Tablet PCs come of age

We had to write legibly and fast. I can barely read my own writing now but if I flash back into Fleet Street mode when using a Tablet, it reads me 95 per cent correct.

This, I stress, is writing with only slightly more than the usual care. I have no patience with those who complain that they should not have to adjust to a computer: we had to take extra care for human typesetters.

The same was true when reading copy over the phone to a typist: we had to adjust our voices almost as much as is necessary for speech-recognition software.

Computers are as good as humans at picking out words clearly enunciated in a quiet room or carefully handwritten. They are, however, much harder to correct.

This not a small point: Apple’s Newton, the first PDA to depend on script recognition, could be 95 per cent accurate but failed because the remaining five per cent was nearly impossible to get right.

Correction on the Tablet PC is much easier, but it is still relatively slow and clumsy. There could, for instance, be more gestures for erasing and capitalisation, and more co-operation between speech and script input.

Even if script recognition was perfect, expert typing would still be faster; but early small Tablets will be competing less with the keyboard than with the handheld keypad, which they far outclass for answering emails.

Tablets also make a better interface for the digital home than either the screenless remote control or those poster-sized TV-screen menus.