Comments on: CES 2010: Finally met the enTourage eDGe

By: zeuxidamas

zeuxidamas — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 11:36:14 +0000

Ahhh. Thanks for learning me about the difference between the searchability and text-conversion features of the handwriting recognition function.

I’ve been tagging the notes that I think I will want/need to get back to in MS OneNote, and then pulling up the “View All Tags” sidebar when I want to see my list of “important” notes in a given notebook.

Either way they go, I hope the Edge makes it to market and is executed well. My strongest interest is in Courier, but this product might hold me over until then (especially if MS takes longer than expected getting Courier devices available). I am interested in both an eReader and a tablet. It would be nice to be able to get both, especially given the price this is going for. Two devices could easily run me a grand, while this device would fulfill both needs for less the $500.
– Vr/Z..>>

By: Sumocat

Sumocat — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 03:34:32 +0000

To me, searchability is the more important aspect of handwriting recognition. Ink in both OneNote and Windows Journal is searchable by the Windows OS thanks to its handwriting recognition engine. This is a huge advantage of digital ink, far more important to me than text conversion.

That said, I do convert much of my ink notes to text, but that’s for my ink blog, which I make searchable by including the text conversion. Necessary until Google adds good handwriting recognition to its search engine.

By: Zeuxidamas

Zeuxidamas — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 03:22:58 +0000

I am coming to think, given time spent in the various tablet and inking forums around the internets, that digital inkers fall into one of two camps: those who care about handwriting recognition and those who do not. I’ll agree that I use the ink-dock to write if I am upright and don’t have the keyboard available. However, usually if I start to take ink-notes in my digital notebook (MS OneNote) or in one of my design journals (Windows Journal), I intend for them to remain ink-notes, so I never worry about the PC translating them back into typeface-text. I just need the Edge to be stable, and to permit web-based interaction with my PIM (Google Calendar and Contacts; Evernote would be nice but I am not getting my hopes up).

But either way, ink-support of some type is good to see, and I can not argue with increasing that ink functionality. Thanks for digging to the bottom of this question which was one of the foremost on my mind from the CES coverage.
– Vr/Zeuxidamas..>>