It has always bugged me that the TIP in XP (and from what I’m reading here, Vista as well) lacks the full functionality of that in windows mobile (seriously, why?). I’ve loved two things about the pocketPC soft keyboard for years – 1) dictionary completion, as mentioned here, and 2) the ability to remove shift, backspace, enter and space from the keyboard and use simple gestures anywhere on the panel – I actually find it speeds up my input because I have to drift back and forth across the keyboard much less, and don’t have to hit the extra button for shift. I find it so natural that it drives me nuts when it doesn’t work on our office XP tablet.

I take it you refer to TIP in Vista – I’m using XP, don’t find the autocomplete.

I agree, however, have resorted to a combination of 3 soft keyboards, macros, TIP, Dragon NS, and sometimes Dasher to do what I need.

Ben in CA

Nokia phones have autocomplete is it’s garbage because it’s inaccurate and cannot account when I’m writing in English or using dictation.

I am very impressed with TIP. It’s much easier than I ever expected but one problem. Is there anyway to delete a word?
For some reason when I write “You”, my Tablet PC always thinks I’m saying “Yin”. How popular is Yin? Anyone else have this problem or is it just my writting style.

Bill

The biggest missing feature with the TIP is that it shouldn’t be there at all. Entering input using ink should be more integrated into the operating system and much less of an after thought. There are many ways to do this and I have thought about this in the past but I will not mention those here (hmmm….I smell blog post).

The TIP to me seems to clumsy to me. First, you have to find it on the screen and then either click on it or hover your pen on it. Then you have to wait for the panel to parse and recognize your text. If there are any errors, you have to fix them, then you get to place them within the input area. Most of the time, you have to do this in multiple steps because the text usually won’t fit nicely into the TIP panel. This is really clumsy, prone to error, and frusterating at times. I can’t imagine how tiresome this would be to a new user (I don’t remember that far back and I was too niave then).

I do agree that Microsoft has improved the TIP a lot within Vista (especially with the handwriting recognition) but it is still an afterthought. It can be better and should be as smooth and a lot less stressfull, such as inking in OneNote (and no, I feel ritePen is not the answer either).

Parallel to this topic, but actually why I rarely use the on screen keyboard is that I have really enjoyed the implementation of ritePen and the context menu that pops up when it recognizes your “Write Anywhere” ink: a box pops up with what it thinks you have written in bold at the top. Underneath are several other possibilities of what you may have written and it just takes a tap to select any of them and have that automatically replaced in the inputed text. Very nice.

Steve

That’s an on-the-money observation, Kev. They have this feature in Windows Mobile, so it makes little sense to not have it in the TIP. It wouldn’t count on it working (or at least working well) in the writing pad since that detects context and words, not just characters, but I see no reason why it couldn’t be done for the character pad and keyboard. Actually, now that you bring up the topic, it is a bit odd that the writing pad has word recognition, while the other two don’t.

Does autocomplete work with any version of Vista? I have Business and I’ve never seen this function at work. I’ve always had autocomplete on. Then again TIP correction only works 60% of the time for me so I learned to not expect the other features to work 100% of the time.

Using both a Treo and an OQO model 2, I would very much like some of the auto-complete and ‘smart’ text entry features to be implemented on UMPCs as well.