I had a job in health care where it required me to wander around a hospital for 12 hours, talking to each individual unit, and taking notes.

I tried hard for 2 or 3 months to make a laptop / tablet combo work. (xp tablet edition).

Eventually I gave up and reverted to using a clip board with 20 sheets of paper. Paper was just a better technological solution to the problems I had.

Things that I _really liked:
>Being able to annotate and write on a Word Doc or on a scanned document with a stylus was really, really nice.

>Not having to keep 20 pieces of paper organized was huge.

>Having a large screen that was internet connected if I needed to look something up on the fly was amazing.

>One Note is _really, _really nice software, and completely developed with that type of computer in mind. Being able to annotate a doc, and add sound, video and handwriting was amazingly cool, and quite intuitive. Built in features like the calculator, and table creation were quite astonishing.

>Handwriting recognition was quite trainable, and fairly easy to use after a while. Generally, I didn't have to use the handwriting recognition at all, I could just write down notes in One Note.

>Stylus use was a huge plus. I can't stand writing on an screen using touch only. I've tried tons of different on screen keyboards, and I've never found one that I like. Annotating things or writing by finger painting has never been good for me.

Things which stopped me from using it:

But, where the model broke down completely:

>Username and password inputs. The handwriting recognition in XP tablet was built around recognizing entire words, not combinations of symbols and words. So, trying to get a username that wasn't in the dictionary recognized as such, and then getting a password filled in while not being able to see what was being typed in the password field were complete dealbreakers after several months. What I usually ended up having to do, was bring up the onscreen keyboard, and click 25 to 30 times to inpute my uid/pwd every time I had to log into the hospital's software system, which timed out every 4 minutes unless I was active on it. So, I ended up logging on to the system with 30 clicks, about 10 times an hour, which was infuriating.

>Portrait vs landscape. I carried the tablet around with me in portrait mode all the time. Using a tablet/stylus like a clipboard/pen is extremely intuitive. Desktop applications generally expect a landscape orientation, however. It's hard to carry a tablet in landscape mode and write with one hand... it gets really easy to drop the tablet.

>Weight, and battery life were also pretty big concerns. I worked 12 hour shifts. I don't think that there has been a battery / portable computing device combination that has been created that can stand up to 12 hours of constant wireless / touchscreen use that is portable.

All that being said, I'm looking forward to seeing Windows 8's touch first approach to these problems. I also suspect hardware manufactures know something the rest of us don't. A walk down a Fry's netbook / laptop aisle in San Jose shows a _ton of touch screen enabled laptops and netbooks. The Build conference in a few weeks is going to be really interesting.