Search results for 'app:weblogs' matching tag 'UMPC'

InkSeine Update 1.1.1714.0 Now Available

Ken Hinckley — Wed, 20 May 2009 05:00:00 GMT

We have an InkSeine update for you.

UPDATE: We have discovered that this build does not work on Windows XP. We are working on a fix (ready tomorrow?).
UPDATE #2: XP problem fixed! The build number on the update install will show up as 1.2.1720.0.

We'll be publishing it shortly via the OfficeLabs auto-updater, so if you have auto-updates enabled, leave InkSeine running for a couple of minutes, and when you exit InkSeine it should ask you if you want to install the update. (Update: the Office Labs auto-update has not yet been pushed out.)

If you do not see the auto-update for any reason, you can install the new version directly from our downloads site : InkSeine version 1.2.1720.0 1.1.1714.0 (but if you do it this way, you must first uninstall your old build of InkSeine).

This build addresses a number of issues that have been on our plate for a while now:

Windows 7 Support. InkSeine's search features now work on Windows 7.
Inking Performance.
We fixed some issues with our ink stroke capture and rendering that produces a much snappier feel for drawing in InkSeine. This is a significant improvement for most tablets; if you have a UMPC like the Samsung Q1 series or an OQO Model 02, the difference is dramatic.
New Page Viewing Options and Scrolling within Pages (see details below)
Hide / Show the Arc
The arc with all your pens and other tools on it now has a small +/- symbol on it. Just tap it to hide or show the tool arc. I find it's great to hide the arc when I'm really concentrating on a full page of notes, or projecting an informal presentation that I've sketched up in InkSeine.
Tool Ring in task tray. The InkSeine Tool Ring now resides in the system task tray. For the many people who run the "ScrollControl.exe" application separately from InkSeine, this will make it easier to manage.
Print margins bug fixed. Printing from InkSeine now always scales the page correctly so that the entire page will be visible on the printout; previously InkSeine would sometimes clip off the margins.
File loading bug fixed. We fixed an obscure bug that on rare occasions would cause opening of certain InkSeine files to fail. Thanks to everyone who helped us track this down!

New Page Viewing Options

Previous versions of InkSeine were limited to always show one whole page of your notes at a time. From the feedback we received, it became abundantly clear to us that this could sometimes be too limiting, particularly when switching between portrait and landscape screen orientations on your tablet.

InkSeine now supports a new Fit Page to Screen viewing option that scales the page to fill the current screen dimensions. For example, you can give this a try by creating a page in landscape format (step 1 below) and then switching your tablet to portrait orientation (step 2). InkSeine now applies the Fit Page to Screen mode by default whenever you switch screen orientations.

You can still view the entire page at once by choosing the Whole Page viewing option instead (step 3). The Fit Page to Screen / Whole Screen viewing option is a toggle found in the InkSeine Options menu, as shown below.

Scrolling within Pages - without a Scroll Bar

The new Fit Page to Screen view implies the need for scrolling. But InkSeine has no scroll bar. That would just be wrong. A concept car for pen computing can't have scroll bars on it.

But now, InkSeine does allow you to scroll within pages. Here's another example where I'm using my tablet in landscape mode to view a page I originally created in portrait mode. I can now circle my pen starting on the InkSeine tool ring to scroll the page up and down.

Note that InkSeine still has an underlying model of discrete pages, so if you continue to scroll, it will not scroll you through all the pages in your note.

You might even notice that InkSeine now adds a subtle effect so you can tell when you've scrolled to the edge of a page. Do you see what it is? What do you think?

Still a Work in Progress...

I had really wanted to get custom pen and highlighter colors (and thicknesses) into this build, but we didn't make it. We believe there are a lot of subtle issues with supporting that well, and we didn't want to include a half-hearted attempt just to check off a new feature. But this is a new capability that I'm desperate to add myself.

There's also a couple basic usability requests that we didn't get to, such as having both Personal Search and Web Search available as top-level options in the context menu which appears after lasso selecting an ink phrase. I have a particular solution in mind for that which we didn't have time to complete.

I currently have three kids at two years old or less, and Raman (our developer extraordinaire) is currently managing our group's entire dev team, so we've both been running on limited cycles this year. But we are still pounding away and looking to introduce more new features and innovations for future InkSeine releases. Definitely be sure to let us know of any new requests, bugs, or reflections that you have on your use of the new features in this update.

