Microsoft OneNote - Is it the death of the pen and yellow notepad?

Although like most things that come from Microsoft, there always seems to be room for improvement, I needed to comment on Microsoft OneNote. Although OneNote has been around for a few years now, the advancements in tablet computing hardware has really started to take shape. The marriage of an adequately powered tablet PC and Microsoft OneNote brings people closer to achieving what I set out to do many years ago, that is, scraping my pen and yellow notepads. You can’t appreciate a tablets capability until you experience the interface that a product like OneNote brings to the table for you.

Personally, I am still learning all its capabilities, however, my initial findings is that it now is practical to take phone notes, meeting notes and similar information that you normally write down on a piece of paper, right on the tablet. The general human interface issues that were inherent with tablet computing in previous years really have been minimized by Microsoft’s OneNote. I would expect that as more technologists experience this product, the adoption of the tablet environment will begin to integrate better for people and add yet another common human interface right next to the keyboard and mouse. That is, of course as long as the hardware manufacturers continue to refine the ergonomic technicalities of integrating tablet based computing into the mainstream of personal computing. For now, OneNote makes sense and if you haven’t investigated it’s impact to your personal or business computing environments, it may be worth some of your time to take a look.