Although the tablet or slate computer concept has been around for several decades (in fact Apple developed concepts for a tablet in the 80s) it wasn’t until the introduction of the iPad that the general public started to take notice.
At Marche we take time to evaluate emerging markets, and after looking at the burgeoning tablet sector we felt there was potential for a type of tablet that was being ignored by bigger players such as Apple, Samsung, and Motorola. That niche is the tablet with a pen. Steve Jobs famously dismissed the pen when the ipad debuted in 2010, but we feel like it deserves another chance.
Why is the pen worth considering? The pen is still one of the best ways to convey information, whether it be jotting a quick note or drawing a diagram, or sketching an invention. Imagine making a page full of notes with quick diagrams and call-outs with a keyboard. Sketches interspersed with notes is the type of stuff you find in a designer’s sketchbook, or a writer’s journal, or an engineer’s notebook. The current crop of tablets cannot fulfill this role because they lack the necessary software, and they lack the hardware to do so.
The software aspect is easily overcome, developers need only to create software that is intended to replace the trusty notebook. The Hardware, however, is a bigger problem. The ipod and ipad uses a capacitive touch screen that has become the standard for a quality experience. The reason is because it is far superior to the old resistive screens found on ATMs and windows phones of the past. Resistive screens often irritated users because they didn’t always work very well and often took multiple presses to register an input. In contrast the new iphone and ipad screens seem magical. The drawback to these new screens is that they only work with fingers (and other conductive materials) and do not work with smaller items such as pen tips. However, there is another type of technology that the majority of the public had never interacted with, the active digitizer. The active digitizer is all about the pen.
This leads me to the concept that we developed. In order to highlight the possibilities of a pen based tablet we chose a concept branded by the leading manufacturer in active digitizers, Wacom. Wacom has been producing active digitizers since the early 1980s and is highly regarded for quality. The active digitizer allows the user to rest their palm on the screen and draw normally, the palm doesn’t interfere because it is based on Radio Frequency technology. This form of input is also very precise allowing artists, designers, and architects to create intricate work. Not only does it effectively replace drawing and writing with traditional media, it adds additional features such as pressure sensitivity (the harder you press the bolder the line).
Why all this talk about technology? In order to wipe the slate clean and focus on the positive aspects of the pen input, we felt it was necessary to review the current state of touchscreen technologies. In order to create a piece of hardware that would be a true replacement for the notebook, we had to understand what would and wouldn’t work. The quality of the input would be one of the biggest indicators of a good experience for the user.
For the Tablet to be a true notebook experience it would also need to be lightweight, thin and be capable of working all day. Hardware in today’s full featured notebooks would be too heavy, cumbersome, and power hungry. However, utilizing hardware designed for mobile devices and for media based tablets would be feasible. Since this concept was primarily focused on hardware we decided that utilizing an OS with an open market system would allow leading software developers for the creative fields such as Adobe and Autodesk to easily produce software for the tablet. Therefore the Android OS was chosen for the concept.
We have designed a concept that has a highly precise input for pen, but what about all the useful features of capacitive touch like gesturing (think pinch to zoom) that would be needed in the Android OS? Capacitive touch and active digitizers aren’t mutually exclusive in fact wacom already provides a dual digitizer for Windows based tablets, that deactivates the touch when the pen is being used.
So now we have a tablet that can truly be called a notebook and sketchbook replacement, but wouldn’t it be nice if you could utilize that exact pen input and touch interface with your fully powered desktop or laptop running photoshop or other high end creative software? Desktop mirroring over wifi is already a possibility in Android, and a bluetooth connection is available in some of wacom’s products. Combine the two and you have a device that not only allows you to sketch and write on the go, but also allows you to work in conjunction with your full featured computer and software.
We believe that this concept would provide a great benefit to artists, designers and journal writers.