Portrait Inking on the OQO Model 02

Ken Hinckley — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 05:00:00 GMT

The OQO Model 02 is almost the same size as my Moleskine Pocket Sketchbook. I suspect this is no accident. To illustrate the point, I scanned them side-by-side. The OQO is slightly narrower, which is necessary to make it fit in my shirt pocket given its 1" girth. By the way, don't let this scan fool you - the screen on the OQO is gorgeous. It's just really hard to scan properly. The other photos below give a better sense of what the screen really looks like.

I set up a custom cover page for my OQO in InkSeine to make it feel just like a new moley fresh out of the shrink wrap. Now I feel like writing important stuff in here.

I also scanned my pocket Moleskine to use for the inside pages. I love having this page style on the OQO - it just seems right.

I prefer inking on the OQO Model 02 in the portrait orientation. I can grip the device more comfortably in this orientation, and there is more room to plant my hand on the screen. This also keeps the touch-scrollers out from underneath my hand. I've experimented some with using the "secondary portrait" orientation, to flip those touch scrollers over to my left hand. That feels great, but since the keyboard rotate function only flips between the primary landscape and primary portrait orientations, it's inconvenient to go to the options panel and hunt for the command to flip to the secondary portrait orientation.

There's one other tip I have for working in the portrait orientation on the OQO's small screen. I was thinking about why it seemed easier to draw in my pocket Moleskine, even though it has nearly identical dimensions as the OQO. It's not so much the small screen size of the OQO, as it is the thickness.

So I slide out the keyboard, and I rest the meat of my palm on that. This feels more like resting my hand on the desk while I draw in my (thinner) pocket Moleskine. The OQO keyboard keys are fairly stiff so I never trigger them by accident while I'm doing this. Typically I do this while holding the OQO in my left hand; the photo below shows me doing this on the desk because I was out of hands to hold the camera, and no tripod was handy :-)

The keyboard is also convenient for hitting the Enter key, modifier keys, or the special OQO hardware hotkeys (such as the screen rotation, brighteness, and keyboard backlight) when the occasion demands.

That closes the book on this post. I'm sure I'll have more thoughts and ideas about using the OQO as I continue to work with it.

Related Posts:

My very first impression of the OQO Model 02

Make a faux-OQO to see if the size is right for you

The OQO Model 02 Has Arrived

Ken Hinckley — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 05:00:00 GMT

The cat dragged in an exciting new gadget today. Of course, my shiny new OQO Model 02 showed up on a day where I was pretty much booked solid with meetings, so I was able to do little more than turn the thing on. But I did take a moment to snap a couple of pictures.

I brought it to our group meeting to show it to Raman, and then the person next to him wanted to see it, and then the person next to him… it was a fretful round of musical chairs for my OQO before I had it safely back in my hands.

The early impression: The OQO Model 02 is the neutron star of computing. Jet black, dense, and it sucks in the attention of all who wander too close to it.

I’m looking forward to setting it up with all my stuff and tooling around on it with InkSeine.

Faux-OQO with origami

Ken Hinckley — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 05:00:00 GMT

It's been a very busy couple of weeks for me, so I haven't had time to attend to the blog, or much of anything else for that matter.

But one thing that has been on my mind from time to time is the OQO Model 02 Ultra-Mobile PC (UMPC). It's an intriguing device but I have wavered for some time now on whether or not it is the right device for me, and whether it will offer the right fit for the projects I have in mind for it. I don't know anyone who owns one, so taking one for a test drive has not been an option.

The active digitizer on the device is extremely appealing to me. Obviously, I want to use InkSeine on it. The passive touchscreens that I've tried on other devices are rather unsatisfactory for inking.

But yeah, I keep hearing the screen is small on the OQO. But how small is it? The entire device measures 5.6" by 3.3" and is 1" thick. It weighs just one pound. Some people like the OQO's diminutive stature because they can slip it in their pocket. Others don't much care for it, because their big meaty hands just cannot write on such a small screen.

Got it. But how big is that really? How would that feel to me? Would it be useful in my nutty research project ideas? I just can't decide!

What to do, what to do?!?

Finally I could stand the waffling no more. I had a bit of time today, so I made a scale model "OQO origami" by using InkSeine and PowerPoint together. Then I printed the origami, cut it out, and folded it up into my own little "Faux OQO" device. I taped it to some cardboard to make it a little more rugged, and I carried it around with me during the day. It looks surprisingly realistic. Maybe, just for kicks, I should try to fool my co-workers with it. Tomorrow I'll have to pretend to drop it down the stairs, or fumble it off the railing of the four-story atrium that we have here in the new Microsoft Research building.

