[BUGA] "Handwriting" (was: Mobile phone/PDA recommendations?)

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Saturday, 10 December 2005 at 12:35:10 +1030, David Newall wrote:
> Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
>> And as I said, handwriting recognition is of no use whatsoever to me.
>>
> I suspect you're coming from a position of little or no experience with
> good handwriting recognition.

I'm coming from a position of having poor handwriting, good typing
skills and some experience with Palm's graffiti.  It wasn't the poor
recognition that worried me (I was actually relatively satisfied with
that); it was the slow speed.

> You're used to a real keyboard, on which you are highly competent,
> but a PDA won't have a real keyboard, not that you can't have one,
> but in practice you're not going to want to carry one around, unroll
> it and plug it in every time you need to enter an appointment, note
> or whatever.

Agreed.  A keyboard for a Palm is a waste of time.  But I have used
the on-screen replacement.  It's not nearly as good as a real
keyboard, but it's still an order of magnitude faster than graffiti.

> You'll either tap on the ridiculously small on-screen keyboard,
> using 20% of your already insufficient screen,

Yes.

> or more likely just write and let the machine do the conversion.

I greatly doubt it.

> I predict you'll come to appreciate the latter more than the former.

Well, since I've already done the comparison, I can say confidently
that graffiti loses.

So what we're really discussing here is: is the difference between
more modern handwriting recognition sufficient to make a difference.
I assert "no": I don't have an issue with the quality of the
recognition, and I can't imagine that the number of stylus waves per
character can be reduced to a point where it's faster than toy
keyboards.

Here, BTW, is a good reason to run X on your PDA: that way you can use
x2x to attach a real keyboard to it when you're near another machine.

Greg
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