Yes, you can use ‘tablet’ and ‘productivity’ in the same sentence

And save a few trees in the process.

I’ve been a tablet users since 2003 when I bought an Acer C111 and embraced pen computing in full. I’ve also owned an HP TouchSmart TX2, Dell Latitude XT and have tested many more as owner of Tablet PC Italia.

In April this year I bought an Asus VivoTab Note 8 and for the first time I am able to be as productive as I need to be. So I guess it has taken 10 years for Tablet PCs to evolve and mature into a system that is finally as usable as it was originally intended — a few of you will remeber Bill Gate’s claiming that in a few years time everyone would be using them (and he was right… the iPad came along).

Requirements for work and play, but mostly for the former

At home I use my tablet to check emails, social media, YouTube and browse. Not so much apps. Most of the time it’s powered off as fatherood keeps me busy.

I bought this device for work and for a specific scenario: taking notes in meetings and trying to use as little paper as possible. I work in Marketing for a software company and it’s extraordinary how much documentation is produced.

A big consideration right from the start was the IT environment. As much as I would want to work in the cloud, and I’m a big fan of cloud solutions big and small (gotta love Teamwork.com for project management), information is produced and shared in the usual docx, .xlsx, .pdf, etc… formats.

The Asus VivoTab Note 8 is a full PC and can handle all those, as well as the rather ‘heavy’ desktop software we build and sell.

Saving a small forest

There are between 5 and 7 people in our weekly team meetings and our WIP document is about 15 pages fat, printed double-sided in A3. That’s over 75 pages a week and over 3,000 a year. We also produce a small forest worth of docs for everything else Marketing folk tend to do.

I now save as PDF our WIP document and open it up using the excellent Drawboard so that I can scribble notes over it.

I can also ink over Word documents but prefer PDFs for scribbles.

I’m saving the documents I produce on our Intranet (Sharepoint) so that I can access them from my main PC at my desk, my tablet when I’m around in the office and even my phone (a Lumia, of course).

Actually, it’s a very well thought out OS

Lovers and haters of the Start Page will continue their flames forever, no doubt. And it’s also true that the Desktop feels a bit awkard in terms of role and positioning in the opeating system.

But I’m sure that most Windows 8 users, particularly the tablet ones, will agree with me when I say that it’s a very usable system. I make the most of it at work by:

• Configuring my Start Page so that I can quickly access apps, files and web resources that are relevant to the project I am working on. Live Tiles give me a glimpse anything new, upcoming, changed, etc…
• Being able to navigate quickly and find things by swiping on the left hand side for apps that are currently open, and the right hand side to go back to the Start Page or access search and settings in the context of what I am doing. The split screen dynamic where, for example, you click a link in your mail app and the browser opens up to the side, works very well.
• Using OneNote for all my note taking. It’s an excellent piece of software and the Windows 8 app version is a joy to work with in tablet mode. I can then open the same notes on my Desktop and phone too. The function that still blows my mind after many years of use is being able to search handwritten notes.
• Having a full PC in my hands. It can fire up Office programs as easily as Photoshop.
• Check email, Facebook or read the news when meetings stretch further than they should

I also find that I’m away from my desk more and work in more comfortable surroundings.

An 8" screen is small, but not too small

It took a little getting used to, but now I wouldn’t want anything bigger. Not even a Surface 3. Icons on the Desktop are small and I can bearly click on things, but I’m rarely there. And if I am, I can always use the pen.

The VivoTab Note 8's killer feature is the active digitizer. This means that note taking is precise and I can rest the palm of my hand on the screen as I write. I would NEVER buy a tablet without an active digitizer.

The tablet lacks a lot of features too, but this is a non-issue given my specific requirements. I don’t need to plug it into a larger screen and even the lack of USB ports hasn’t been a problem.

Why not an iPad or an Android?

To be honest, this was never going to be an option given I’m committed to one ecosystem.

Also, I haven’t tried note taking on Android (except on the HTC FlyNote, where it was very limited). Kudos to Google Apps users, though, as their paper consumption levels are low, no doubt.

These are certainly devices and operating systems that work well for business users too, but are certainly not as powerful for note taking as my set up is. And in the context of an organisation that uses Microsoft Office, well, the advantages are many more.