This bitmap probably won't print out to scale, but my OQO origami PowerPoint will. I've attached the file to this post so you can join in the fun. It's attached as a .zip file because I can't directly post .ppt files on this blog. Just open up the zip and you'll see the ppt file in there. The attachment also appears as a link at the very end of this post.

Now you can make your own Faux OQO and truck it with you in your travels. See if it stirs your gadget lust as well. Better yet, have some fun and pretend you are using it in meetings, on the bus, or on the subway. Fake out some gullible rubes. Go ahead.

If they get mad when they discover your ruse, just tell ‘em the AlpineInker made you do it.

Jump Start your Creativity with Custom InkSeine Notebooks

Ken Hinckley — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 05:00:00 GMT

Distressed books from forgotten decades, documents battered by time, and postcards from the distant past hold a deep charm for me. Perhaps it was because my grandfather was an insatiable reader and his shelves were always brimming with volumes dating as far back as the 19^th century. Maybe it was because my great-uncle was an avid stamp collector and gave me heaps of aged stamps and letters when I was a young boy.

Whatever the reason, Wal-Mart can keep their shiny rows of bestsellers. I'll settle into my armchair with a yellowed tome, during the darkest recesses of the night, to read eldritch tales of mystery and imagination.

The same is true, I believe, for writing and sketching. Just look at all the amazing and beautiful personal touches that artists and writers add to their moleskine notebooks.

So I decided to join in the fun with InkSeine on my Tablet PC. I scanned in a few books, papers, and found objects to personalize my inky reflections.

Below are few examples that I came up with. So that you can have fun too, I've made most of these backgrounds available as download of blank example InkSeine notes (ZIP archive, 10MB) from the InkSeine webpage. More details on how to use the samples later in this post.

Inking after Midnight

These custom pages come from a book printed in the 1930's that belonged to my grandfather. This makes the perfect foil for my creativity.

In a dream-vision I transcribe the legendary Codex Inkseinus, a grimoire of arcane and forbidden Tablet PC knowledge, originally penned by the mysterious Mad Inker of Redmond:

Next, I scan in some blank pages. The anachronism of yellowing paper on my venerated NEC VY11F/GL-R slate sets the proper tone:

Of course, I begin my narrative with a distressed "letter" from the unfortunate author to add a ring of authenticity - with due homage to H.P. Lovecraft, who often employed the epistolary literary device with great success.

Want to see the rest of the Codex? Well, I should not to reveal too much of this cryptic treatise at once. You'll just have to keep following this blog. The AlpineInker often gets ideas for posts by paying visits to the sole known surviving copy of the Codex, which resides under lock and key at Miskatonic University.

Inking with a Splash

For my next project I wanted a lighter mood, so I scanned in one of my watercolor boards. I grew up close to the ocean. This backsplash makes we want to pen an epic tale of men and the sea:

Rough Drafts & A Library for my Notes

I mentioned my envy of Ript the other day. With very little work I produced a similar effect by scanning in a ratty piece of paper. I sized it to make a nice title area for my note. I rotated it by 90 degrees to make rough edges for my artwork.

I played with this a little more to produce a front page for my library. All I need to do is add InkSeine hyperlinks to my "note books" and I'm good to go. As you can see I'm having great fun with the mostly-working-but-not-bug-free rotation feature we've been working to add to InkSeine.

Hello from UMPC Land

My UMPC screen is about the size of a postcard, so I might as well use it to write one:

Download Example InkSeine Custom Backgrounds

I've produced four sample InkSeine notes with blank custom pages. The download is a WinZip archive (.ZIP, 10MB) that contains:

book-2up-stationery.iks: A two-up note format for Landscape orienation on your tablet, based on the old book style shown above.
book-stationery.iks: Single-page old book stationery formatted for Portrait orientation.
postcard-umpc.iks: Landscape UMPC format using the postcard.
splash-stationery.iks: A sample Portrait orientation note based on the watercolor backsplash.

Before you go too crazy with these, be aware that InkSeine has no explicit support for custom page backgrounds. As a result it is kind of hacky at the moment and resulting notes can become bloated, but you can still have quite a bit of fun with these samples. If there's enough interest and we can figure out a good way to make it work "for real", we'll look to better support custom InkSeine page styles in the future.

