Rakesh Agrawal's Blog — Founder, Investor, Houstonian

My daughter plays with my new Toshiba Portege M400 Tablet PC laptop (after eating a chocolate cupcake… mmm)

I just purchased a new Toshiba Portege M400 Tablet PC laptop… As far as the Tablet PC goes, I’m a long time listener, first time caller. That is the say that I’ve followed the Tablet PC for some time both in the news and in reviews and from people I know who have one and have considered getting one on several occasions, but until now I never took the step to actually own one.

Here are some of my initial impressions — warning they are going to be a bit scattered, but I’m hoping to capture some of my first thoughts while they are fresh and haven’t been erased by… whatever it is that leads many of to quickly adapt to new gadgets and new interfaces.

• As you can see above, my daughter loves it already. Really, though, she took very naturally to it. It was cool, she thought she was on her chalkboard so she tried to rub off her scribblings using her thumb. 🙂 On a side note, Shonali and I both became afraid, almost at the same time, for every other screen in our house. We need to teach her early and quickly that she can only write on Daddy’s laptop screen… and that too, only with a special pen.
• The first things that I find myself doing with this new device are the normal things I do with any PC. Login to GMail to plough through work emails (I just whittled my inbox from 275 messages down to 75… someday I’ll learn my lesson about leaving the office and heading to a conference with extremely engaging speakers for 3 days), listen to voicemails, download some photos from my camera. And unfortunately none of those apps really support my new laptop’s special capabilities (ie the Tablet PC side of things). Right away, I want to use the pen everywhere, I want to be able to draw on everything, make circles, notes, annotations and I can’t. The broad success of this thing is going to be around getting the right set of applications on a box and making them all very pen friendly. Maybe there’s a good pen layer for Office and that might help, but for folks like me that spend so much of their time on the web, in the cloud, there has to be deep pen integration in those apps / website too. A Firefox Tablet PC plug-in? I’ll have to look into it, it’s something I think I’ll almost certainly want. OneNote and Windows Journal? Well, those seem to be THE pen apps, and I haven’t spent anytime in them yet.
• The thickness of the Toshiba Portege M400 is a put-off when it’s being used in Tablet mode with the pen. I usually rest my wrist on the paper/table when I’m writing (I think most people do, right?) and having my wrist elevated by 1.5″ makes it awkward to write. Maybe I’ll adjust, but it’s a big put-off to begin with.
• Toshiba has this annoying pop-up that appears, by default, everytime you even slightly move the machine that tells you that Toshiba’s anti-shock technology has detected that your laptop is moving and to prevent any damage, it’s parking the hard drive heads. And you have to click it to clear it. Talk about a total put-off to the initial pen experience. I picked the laptop up from the desk and put it in my lap and started writing and every 2 seconds I had to clear this pop-up. I finally said, “don’t show me this message again” but shouldn’t that pop-up just be off by default? I mean, haven’t hard drives been automatically parking their own heads since the mid to late 1980s?
• There’s a little bit of “wobble” in the Tablet PC screen when it’s in regular laptop mode. It feels like there should be some way to lock it into laptop-mode position, but there isn’t. In contrast, when I swivel the screen around and lay it flat to put it into tablet mode, the screen snaps securely into the base and the whole thing feels really solid.
• There are these funny buttons on the bottom of the screen — I wonder what those are all about? One’s a joystick that kind of acts like the scroll wheel and when you press it you click.
• When I’m in tablet mode, I miss my keyboard.
• The smaller screen and keyboard (I’m using a Dell 300m right now) are a bit annoying, but I remember switching from my Dell X200 up to the 300m and being amazed at how much nicer the larger keyboard was so this is probably just the reverse of that effect.
• I wish the screen was higher resolution, but I probably should have thought of that before I purchased this thing 🙂 Seriously though, I could see a higher resolution display paying more dividends than anything else.
• Fan is kind of loud
• As I read in a few reviews before buying the M400, switching from laptop mode into tablet mode can take a couple of seconds — it’s not immediate.

I’ll post more comments as I dig into the pen functionality of my new PC. At the moment, “a drawing pad for Ananya” is the best story I can tell about this thing.

I’m at the Future of Web Apps event in San Francisco’s today and tomorrow. If you are here, give me a shout.

Some brief notes since I left Houston yesterday:

• Apple marketing really knows how to hit all cylinders at once with their launch messaging. When I got into SF last night, I saw a billboard on US101 for the new color Nanos and then when I got into the hotel, this e-mail was waiting for me:

• I sat next to this guy on the flight from Houston to SFO yesterday who was grad student in bio statistics at John Hopkins in Baltimore. It comes time to eat and they give him a meal and he puts it on his tray but doesn’t actually start to eat it. He’s alternating between looking at his watch and looking at the stewardesses who are a few rows away from serving us drinks. I’m thinking, “This guy really doesn’t want to eat without a drink first!”. Fine, so the drink finally arrives and he gets an iced tea and he specifically asks if he can keep the entire can. Fine, the stewardess says. Then the stewardess says, can I get you anything else for your iced tea — lemon, sugar…? His response, Yes, I’d like a glass of water. !? OK, so now he goes into overdrive organizing everything on his tray, his food tray, his burger, and the two beverages and one can that he has. It looks like he’s doing some feng shui thing with them all on his tray. So he gets them exactly how he likes them and then he reaches down underneath the seat into his bag and pulls out a… camera. He snaps a photograph. At this point, I couldn’t not ask him what was going on. His answer: http://www.airlinemeals.net/. Ha! Wild. He said it was just a sort of hobby for him.

photograph taken by j-a-x, featured on houstonist.com.

