Thats what Kevin over at jkOnTheRun wants to know. He asks this question with regards to Tablet and UMPC owners alike. Being the owner of a UX180p, I thought I might have some interesting feedback. The reason I say interesting is that the UX180 and UX280 don’t even come with Windows XP Tablet edition. So I suppose thats an important thing to keep in the back of your mind while I respond to the preceding…

I’ve never really been much of a touch screen guy. I’m totally in favor of a built in keyboard, as I feel that its still faster and easier then touch screen input. Again I’ve never had the opportunity to use a very nice tablet PC with a tablet OS, but I feel like it would be something along the lines of voice recognition software. For voice input software, they have come a long way. But its still not to the point where its accurate enough to be practical. Continuously having to go back to fix errors ruins the viability of such a program. I can probably type faster than I can write on a piece of paper, and I’m sure that writing on a screen using a stylus would be much slower than on paper. I almost never use touch screen based input when it comes to text input. However I do use it somewhat regularly when it comes to clicking and selecting.

Reaching out and touching something is obviously much more natural than navigating your way there with a mouse. I often find myself using a combination of mouse and touch screen input when it comes to clicking on links, pictures, etc. The thing is: I just about never use a stylus. I really don’t like styli very much. It almost ruins the natural feeling up touch screen input when you have to slide out some pen shaped tool to be able to accurately click the things you want on screen. Even back when using the Sony Clie UX-50 PDA, I skipped the stylus and just used my finger. The same goes for my UX180 a quick tap with your finger is much more efficient than having to pull out a stylus every time you want to make some sort of selection. At this point when I say using my finger to touch the screen, I’m really referring to tapping with a finger nail. You have to make a rather specific point of collision with the screen because it only recognizes one point of input. I wish that companies would start working with software that actually tries to understand and decipher a finger press. I don’t mean a single point of input, I mean a touch screen technology that completely analyzes where your finger tip touched the screen, and makes logical assumptions as to exactly what you were trying to touch.

In my opinion, touch screens would be much more at home with desktop based use. Take a look at your desktop screen right in front of you. Most of us are rocking out decently sized monitors. The difference between desktop monitors and tablet/UMPC screens is not only their size, but also their weight. When you have a decent base for your desktop screen, you can really give the screen a good natural tap. This would be great for clicking on icons on the desktop, or actually navigating the start menu with your finger. The increased size makes most buttons very good sizes for clicking with your finger, and helps to eliminate the need for a stylus. Obviously a touchscreen desktop monitor wouldn’t be used for touch screen based text input, but I think if an OS was designed specifically with touch screens in mind (I’m not talking about adding some extra features to an already existing OS like Microsoft has done) we would be able to navigate our computers much faster and more naturally than we do now with our mice. Once and a while I rearrange the icons on my desktop using the touch screen on my UX. The ability to select them all with just a finger and drag them around then drop them right where you want them is just so fluid and easy. If someone could base an OS with that ease of use in mind, I think they’d have something revolutionary. Multi-touch is also a very important factor in the desktop touch screen equation.

As for me, I’ll continue to use my touch screen once and a while for the occasional link click, or picture enlargement, but I hope at some point in the future we’ll see and OS that is designed completely around the idea of touch screen input. Until then, I think a hardware keyboard is a necessity if you are looking to get work done. By the way, if some of you Über tablet users out there want to show me how good touch screen based input can be, send the links my way. Again I’ll be the first one to say that I’ve never used Windows XP Tablet edition, or played around with a “real” tablet PC. So please, educate me!