I'm ready for my next Tablet PC Challenge
Inspired by this post, I've decided to challenge myself to see if I can effectively use my Tablet PC as a total replacement for pen, paper, and books. Next week, I start an intense 8-week business law course and I've decided to use this course as the subject of my next Tablet PC challenge.
Context & Ripple Effects
This post lands at the peak of a small but visible wave of Tablet PC experimentation in the enthusiast blogosphere. The same day, jkOnTheRun's Eric and Tracy committed to going paperless, and another blogger ordered a new Tablet PC outright, while buyers were being walked through how to actually pick one. Eric Mack's twist is to make the test concrete: an intense 8-week business law course as the proving ground for replacing pen, paper, and books entirely.
First-order effects
- Mack's study workflow changes immediately: lecture notes, case readings, and annotations must live entirely on the Tablet PC — ink-based note-taking in place of legal pads and printed textbooks for eight weeks.
- His readers get a structured real-world evaluation instead of a spec review; the course's demands (dense reading, heavy annotation) will surface the device's practical limits fast.
Second-order effects
- Fellow Tablet bloggers are running parallel experiments — paperless households, first-impression reviews like the Gateway Chronicle and one-month reflections on the X41 Tablet — so Mack's results feed a shared pool of evidence that shapes what these early adopters recommend to would-be buyers.
- Gaps he hits (software, battery life, screen ergonomics) become feature requests; wishlists like Craig Pringle's for the Tablet PC world show how user pain points from such trials translate directly into demands on OEMs.
Third-order effects
- If challenge-style, use-case-driven testing becomes the community norm, Tablet PC coverage shifts from hardware specs toward workflow fit — pressuring vendors to compete on software and ecosystem rather than just convertible form factors.
- Sustained paper-replacement experiments in demanding domains like law school preview the longer question of whether pen-centric computing becomes a mainstream productivity category or stays a niche tool — genuinely uncertain from this vantage point in late 2005.
The trend: This is one data point in the mid-2000s shift from reviewing mobile devices by specification toward validating them through sustained, real-world paper-replacement challenges — the enthusiast community doing the field testing that would eventually decide tablet computing's fate.