In late 2003, Microsoft reorganized its business yet again. Part of that reorganization saw the Tablet PC team become part of a wider Mobile Platforms Division, which is now responsible for spearheading the development of the company's mobile operating systems, applications, services, and tools. In case it's not obvious, this change also means that Microsoft is serious about getting its Tablet PC innovations into every product where it makes sense. Thus, it's pretty clear that, eventually, the Tablet PC OS will go away, and those features will simply start be included in other Windows versions. For that to happen, however, mainstream portable computers will also need to start picking up features from today's Tablet PC hardware.

In 2003, the Tablet PC was a new type of notebook computer, separate and distinct from other mobile PCs. By 2004, with the release of new Tablet PCs based on Intel's Pentium-M/Centrino platform, Tablet PCs had become true supersets of notebook computers, making most Tablet PCs notebooks that have additional tablet functionality. Through 2005, the Tablet PC software will start to be incorporated into mainstream notebooks. And then, in 2006 and beyond, there will be mobile PCs for every customer need, with form factors and features that maximize computing.

Part of that evolution will require a future version of Tablet PC Edition that will ship in the Longhorn time frame (and might have a different name). With Longhorn, the Mobile Platforms Division hopes to augment its Tablet PC software with enhanced power management features, auxiliary displays, multi-display support, a new Mobility Center front-end for smaller devices, and additional features. I've previewed some of these technologies in my WinHEC 2004 Longhorn Prototypes Gallery.

Anyway, that's all a few years down the road. Today, we have an exciting, evolutionary upgrade to Windows XP Tablet PC Edition that significantly enhances Microsoft's premier mobile platform. Let's take a look.

Evolutionary genius
In November 2003, Microsoft announced the next version of its Tablet PC software, which was then codenamed Lonestar, which was eventually renamed to Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005, at the Professional Developers Conference 2003 the October, though the company was focusing largely on the next generation Tablet PC SDK, a set of tools for developers, at the time. Lonestar quickly developed into an important release. Though the first version of the Tablet PC OS was, by all measures, an excellent release, customers had been asking Microsoft to improve the software in subtle ways. So Lonestar was born, a free OS upgrade that the company originally planned to ship to customers in the first half of 2005 (it eventually shipped as part of Windows XP Service Pack 2, as described below).

Lonestar has focus on two key areas. First, the Digital Ink to text experience will be more native and natural, with a new Tablet Input Panel will make it more natural to use Ink across any windows applications. Second, in Windows itself, the [Tablet PC's] pen will be a more natural input mechanism, where users will be able to think about it in the same way as the mouse and keyboard. You can use the pen when it's the most appropriatefor annotating, and so onand it will be a superset on top of the keyboard and mouse.


Rocking with the new In-place Tablet Input Panel
In the first release of XP Tablet PC, Microsoft created a Tablet Input Panel (TIP) that could be used to interact with non-Tablet PC applications (i.e. every application on the planet) using the pen and Digital Ink. The TIP was tethered to the bottom of the screen, however: When you need to input text, say into the Internet Explorer Address Bar or a eb form, you'd have to manually click the TIP icon in the taskbar (if the TIP was hidden) and then start writing. This worked well enough, with one problem: Because the TIP was tethered to the bottom of the screen, you'd have to move the pen back and forth constantly between it and the application that needed input. On forms-based applications or Web sites, especially, this could be extremely laborious. And because the TIP was a fixed size, it was hard to enter long strings of text efficiently.

Now, in XP Tablet PC Edition 2005, the TIP has been extensively updated and is, as a result, far more useable. When you select a user interface element in a legacy Windows application (again, just about any application on the planet) that supports text entry, a new TIP Access button appears just below the point on the screen that you can tap with the stylus. If you tap the TIP Access button, which visually resembles an overly large Office XP/2003 Smart Tag, the TIP appears, in place, as a floating window, right by your stylus. That means that you won't have to break your wrist moving back and forth between the text entry field in the application you're using and the TIP.

Real-time recognition and in-place correction
The new TIP also supports an exciting new feature called real-time recognition. Previously, when you handwrote text into the TIP, the Tablet PC handwriting recognition engine wouldn't kick in until you were done writing, and you'd have to go back and make corrections after the fact. Now, Microsoft's handwriting technology translates your chicken scratches on the fly, using a small space at the bottom of the TIP's Writing Pad area to preview each letter you've written, as you write . This way, you'll know whether the system has correctly translated your writing before you post it to the application. And as you add more and more text, the new TIP also resizes on the fly to accommodate you, which is simply wonderful, and very natural.

Contextual smarts and developer improvements
Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005 also supports a cool new feature called contextual awareness, which developers will need to manually support in order to see the benefits. However, this feature doesn't require developers to rewrite their applications instead, developers can simply add an XML file to the installation directory of their applications to support this feature (this is sort of an advanced topic, so interested software developers should check out the MSDN Web site for more details). Here's what it does: A compatible application can specify what type of input it expects on a form element by form element basis, filtering out other types of input, and improving text recognition. So consider a standard forms-based application, where you might enter name, address, and ZIP Code information. In the name fields, the application would know to only accept letters, so the handwriting recognition engine would filter out non-letter characters. In the state field, the application would know to only look for state names (e.g. Massachusetts) and/or abbreviations (e.g. MA), dramatically limiting what needs to be recognized. And so on.

Contextual awareness is hard to demonstrate in a text-based review, but it's excellent in a demo. In the aforementioned example, you can write a scribble that only vaguely resembles the word "Massachusetts" into a text field that is designed to accept only state names, but it works fine because of the input filtering. And since this feature is very easy to add to existing applications, there's no reason for application vendorsespecially those who make vertical applications for Tablet PC-wielding usersnot to support this crucial feature.

Better Office integration
When Microsoft shipped the original version of XP Tablet PC in late 2002, it also shipped an add-on for Office XP called the Tablet PC Office Pack for Microsoft Office XP which let certain Office XP applicationsWord, Outlook, and PowerPointinteract somewhat seamlessly with the Tablet's pen and Digital Ink features. This add-on is still available and works fine with XP Tablet PC Edition 2005, but users of the newer Office 2003 family of products will not need an add-on that suite was designed to work elegantly with the Tablet PC from the ground up, and the Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Excel 2003 application all feature native support for text insertion and annotation via the Tablet PC's stylus.

Most impressive, however, is the new OneNote 2003 application. OneNote 2003 is a note-taking application on steroids, and it natively supports Digital Ink and the Tablet PC out of the box. With OneNote 2003, you can take notes in your normal handwriting, more closely emulating the way you take notes in a real notebook. You can also move around its virtual page at will, scribble diagrams and drawings, and utilize all the pen types of colors to which you're accustomed.

Conclusions
What can I say? With Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005, the best mobile operating system has gotten even better. If you're an existing Tablet PC owner, you need to download and install XP SP2 as soon as possible, in order to get both the security benefits of that upgrade and the exciting new features in XP Tablet PC Edition 2005. Thanks to the vastly improved Tablet Input Panel on the software side, and an amazing new array of innovative and varied Tablet PC hardware, it's pretty obvious that 2004 will be remembered as year the Tablet PC came of age. If you're in the market for a notebook computer, it's time to consider a Tablet PC. In time, this once skeptical reviewer will be but one of the many users converted to the platform.



These are only exerpts from Paul Thurrott's, The person behind Winsupersite, exclusive Article on Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005. Read His Indepth Article on