Early Look at XP Tablet PC Edition 2004, codename "Lonestar"

Let me start off by saying that I am writing this in the wee hours of the morning, without having gone to bed, and after a long and event-filled day in Las Vegas. Thus this is really a very early look at Lonestar, after spending only a few hours with the new features. The build that I am running is an alpha version, but so far it seems pretty stable and doesn"t seem to be causing a performance hit at all. The straightforward installation was very much like any other Windows XP update - a 10 MB file that took about 5 minutes to update the system, a reboot, and Lonestar was up and running.

I am not sure what all will change before the update ships, but right now Lonestar improves on the original Tablet PC OS in several areas:

  • A vastly improved Tablet PC Input Panel, which now floats near where text is being entered

  • An improved - essentially added - correction features within the TIP

  • A redesigned logon screen keyboard

  • Context sensitive recognition for things like URLs in the Internet Explorer address bar

  • Improved handwriting recognizers

  • Improved support for Asian languages

  • Support of ink in the browser through web controls

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    News source: Tabula PC

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