When car sales soften, automakers tack
on rebates. In the case of slow-selling Tablet PCs, Microsoft
gives away software. The latest giveaway, Microsoft Education Pack for Tablet PC, comes as a free download (www.microsoft.com/educationpack) and comprises four useful software tools and a game. The best part of
the pack is GoBinder Lite, a note-taking and coursework organizer. If you're a
student and have a Tablet PC, this is a no-brainer: Get Education
Pack.
Announced in 2000, portables equipped
with Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC Edition first shipped in 2002. Sales have
been soft (to put it mildly); they currently run at about 1 percent of all
notebook sales, according to market researcher Gartner Dataquest. Microsoft
could have a high-tech Edsel on its hands in the Tablet PC, or it could just
have a late bloomer. Hardware offerings are improving, typified by the recent
Lenovo/IBM ThinkPad X41, and prices are coming down, so the tablet versions of
notebooks are worth considering.
This spring, Microsoft offered the
Experience Pack, which contains a half-dozen pleasant utilities, such as a tool
that lets you jot quick notes on the Windows desktop at the flick of a stylus.
Here's what you get with Education Pack, in descending order of
desirability:
GoBinder Lite lets you type notes and
diagrams, handwrite them with the stylus, and keep track of your class schedule.
It's like Microsoft's OneNote, only geared to the needs of students and not
quite the technical tour de force OneNote is. You can drag in Web pages (static,
not linked images) and capture output from any other Windows application via a
GoBinder print driver. There's a calendar and contact list that syncs handily
with Microsoft Outlook. If your school uses the Blackboard Learning System, you
can download course materials directly. The lite version has a limit of 10MB per
database; if you want more capacity, you'll need to update to the full version
of Agilix GoBinder for $49.95 direct. Microsoft says most students would find
5MB of data adequate for a typical semester.
Equation Writer lets you handwrite
complex equations with the stylus and convert them to text. For poetry majors,
this is a useless feature once you get past the freshman math requirement. For
all others, it's a godsend, so long as you understand it's an equation writer,
not an equation solver. For that, you'll need something like MathCad or your TI
calculator.
Ink Flash Cards is for creating
electronic flash cards. Write the question on one side, the answer on the other.
It's slower than writing on cardboard index cards with a felt-tip pen, but these
cards will never get lost.
Send to Microsoft OneNote 2003 takes
anything you can send to a printer and instead sends it to the excellent
Microsoft OneNote app (which is included standard on some Tablet PCs). Hexic
Deluxe for Tablet PC is a tablet-optimized version of the $20 game from
Zones.com.
Like Experience Pack, the Education
Pack is worth downloading. The programs are good and the price is right.