I've set up the pages so that lasso-selecting your ink will never select the background bitmap by accident, but if you tap-select you may hit the background and move it around accidentally. Just hit Undo if that happens. In the currently available release of InkSeine, there is no way to "lock down" a bitmap in the background.

To make new pages that still have the fancy background, use Copy Page from the page menu, then use Paste from that menu to insert your page with the custom background. It's best to copy and paste some blank pages before you add any ink. That way you can make more pages without having to select and cut the ink from each page as you go.

Here's How to Make Your Own Custom Backgrounds

With a bit of hackery, you can make your own backgrounds, even though InkSeine currently has no "custom page" features.

Once you have a suitable scan, here's what you can do. If you don't have a good book or a suitable scanner, I recommend appropriating one of the aforementioned moleskine photos from Flickr, or see if any of the Wikipedia codex scans strike your fancy.

Make sure you save your scan in a resolution and format where the resulting file is 50-100 KB at the most. I scaled mine down using Microsoft Paint to about 50% of their original size, and saved the scaled-down versions as JPG files to get them as small as possible. You'll lose some quality this way, but if you use huge bitmaps on all your InkSeine pages, you'll quickly bog down InkSeine and overwhelm the memory of your poor tablet. I also used Alias Sketchbook's airbrush to touch up some of the scans to suit my needs.
Double the height of your bitmap (plus about 25-50 pixels to spare) and flood-fill it with black or whatever background color works best. This will allow you to import the bitmap into InkSeine and expand it so that the scan fills the screen, but the center of the bitmap will be off-screen. Since InkSeine selects a bitmap only when the center of the bitmap falls within your selection lassos, this will allow you to ink and lasso-select any of your writing on the page without selecting the bitmap too. You'll definitely want to set up your custom pages that way or it quickly becomes annoying to work with them.
Drag this doubled-height bitmap from your file folder onto your InkSeine page. Drag it so that the upper-left corner of the bitmap lies at the upper-left corner of your page. Then take the bottom-right corner of the selection and drag straight to the right. This expands the page as much as possible. This is what this step looked like when I started with my book scan:

Depending on the aspect ratio of your scan, you may want to further scale your bitmap just vertically, or just horizontally, to fill the screen. With my book, I stretched it a bit horizontally to make it fit the screen completely. It looked fine since the stretch was not extreme. You'll probably have to pan your bitmap around until you can see the desired selection resizing handle on-screen. Resize it as needed and then pan it back to align to the top-left corner.
Voila, you are done! You have a bitmap that fills the page completely, but which will not be accidentally selected while you are lasso-selecting ink on the page.

Have Fun and Report Back!

Give the samples download or your own scans a try. Do you want the option to use custom pages for your notes? What kinds of custom stuff do you find you want to do? What kind of features or capabilities would you want around custom pages if we were to add them to InkSeine?

Soup Up Your Tablet PC to be Ultra Productive

Ken Hinckley — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 06:00:00 GMT

I am having some great fun this week modding up one of my slate Tablet PC's. I have a nutty little idea that I am working towards, but mums the word on that for now... Either it will take the Tablet PC world by storm, or I will prove once and for all that I am a complete kook. Perhaps even both!

While I was thinking about this top-secret project, I rediscovered a great Channel 9 video. In the video Bert Keely shows how he has modded up his slate, delivered with his typical firehose of enthusiasm. Bert is an architect on the Tablet PC team and has been there since the very start. Even though this video is a few years old now, his advice is still bang-on, and his enthusiasm gets me excited about the Tablet PC all over again.

I could find nary a mention of this video, save to ask about it, in any the forums, haunts, or other dark corners of the blogosphere frequented by Tablet PC Illuminati. So I've uploaded the video to MSN Video and now you can play it right here in your browser (or get the Channel 9 MSDN Video download).

The video player that I am able to embed in this blog is a little lame. Apologies for that. Click on the link immediately below if you'd rather view it in MSN Video instead - that offers a better experience in my humble opinion.

[video]

Video: Bert Keely on Souping Up the Tablet PC (2004)

Bert is only just scratching the surface of tablet PC mods that are possible. Cestfiu has been posting about his quest to find the ultimate combination of buttons'n'stuff for his Lenovo, while e-gadgetjunkie seeks the ultimate stealth pen button settings. FeralBoy had the stroke of genius to throw small rubber door wedges in his travel bag, to prop up his tablet as needed.

