But aside from one other student I vividly remember using a Fujitsu Lifebook (a computing school student, no less) there was no such thing as market penetration for Tablet PCs on campus. You had the usual flock of PC users, with a scattering of white Macbooks here and there by the trendsetters. Besides, the laptop landscape at the time was fairly drowned in uniformity. I never shied away from giving others impromptu demos of what my Thinkpad could do. 10 years later, come version 2013 and Windows 8.1, I think OneNote shifts the entire debate about how useful touch input can be, and why new age touch devices can allow us to rethink about where computers fit into our daily lives. In version 2003, they were merely proving a concept. In fact, I don't think any other app in the Office suite has come so close to fulfilling the long dream by users like myself to ditch the paper notebook once and for all. Seeing how OneNote is hitting its 10th anniversary right about now, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on how useful the tool has been in my personal and professional life.
The hardware was there, but the operating system was the large bottleneck by far.
I bless Microsoft for taking chances in areas where no one else dared, which undoubtedly led us to the current revolution being driven by Windows 8.1, but the first wave of Tablet PCs had real potential. Cool, sleek, powerful, and usually fairly light - but they were held back in one major way: the operating system.
Aside from OneNote, they were a sort of a pariah in the PC industry. Tablet PCs had a real personality dilemma way back then. Professors even asked from time to time whether I brought my paper notebook to class, so I wasn't playing with my "toy" the whole time. So when I sat in my undergrad classes taking notes in OneNote 2003 on my Thinkpad X41, people looked at me like I was an alien. The smartphone craze was still years away, and for all intents and purposes, touchscreens were relegated to two platforms: the Nintendo DS, and the last hurrah of Palm devices like the Treo. In the mid-2000s, walking into a college classroom holding a laptop that came with a stylus for the purpose of note-taking was without a doubt out of place.
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