeting The student uses this program for online meetings and video chats.

Value Proposition

Many students find that they need a combination of paper and computer in class because in addition to taking textual notes, they also need to sketch ideas, graphs, and the like. The Tablet PC allows the student to take notes using handwriting or the keyboard, as she chooses, and still sketch by using the pen interface. Now all her notes are digital.

Day in the Life

The student gets up, checks her email, and gets ready for the day. She turns on her camera and puts on her headset and calls her friend from high school over the Internet, who goes to school in another state. It's his birthday. They can see and hear each other through the video chat. She wishes him happy birthday and eventually disconnects.

She grabs her backpack, stuffs the Tablet PC into it, and heads for class. Once in class, she pulls out her Tablet PC and gets ready to take notes with Microsoft OneNote. OneNote enables her to enter text free-form and later organize the thoughts and sketches any way she wants. She prefers this mode of note-taking over Word, because it gives her more freedom to tie related thoughts together and to sketch ideas in real time. Plus, when she connects her zoom microphone to her Tablet PC, she can capture the lecture at the same time. Microsoft OneNote allows her to create a time-based record of the classroom, integrating the audio discussion with the notes she takes. This allows her to check her notes later to ensure she has the information correct.

When class is over, the student walks to her next class, and decides to take some pictures of a group of friends she meets along the way. By the time the day is over, the pictures are edited, annotated, and sent to each of her friends by using Photoshop Elements and email.

After the school day is over in the late afternoon, the student checks her TabletPlanner schedule and task list and knocks out her top two priorities for the day a take-home quiz and an outline for an upcoming paper. Then she begins writing her paper by dictating it to her Tablet PC using the headset. She can capture many of her ideas without ever having to use a keyboard. Although she types quickly, she speaks even faster, and her speech-recognition software allows her to speak rapidly. After an hour of dictating, she has a good portion of her paper done.

Summary of Benefits