In addition to the four button concept, one of the distinguishing characteristics of Palm devices is the Graffiti handwrting recognition system. Anybody who uses a palm learns it. It's not that hard to learn, and it's pretty useful. It was one of the reasons Palm caught on, but it was not always that way.

Who could forget the Apple Newton? John Sculley, lambasted as he was, loved it. The "future of computing" he said. With today's rumors of Dell working on a Pocket PC, and the predictions of growth in the next few years that may end up becoming reality. One of the biggest shortfalls of the Newton was it's pathetic handwriting recognition. I used one at a trade show in '94 shortly after the launch. The booth babe kept trying to convince me it was easy, but the more she did it well and I sucked she seemed more like one of those shucksters at carnivals that can do the impossible basketball shot or ring toss that the customer can never do without luck. In the end newton died, and Palm became a standard.

In the book Piloting Palm there is a great description of how hard it was for Jeff Hawkins to convince the other founders that there was nothing wrong with forcing people to learn how to write as opposed to teaching a computer to learn how to read. His mental breakthrough was when he was thinking about the fact that we all have to learn to touch type.

PocketPCs copy many elements: the form factor, the four buttons, and have licensed the graffiti (I don't know about you but it seems to work much better on my Palm705 than the "block recognizer" on my PocketPC). But I really dislike it. I can type so much faster. Yes, graffiti was a brilliant idea. I heard Jeff talk at the Wireless IT event in 1999 in Santa Clara and he had an extension of graffiti that was clever: why not teach people how to speak again using some for of verbal graffiti instead of voice recognition? Anyway, having learned to type in 7th grade at Earl Warren Junior High, I'm sticking with it.

I bought a Pocketop keyboard for my PocketPC and it works fine. It's not as big as a normal keyboad, but I'm able to enter text 10x faster. I'm not a big fan of that aspect of tablet PCs, and believe that they will need some sort of IR or bluetooth keyboard.