Thread: 770 Question
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Karel Jansens's Avatar
Karel Jansens is offline Karel Jansens
2006-06-26 , 10:47
Posts: 3,220 | Thanked: 326 times | Joined on Oct 2005 @ "Almost there!" (Monte Christo, Count of)
#17
Originally Posted by frethop
Good HWR does exist in a modern (sorry folks, the Newton is not modern. Although someone is trying to raise its soul, it's still a dead platform) usable platform. The Sony Ericsson line of smartphones -- P800/P900/P910 -- have excellent HWR. And, I cough when I say this, Microsoft Window XP Tablet PC version has awesome HWR. It can be done.
Excuse me, but the P910 and its predecessors do not have good HWR. Strictly speaking they don't have HWR at all: they have character recognition, essentially the same thing as Palms Graffiti. The engine has no idea about words, has no dictionary built in and is basically only good for short and occasional text entries. I should know, I've had a P910i for more than a year now. Even Decuma Alphabetic, though immensely superior to the built-in character recognizer, is not strictly HWR.

AFAIK, Windows Tablet comes with a scaled-down version of PhatWare's ParaGraph HWR, IMO one of the best HWR engines in the world, because it is based on one of the HWR engines that is in the Newton. Mind you, ParaGraph is only really useable in Windows as part of the (to be paid for) PenOffice package.

Some features that would make a great note-taking app: Note taking with HWR or digital ink, allowing the page with ink to grow indefinitiely (sort like MaemoPad+, but with the growing notetaking surface and without the confusing node tree). Organizing of notes in arbitrary fashions. Sending of notes to other applications on other computers. THe ability to import Web pages and PDF and annotate them.

Tall order...I know. Imagine how cool that would be on a 770.
You do realize that in the paragraph above you are describing the Newton's Notepad application, don't you? Although you did leave out the shape-recognizing ability of the Newton, which would transfer squiggly attempts at drawing geometric shapes into perfect circles, squares, etc...