Tablet stands are another popular "mod," but I have two really big beefs with those:

(1) Most importantly, they don't involve cutting, epoxying, melting, dremel-tooling, or otherwise risk bodily harm, carcinogenic vapors, or fatal impacts to your tablet; and

(2) They typically aren't suitable for my mobile kit. But here's a recent stand that looks useful, if not mobile.

If you're not just mobile but ultra-mobile, be sure to deck out your UMPC with a cool case and stuff.

While you're at it, don't forget to mod up your pen with felt-tip nibs and spring-loaded stroke nibs. Ordering these from Wacom is only slightly more difficult than gnawing your own foot off. But at least Mobile Maestro Steve S over in the GottaBeMobile forums has kindly posted the magic link.

I hope you have great fun with these ideas. Be sure to report back on your most clever, useful, or downright extravagant tablet mods!

Maybe you'll even soup up your tablet with something hotter than what I've got cooking on the back burner here at Microsoft Research...

PREVIOUS: Post #1 in the AlpineInker's Tablet PC Ultra-Productivity Series!

NEXT: ???

Localization Problem with InkSeine - Fix Coming Next Week

Ken Hinckley — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 06:00:00 GMT

UPDATE: bug fix now available!

My humble apologies to users outside the US who have encountered some problems with InkSeine. The good news is that this is the only major bug that has come up in our InkSeine deployment, and we already have the problem fixed on our internal testing build. The bug results from a localization issue that we missed in our internal testing.

This issue only affects installs for users who are not using the American way to view numbers and dates.

The main symptoms of this bug are that Copy/Paste, Undo/Redo, loading the Tutorial, and Loading files that you have saved all will not work. That failure to load saved files is the really bad one. A couple of people have written to me out of frustration after they were unable to load content that they saved, and for that I am truly sorry. We had very limited testing outside of the US before our external release, and we missed this bug.

We will deploy our fix for this bug soon, hopefully early next week. Raman, the ace InkSeine developer, is back in town and has already coded up a fix. We just need to do some additional testing to make sure we didn't break anything else, and deploy it through the Microsoft Research downloads process. All that will take a few days, so it will be not be available on the research.microsoft.com downloads area until early to middle of next week.

What went wrong? Well, basically if decimal numbers appear on your system as 4,5 instead of 4.5, when InkSeine writes its data to a file, it gets a stream of number that look like (4,5, 2,8, 7,5). But what it should look like is instead (4.5, 2.8, 7.5). So when our parser reads in that data, it gets confused because it finds more numbers than it was expecting, and it blows up. Copy/Paste, Undo/Redo, and Saving/Loading all pass through common routines to turn data into a textual representation, so that is why all of those end up being broken. There's some similar issues with dates in different formats as well. If you really need to recover a file you've lost, you can edit those commas back to decimal points. I know, yuck! Our fix will not convert files saved in the "bad" format back into property formatted files. But any new files you create going forward will work correctly.

There are a few other small problems that we have already fixed and will be rolled into the next update as well:

Fix for broken InkSeine file association. If you double-click on an InkSeine (.IKS) file, it will open up inside of InkSeine without forcing you to manually perform the association to InkSeine. Fixed!
Fix for "The requested recognizer is not available with the current setup or configuration" error dialog that some international users have encountered when doing a search. This can be worked-around now by installing a language pack, but we believe our localization fixes will remove the need to install any language packs. Fixed!
Option to disable automatic checking for updates has been added to the installer and to the InkSeine Options panel. We hope you'll take advantage of this great feature to get future updates & bug fixes, but we understand that some people don't like to be prompted for automatic updates, so now you can turn that off if you like. Fixed!
Missing Notes file types added to the notes filter (looks like the OneNote icon). New extension supported: .onecache (shared OneNote notebooks are cached in these; you also may need to add this extension to Vista Search / Windows Desktop Search for the indexer to pick it up), Geometer's Sketchpad (.GSP), Jackson GradeQuick (.GBK), Google Sketchup (.SKP), and SMART Technologies slide collections (.XBK). Fixed!
.TXT file extension removed from the PDF filter. This was causing confusion for some people. Fixed!
Probably also a fix for the annoyance where icons that you drag out from the search results list don't drop directly under the location where you lift the pen, and maybe a couple of other little things.

I'll get an announcement out when the fix is ready for download... It's fixed now, here it is.

Twelve Days of InkSeine, Day #11: Dish out a Little UMPC Love

Ken Hinckley — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 06:00:00 GMT

I have a Samsung Q1 Ultra-Mobile PC. Originally I borrowed this to see if InkSeine would work correctly on the device, but I have more or less inherited it on a permanent basis. So I have started using it to play around from time to time.

