Recently I installed the Vista Beta on my Tablet PC.
It works, given the occasional blue screen, quite well; but didn't feel
like a real tablet PC yet. The pen worked but the Tablet Input Panel
(TIP) and the handwriting recognizers were still missing. There is good
news: a beta of the TIP is now available to MSDN subscribers. The TIP
does not make much sense without handwriting recognition; in the beta
one for the English language is included. My first impressions are
quite positive. XP Tablet Edition 2005 could keep up with my lousy handwriting and Vista has no problems either.
There is no possibility to change the language. What also changed
(or isn't included yet) compared to the XP version is context sensitive
recognition of handwriting. When you want to scribble a web-address in
XP Tablet PC's edition IE the recognition of url's is favored using factoids. Buttons with url specific words like http:// and .com
automatically pop up. The Vista TIP has three special character pad's;
but you have to select them yourself with a click. This is what the
web-pad looks like
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Note the .uk button.
The recognizer is also available to your own code. Again I tried my text-reco demo which was build with the tablet SDK (which was originally designed for VS 2003) and VS 2005.
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Like a charm. Now my Vista Tablet is a real Tablet.