I’m looking for a “Google Alerts”-like service that’ll notify me when certain keywords appear in certain forums (example: I’d like to be notified everytime someone posts ‘snapstream’ or ‘beyondtv’ or ‘beyond tv’ on byopvr.com). Or I’d like to be notified when a particular user makes a post within a particular forum.

Something like this would make it a lot easier for me to track and monitor conversations in the forum-o-sphere (yes, that is a term that I just made-up… 1:15pm central time, Sunday, September 10, 2006 — you heard it here first!). Forums are pretty darn popular, at least they are for us over at SnapStream and my sense for it is they are more practical and accessible to the general population than blogs are. ie random Joe customer is more likely to post something in a company’s forum or in a community forum than he is to create a blog and make a posting about it there. Even if he already had a personal blog, he’s probably still post to a company or community forum, knowing that he’s likely to get more traffic and responses that way.

If a service like this doesn’t exist, it’ll be one of those “shit, why doesn’t this service exist?” moments for me. With blog search being such a hot area, Technorati and Google duking it out, how can everyone be missing out on being able to search and track conversations in the forum-o-sphere?

One of the fun things about taking photographs of friends and family is sending them copies afterwards so everyone can enjoy them. And sharing photographs online is a relatively simple process. Choose the photographs worth sharing, click some buttons to get them to a reasonable size, upload them somewhere and then e-mail a link to “somewhere” to family and friends. Or maybe there are just one or two photographs of interest so you e-mail those to a friend. Some of these things are even simpler if you are using photo management software (like Picasa) that’s integrated with a website for sharing photographs (for Picasa, this site is Picasa Web Albums).

But what about sharing actual prints that people can put up on their fridge, in their photo albums or mail to grandparents? This is more cumbersome. In my case, the process to do this goes something like this:

1) Select “worthy” photographs in Picasa

2) Export those photographs (I set the “resize too” option to 1200 for 4×6 prints, 1600 for 5×7 prints)

3) Login to Sam’s Club Photo Center

4) Upload all the photographs

5) Tell Sam’s Club that I want 4×6 prints (singles or doubles)

6) Tell Sam’s Club where to send the photographs

7) Complete the checkout process (including credit card info)

So this isn’t so bad — after all, I’m just clicking buttons. No phone calls, no physical trip out to the photo lab, the whole process is virtualized. But it’s still labor intensive, even if it only takes a bunch of clicks.

So first of all, Picasa could stand to have much better integration with photo printing services (or maybe they just host their own like Apple does). The key points for better integration would be:

– Integrate my contacts, so I don’t have to go digging for people’s addresses.

– Save my credit card information

– Automatically resize photos before uploading, depending on the size I want to print photographs at so I don’t have to do it manually (or so that uploads don’t take excessively long when I’m just looking to print wallet sized photographs)

And then the other more innovative thing to do would be to integrate some sort of facial recognition technology into the process so I could take an album and choose a “Send Prints to Detected People” option. My photo printing site/software would then order and mail photographs that John was in to John, and the photographs that Suzie was in to Suzie, and so on and so forth. Each person’s face would need to be associated with their name and address.

The upside to an approach like this is ordering and sending photographs to friends becomes really easy. Your photo printing site or software, with the help of some facial recognition, basically does it for you. What photo site wouldn’t love something like this? If it worked reasonably well, it would surely increase photo printing sales for customers using the feature. And, all that heretofore useless facial recognition software would finally do something useful!

There’s an assumption here that people are only interested in photographs of themselves. I think people ARE, generally, very interested in seeing photographs of themselves, definitely more than most people would be willing to admit. But this approach certainly wouldn’t be complete. To get better coverage, maybe a social network could be thrown at the selection process, after all the problem here is basically one of relationships. “Send person x all photographs that contain person x and of all of the people person x has designated as friends and family.” Fundamentally, though, the question of whether someone would be interested in seeing a photograph of someone else isn’t something that’s easily answered (nor is the opposite question — who a person would want seeing a photograph of themselves, or, say, a photograph of their child).

Another problem here is a problem of physical addresses. With e-mail, fine, you can send separate emails out to people even if they live in the same place — no big deal. But I’d feel silly sending two sets of photographs to husband and wife that live in the same house. This could kind of be solved by working backwards from the address, if two people are designated to live at the same address, then those batches would get merged.

So it seems obvious that the facial recognition + photo ordering feature like what I’ve described wouldn’t be a slam dunk — I’d classify it as potentially interesting enough to try out and experiment with. At a minimum, photo sharing software like Picasa should make the printing process easier. My fingers are getting tired of clicking so much!