Here's a capture of what InkSeine looks like on this device:

Here's another shot that shows InkSeine's search panel and the help tips on the UMPC screen. We spent about a weak tweaking its layout and design to accommodate the limited screen dimensions when you launch it on a UMPC. Admittedly it's a tight squeeze, but 480 vertical pixels are not a lot to work with!

To be honest, I am still trying to figure out where a device like the Samsung Q1 can really fit into the way I live and work. I actually like the size of it and the heft of it in my hands, although it is about twice as thick as I'd like it to be.

I am also the lucky owner of one of the old NEC VersaPro YV11F/GL-R tablets. Now that name has a real ring to it, doesn't it? I think they must have chosen a Tablet PC hallucinated title based on their designer's doodles. The VersaPro weighed in at 1.98 lbs, was a scant 11 mm thick, and was only ever sold in Japan. Talk about a wonderful slate. Even people in Microsoft Research, who are used to seeing strange devices (not to mention eccentric researchers) roaming the hallways, would stop me in my tracks to ask what it was and drool over it. The processor and hard drive capacity were a bit anemic, but it felt like carrying around a legal pad. I knew it was a qualitatively different device when I observed that I would leave it piled up with the papers and magazines on my messy desk - I have never done that with the Toshiba M400 that is my main tablet right now...

Anyway, if I could get me a UMPC as "wafer thin" as my old NEC, I think we'd really have something. That's partly why the dual display e-book project at the University of Maryland has me excited.

I do have difficulty getting used to the passive touchscreen on my UMPC while inking. I just cannot train myself not to touch the screen while I am holding the pen. This is deeply ingrained not only from my heavy tablet-inking addiction, but also from a lifetime of sketching on real paper.

But don't get me wrong. I am a big fan of touchscreens. I plan to get a multimode pen + touch device when I get my next Tablet PC. Throughout graduate school, I worked daily on a system that had a touchscreen. Even though the mouse and keyboard were always at the ready while I was working, some operations were wonderfully convenient with touch. I set up my X11 window manager (now I am really dating myself) to immediately switch the focus window as soon as I clicked anywhere in a window. Now I could just swipe at the screen with my hand to switch windows. That was fun, fast, and reliable. I remember hacking up a quick demo where almost the whole screen was a button, and I could activate it by head-butting my screen. Now that was utterly useless!

I see wonderful opportunities for touch interactions on my UMPC. But there really is not any software on the device that takes advantage of touch. I tried using InkSeine with my finger, and it actually works pretty well with touch. The radial menus that we use have a wonderful feel when driven via touch - I find that just sliding my finger in a direction to get a command is oddly rewarding. However, I must confess that InkSeine really hasn't been optimized for touch; our menus and buttons should probably be a bit larger so it is easier to land on them with your finger. We'll look to improve this in the future. Also, the ink that results if I try to finger-paint on the Samsung Q1 UMPC is utterly horrible, so touch is only useful for navigating through ink content that I have previously generated with the stylus.

I also have to say that my experience on the UMPC was the first time that I really missed scrolling in InkSeine. InkSeine has a discrete page model, where all pages are always scaled to fit the current screen size. The UMPC screen is so small that scrolling feels necessary so that I can paste larger bitmaps, etc. on the page.

My biggest disappointment on the UMPC? The ribbon UI model of Office 2007. It's been growing on me for my desktop and tablet usage, but it is a complete joke on the UMPC. I can only see a tiny fraction of my document if I leave the text at a reasonable size:

Overall, there are some things I don't particularly like about the Samsung Q1, but using this UMPC has been a bit of an eye opener for me and I am becoming more interested in the platform, both for "real work" and also as a target for research projects. Many of you have probably seen LucidTouch, the see-through device demonstration by Patrick Baudisch. Well, Patrick is part of my team and I talk to him almost every day. I think doing more with a Lucid-Touch type of UMPC device could be very interesting indeed.

But I've also concluded the Samsung Q1 is not the UMPC for me.

To this end I'm seriously considering picking up an OQO Model 02. The ultra-portability without serious compromise on performance is appealing. And the active digitizer on the OQO is a must have for me.

For now, though, I am struggling to contain my device lust for the OQO 02, and the many intriguing new Tablet PC options hitting the market of late, until InkSeine is out the door. Otherwise we would never finish it!

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