They’re not perfect, though. These kind of digital pens tend to be a pain to work with in “real life”. Either you have to attach a big clunky detector to the top of the page you’re writing on, to detect pen movements; or you have to use special paper with dots on, so the pen itself can work out where it is.

So a tablet form-factor computer isn’t actually particularly inconvenient compared to the funky pens. Also with a full laptop computer available, there is also a huge potential range of things that could be done for making the most of the lecture. I’m not sure how far along Universities are in their thinking in regard of that kind of thing.

If I was an undergraduate today, I think I’d be wanting to take my laptop in to lectures. Although, I do admit that would be mainly for the IRC back channel, the ability to surf the web, and for playing multi-player video games during the super-boring lectures

As for the iPhone and speech to text, there’s already a third-party app that does that:

http://www.crunchbase.com/product/jott-iphone-app

Not sure how well it works, though, particularly in terms of length of recordings it can deal with.

The thing is – I would have agreed with you, if I hadn’t seen “regular” people’s reaction to using hand-writing recognition on Vista Tablet PC touch screens. They REALLY LOVE it! A favourite use-case is taking notes in meetings (rather than writing e-mails). The point is – the hand-writing recognition works so well, you can really scribble away in an almost unreadable way, and it still gets the writing nearly 100% correct.

Lots of people are predicting a consumer device along the lines you suggest, though. You might well be right!

pressure sensitive – as you say Wacom already do this well – if your a professional/serious artist then your probably going to be better off with a specific piece of hardware? Also it’s clearly a niche area – the PC already does this well I believe in the tablet form and it’s never really hit the main stream.

Hand writing recognition: Do we really need that? – do you find yourself using the handwriting recognition for your emails or do you simply just type? ie drawing aside, isn’t the best way to input information into a computer still typing?

My bet is that it won’t have those features, that the work will have gone into making the user interface of the OS and key apps ‘finger friendly’ (TM)

That’s potentially a lot of work to get right – if you look back at the recent redesigns of some of the iLife apps – is iPhoto & iMovie more finger friendly now than before? Certainly they simplified the interfaces.

Maybe now, finally, putting cover-flow finder view into leopard makes sense…. or maybe it doesn’t have the finder at all…?

With multi-touch and a device potentially large enough to use both hands there is the potential to create a whole new human/computer interface paradigm – we will see how far they go/have got.

One of the interesting aspects is the timing – if the rumour is true – launch around Sep/Oct basically means that it appears to going to be launched *without* significant third party involvement means that either:
1. Current apps will simply work with the gestures – but not fit that well ( doesn’t seem very Apple ) or
2. It will be closed like the iTouch/iPhone – aimed at a specific market niche – “settee computing” (TM) – web browsing, email, chat, perhaps some iLife type apps, music, movies and games.

It reminds me of some of the reviews of this years E3 – all the game journo’s and attendees really didn’t like the stuff on show – people even got up and left during the Nintendo keynote! – the point being Nintendo showed loads of casual gaming stuff – not the sort of thing the audience at E3 is interested in – but the sort of thing that sells by the bucket loads.

Nintendo have got it – so I think have Apple – now’s the time to make a true consumer device – geeks may be disappointed.