Eric Mack On-Line

My friend, Michael Sampson's just packed his bag for a business trip. Normally he packs a PowerBook and his Tecra M4 Tablet PC.

Click here to see what Michael packed for today's business trip.

This is quite a change.
Several months ago, Michael had this about the Tablet PC vs PowerBook:

... Eric Mack has been trying to convince me that I should buy a Tablet ... I have pretty much decided that I will go for the PowerBook today, and re-evaluate Tablets in 18 months ... once Longhorn for the Tablet, OneNote 2006 (with better support for OneNote Shared Sessions across the Internet and through disparate firewalls), and Office 2006 have all shipped from Microsoft, and once Toshiba has introduced a more up-to-date edition of their Tablet PC...

I admit, when Michael showed up at the Digital Sandbox, I was completely taken by surprise.

I suspected that Michael would grow to enjoy his M4. This summer, Michael and I travelled to New York for the to the Collaborative Technologies Conference, On the plane, we practiced using OneNote shared sessions at 30,000'. The next day, we demonstrated OneNote Shared sessions at Michael's 7-Pillars of Team Productivity workshop and, Michael used both OneNote and MindManager during his presentation. For the entire week of the conference, Michael lugged both PowerBook and Tablet around New York city. (At least he balanced them so his arms stayed the same length.) Still, I wondered how long he could continue to carry both.

I know there's a compelling reason for today's choice. I know he didn't choose the M4 over his PowerBook for weight reasons! There must be something else. The PowerBook's an awesome laptop; In fact, I was tempted to switch my M4 for his PowerBook at LAX and send Michael home with two M4s. [I would have done it but New Zealand is a long way to have to travel to fetch my machine back once he would have discovered the prank.]

I know that, like me, Michael's constantly evaluating new tools to determine their productive benefits. I was excited to read today's post, not because I can gloat, but because I know that I can look forward to some excellent posts on his tablet use in the weeks to come.