I got home tonight to find that Robert Scoble has responded to my recent post on the Tablet PC. I'm flattered!
I'll address some of the points he makes…
Jeremy Higgs demonstrates how geek centric we all are: "I'd hazard a guess most people can type quicker than they can actually write."
Um, Jeremy, most people on earth have never had their hands on a keyboard, so how do you know that's correct?
That was a *bit* of a generalisation on my behalf. Sorry. (But yes, this is from a geek-centric view.) A vast majority of people around my age (20) would be able to use a keyboard (and computer) reasonably well. I think it would be quite difficult to get through high school or most University degrees without touching a computer…
My mother-in-law, who only speaks and writes Farsi, for instance, can not use a keyboard. She can, however, use a pen very well.
You do have a point there. If she were to write in Farsi using a Tablet PC, would the software try to interpret the characters into whatever language is currently selected (e.g. English), or would it leave the input as-is? If so, you could also use the pen input to "write" Japanese Kanji (Chinese) characters, which would be quite neat.
I was just having this discussion with Chris Pirillo earlier in the evening. We both type very fast. I should test myself, but I'm guessing it's close to 100 words a minute. I write far slower, yes.
I doubt I'm even close to that. 
But yes, I find I type much quicker than I write. For some things, it's more appropriate, but for others, it isn't, as I mentioned in my other post:
One area in which I think having a Tablet PC would be useful, however, is drawing models or diagrams (which you could possibly include in taking handwritten notes). On a number of occasions I’ve sat in lectures and wanted to copy down the diagram on the projector or board, and it’s just too much of a hassle to open up OmniGraffle. It’d be great to just whip out the pen and while in my note-taking app (currently OmniOutliner) write down an equation or diagram amongst the typed notes.
Robert addressed this as well in his response…
But, there are many situations when using a pen is more appropriate. In business meetings, for instance. Many people think it's rude to open a notebook and start typing. But it's perfectly acceptable to use a pen on a screen. Why? Because it's similar to writing on a pad of paper. Also, there's no physical block between you and the people you are meeting with.
It's also rude because typing is generally noisy. You have a valid point, however. I see no problems with pulling out a laptop in a lecture or tutorial at University, though. I see more and more people doing it.
Also, when I'm in meetings I like to brainstorm. Or take notes of associations. Or, draw pictures. Quick show me a mock up of your new prototype in ASCII text. But I can draw one out in seconds on my Tablet PC.
As I mentioned in my post, it'd be VERY handy to just pull out the pen and draw pictures or models or diagrams. I'm not denying that! What I was questioning is whether it's particularly useful to write notes out on a Tablet PC when you could just type them. (Depending on your handwriting, it might even be easier to read later. 
)
One other thing, why are you taking notes in meetings? Lately I've just been turning on OneNote, starting the audio recording feature, and taking a very brief outline. You know, just a few words about each section of the meeting to jog my memory for later.
OneNote puts an audio icon next to each node in my outline as I write it. Later, all I do is double-click on the audio icon next to each line and OneNote takes me right to the relevant part of the audio.
If you aren't doing this in meetings you are wasting your time.
I didn't say I was taking notes in meetings, actually. I said lectures, where it's sometimes a bit hard to take audio recordings, because of the distance from the speaker and all of the noises from the surrounding people. However, that audio recording feature sounds like a great idea. You could take a recording for each "section" of a talk or lecture or presentation, and type (or write) notes that relate to that section.
There are so many great apps on the Mac (and all PowerBooks and iBooks come with an inbuilt microphone), so why hasn't this been done?
Hope this clears things up a bit. I'm not saying that Tablet PCs are a bad technology (I think it's great, but I would prefer to use MacOS X), I'm just not sure whether I'd find it useful to physically write notes on (as I would type them).
EDIT: One thing I forgot to mention. I'd find it extremely useful to be able to "annotate" documents using a Tablet PC. If I'm proof-reading an essay or paper, I usually print it out and read through it, using a red pen to comment on and fix errors. Simply going into Word and crossing out a sentence or circling it and writing a comment would be very, very useful for me. Are these sort of features available on Tablet PCs currently?
I also tend to read a lot of PDFs when doing research at University. I haven't found the commenting features in Acrobat to be terribly usable, but doing actions such as underlining and circling areas of text, and scribbling down related ideas would be great. It'd be much more handy than printing out pages and pages (and reams – did I mention lots?) of paper. Apple is supposed to be introducing some this of functionality for PDFs in the "Preview" application in MacOS X 10.4, which can be done using a mouse, but would be nicer with a tablet (whether it's a Wacom or a Tablet PC itself).
