Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
Powered by: newtelligence dasBlog 2.3.9074.18820
Disclaimer The posts on this weblog are provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confer no rights. The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.
© Copyright 2010, Omar Shahine
E-mail
I am in New York visiting my parents. My Dad has been asking me about getting a Tablet PC for a while. You see he was a Newton user for about 3 years, and loved that device. Last year I switched him to an iPaq, but he still longs for the handwriting functionality and user experience of his newton (larger form factor, drawing, note taking).
So, we stopped by J & R Computer world and got a Fujitsu LifeBook T300D. We took it home and I loaded it up with Office 2003 professional, OneNote, and used the Files and Settings Transfer Wizard in XP to copy all his settings over from his Vaio. It is really amazing that it took me about 3-4 hours to do all this. Way to long in my opinion. But I'm thankfully that the Files and Settings Transfer Wizard exists, or it would have taken way longer.
Anyway, my Dad started using it today and it was fun to see and witness his reaction to the tablet. First of all he though the whole thing was cool. He seems to enjoy OneNote (note: I didn't even show my Dad Microsoft Journal, and I have no intention of doing so, OneNote is where he should be doing 100% of his inking, I never liked Journal and it only has one redeeming feature, which is the print to Journal feature that lets you annotate a document like paper).
The LifeBook is a nice piece of hardware. Much better than my Toshiba 3500. It's got a Centrino for one thing, but it also doesn't have a 1) crappy graphics card, 2) loud ass hard drive, 3) slow ass bus, 4) dim hard to read screen, 5) loads of crappy OEM software that switches the backlighting and processor/fan speeds every few seconds. So it's a nice improvement! One thing that doesn't work as well is the mechanical rotation functionality. It's very hard to align the screen when you are rotating, and it's hard to snap the screen shut when it's either in portrait mode or notebook mode. This is really the only downside the the hardware.
My Dad really likes Outlook 2003 thought. At first he was like “what's this? it looks funny”. However, a few hours later he said that he loved the new three column view and the new icons. It's amazing what people will notice!
It will take my Dad a long time to figure this tablet thing out. It's too bad that LoneStar hasn't shipped yet because he'll then need to get used to the in place TIP which will be new to him. He was obviously able to figure out how to use the Newton, so I'm not too worried about this. Another reason why the convertible is perfect. It lets my Dad ease into the Tablet functionality, it will be there when he needs it, but for now he still has his mouse and keyboard to use.