In terms of ink and screen real-estate, I know what Steven’s talking about. I too, felt more comfortable with a larger display when writing within OneNote. I do think though, that with the growing number of smaller devices that we need to think carefully–particlarly as software developers–when considering how to support ink on them. We’ve learned from touch to increase target sizes and I think we’ve also learned to use ink sparingly or at least not to try to jam too much ink into too small a space. It’s an interesting design challenge.

Thanks for clarifying. I’ve gone back and re-read once again what you wrote and I can now see that it’s ambiguous as to whether you actually disable the Tablet bits or are saying it’s something you _can_ do per the reasoning you’ve outlined.

I hope my post makes clear that I appreciate that different people have different needs and a specific Tablet form factor may or may not make sense for a particular person. Indeed, a Tablet PC may not make sense for a user at all. No problem.

However, the Tablet advocate in me still challenges the notion that turning off the Tablet bits is the solution to the performance problem.

The solution is to either improve the performance of the bits (which I’m guessing requires some lower-level adjustments to Windows so I can appreciate the problems in doing so) or to make the software/hardware even more compelling. As a Tablet developer I can work on the software end and on the OS side I hope the Windows team is working to alleviate the problem as well. These together will encourage adoption and in turn encourage the OEMs to keep innovating too. We’re all dependent on one another.

Lastly, with respect to the smaller form factors, the challenge here is that many devices are falling more and more into this smaller range, not fewer, so this is a trend that apps and the OS itself have to accomodate.

A plausible approach is to wait the performance out and give the hardware let’s say four or five years to catch up to the perfmance demands of the current bits. I’m not keen on this approach, because I want to see people benefit from Tablet technology sooner rather than later. For instance, there are simply too many students that could benefit from Tablet technology today to not want to address the performance issues now. That’s my take.

I just said that for me, a 10″ screen is too small for inking. Maybe I just write too big. When I use ink I mostly use OneNote and I just find that a 10″ screen at 1280×768 is not enough information density.

That’s all.