On 28/05/10 6:36 PM, David J. Littleboy wrote:

My take is that groping for a stylus is enough of a pain (and the tiny
screens so ugly) that those things were usable only by the perversely
motivated: the "I'm more high-tech than you" crowd hell-bent on proving
they've got the right idea. But watching my friends use their
iPods/iPhones/whatever, it's clear that they represent an multiple order of
magnitude improvement in usability over anything previous. Flipping amazing.
(And this is from a dyed-in-the-wool Mac hater who bought a Kindle before
the iPad came out just to spite Apple (the Kindle UI is horrible; getting to
a reference number to click it is almost impossible; it's a major disaster,
but I love the thing since I can buy gobs of books and not have to throw any
away).)

This may be true for phones, though it wasn't true for PDAs. And for
larger screen devices like tablets, the styluses were great for writing,
and the handwriting recognition on XP for table was excellent. You could
also draw on the tablet, and with dual screen support (hooked to a
projector) it was an excellent presentation device.