I really do not like using a computer mouse. But what alternatives are there? Plenty. And more coming in the immediate future.

Most of us by now have got used to using a mouse. But remember, how it took some time to learn how to double click the mouse buttons? Then we use a laptop we get presented with a touch pad and/or a tiny stick imbedded into the keyboard instead of a mouse. These laptop pointing devices seem a step backwards in the ease of use of a computer. While some have mastered this latest challenge, many have just given up and attached a mouse to the laptop as the preferred pointing device.

My recommendation is that if you use a mouse; get an optical mouse with a built-in scroll wheel. These are available for about $15 Canadian. The optical mouse avoids the problems of dirt interfering with the movement of the mouse. The scroll wheel allows you to rapidly scroll though documents without having to move your mouse to the scroll bars.

If you do graphics work such as drawing diagrams or editing pictures then get a Wacom Tablet for about $120 Canadian. This device is well worth the price. It allows you to use a stylus to capture your pen-strokes. Its major draw-back is the fact that you are not actually drawing on the screen as you can with pen-based computers.

In November 2002, Microsoft introduced the Tablet computer. This computer gave you all the features of a laptop running the latest Microsoft software plus the ability to write directly on the screen by using a pen-like device called a stylus.

The Tablet concept is not new. In the 1990s, a number of pen-based computers were introduced. The concept was great but the hardware and software were not well integrated and they were expensive. They were sold as devices that could read your handwriting and thus bring an end to the need to use a keyboard -- they couldn't do this. (Today's tablets cannot do this either. Don't hold your breath. This may not be possible until 2010s if even then.) These pen-based computers did not succeed commercially but they did not vanish. One very successful offshoot were PDAs such as the Palm Pilot. These PDAs introduced users to the value of a stylus device as a selection device and a device to record annotations. They also became devices that you could read books on or read new headlines downloaded from the web. Many PDAs allow users to run limited versions of word processors, spread sheet programs, and presentation software so they can access some of the information they have on their desktop computer. The small screens on the PDAs have the advantage of being pocket sized but often you want a larger screen if you want to read a book or make meeting notes just like you would do on a pad of paper.

Enter the Tablet computer. PDA users can think of tablet computers as big screen PDAs that can run all their office software without compromise or changes. Plus they have Wi-Fi (see separate article) built-in.

Convertable tablet computers are those that can look and work like a traditional laptop but have a feature that allows the screen to turn over and cover the keyboard. In this mode the device resembles a pad of paper with the screen acting as the writing surface. Pure tablet computers do not have a keyboard at all although most of them allow you to plug in an external keyboard.

The Toshiba Portege 3500 was one of the highest ranked tablets announced when Microsoft unveiled the tablet computer in November 2002. This was a convertible-style tablet computer. I have been using one for about a year. Fantastic, indispensable are words I would use to describe it. Why? Because it has been my constant companion. It has been to all my meetings. In its tablet mode, it acts like a pad of paper that never runs out of paper plus it is holds all my notes from previous meetings which can be immediately found. More important, if I am waiting for a meeting or appointment to begin or the meeting turns to a subject that does not involve me; I can catch up on my reading. If I had a regular laptop, the clicking of the keys and the fold-up screen would be intrusive to a meeting environment. But with the tablet, the sounds are less than using a pen on a pad of paper.

Since I get some magazines electronically, they are available to me anywhere. Can you imagine pulling out a pile of magazines in a meeting and starting to thumb through them and highlighting sections during a meeting? On my tablet now I have a year's worth of a few magazines, a copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica, Microsoft's technical library (3 CD's worth), 3 years of MSDN magazine, and a few novels. And still I have lots of free space on the computers 40 GB of disk space. (To better understand how big 1 GB (1,000,000,000 bytes) is, the Encyclopedia Britannica, uses about 1 GB of space.)

So is the Toshiba the ultimate tablet computer? No. It is one year old. Computers are always evolving. Now (January 2004), second generation tablets are becoming available. I am testing one that is about half the price of the Toshiba with a bigger screen. More on that machine after my evaluation.

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