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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