I’m writing this post while stretched out on the sofa with my feet being kept warm by a very accommodating doberman named Roxy. I’m using a new x200 tablet made by Lenova and I’m writing it out with a pen cursive style. The handwriting recognition program built into Vista is converting my scrawls into text… flawlessly.

I’ve used a tablet before… the earlier x41… but it didn’t have enough horsepower and it was just too slow and made way too many errors. With the x200 it’s so good it recognizes stuff I can’t read myself. The very it does this is by making very good guesses at the words, I’m writing. And that creates a new issue. Since It never guesses an incorrectly spelled word, your “typos” are not simple misspellings but now consist of perfectly good words used incorrectly. And they can be hard to spot when you scan the resulting text.

This was brought home to me when reading Paul Gillin’s excellent book “Secrets of Social Media Marketing.” Paul dictated that book into his computer using voice  recognition software. And, sorry to say, it is filled with the same sort of typos I’m running into. Not misspellings but incorrect words. A friend, A.C. Ross, told me he was having exactly the same problem. I’m starting to develop new writing habits… watching the output of the text converter as I scribble.

I happen to be a very fast typist. I’ll always be able to type a LOT faster than I can write with a pen on the tablet. But I really like the ability to enter text while standing (or reclining). For me it’s another way of working and definitely easy to pick up. And of course there’s also the matter of just 3 lbs and 6 hours of batteries.