OneNote was one of the few innovative pieces of software Microsoft added to its Office system last week, but it didn't add it to the Office suite - you have to buy it separately. However, since nearly everyone from students to company directors takes notes, it should find an audience, and many people may find it more useful than the spreadsheet and presentation packages they don't really need, and the powerful document processing features that are in Microsoft Word but they never use. If it takes off, it could even give sales of a new generation of Tablet PCs, arriving now, a much-needed kick.
OneNote is straightforward to use: it's structured into colour-coded sections, with multiple pages in each section. You can type - or write - into the pages but you can place chunks of text and pictures wherever you want just by putting the cursor there, so you can have your main notes, an agenda in the top right corner or as part of the page title, a to-do list running down the side and a row of pictures for quick reference. You can drag text and pictures in from other documents, and you get a reminder of where the information came from.
Shrink the OneNote window and the interface slims itself down, turning into a "sticky" yellow note that's handy for jotting down phone messages. You can also record meetings and the audio is saved as part of the document, synchronised to the notes you take, so it's easy to get just the clip you want when you go back to look at your notes.
It's easy to pick up OneNote and just start typing or writing, but you can also customise the stationery to suit the way you take notes. Steve Sinofsky, senior vice-president of Microsoft Office, says the program is very flexible because Microsoft studied so many styles of note taking. "There's a hallway at Microsoft filled with photocopies of notes and samples of notes from all over the world. We have people who take notes in very linear fashion, who use outlines with letters and numbers and structure; we have people who take notes in little squares spread over the paper. We have people who write notes on top of handouts, people who use calendars as a way of taking notes. Our job as product designers is to take the sum of all of those and build a product that supports all of them."
OneNote works perfectly well on a desktop PC or a notebook, with text you type or information you copy from web pages and other documents. It also works well on a Tablet PC, although Microsoft is keen for it not to be seen only as a Tablet application, perhaps because Tablet sales have been variable. The first two months saw substantial sales - around 72,000 Tablets worldwide - but then sales slowed.
The problem is that initially you paid a lot extra for a Tablet PC and in return you got an unusually small screen (10in or 12in at best), barely three hours of battery life and no CD or DVD drive - to keep the size and weight down to something you can comfortably hold in one hand while writing on the screen. The slower processors used to keep the first generation Tablet PCs cool enough to hold didn't always impress, either.
Almost a year on, prices are down - you can get a Tablet for less than £1,000 - and sales are up. Acer hasn't managed the 20% of all notebook sales it predicted but is close to 15%. And the latest Tablet PCs have better battery life and performance because of Intel's Centrino chips.
Smaller players such as Motion Computing went straight for Centrino models, but most Tablet suppliers are on to their second generation. Centrino's built-in wireless networking uses power more efficiently than adding Wi-Fi separately, although not all of the new models get a battery boost.
HP's Centrino-powered TC1100 manages more than four hours, but sticking with the same design apart from the 1GHz processor makes something like Acer's new TravelMate C110 more powerful without improving the battery life. We're starting to see more than just ultra-portables, too: Acer's TravelMate 303 has a 14in screen and a built-in CD drive, the TravelMate 250PXCi is a traditional notebook with a touchscreen and Panasonic's CF-18 is a rugged device you can drop and kick around. There are more models on the way from Toshiba and Fujitsu, too.
So will OneNote give the Tablet market a boost? If you're used to taking notes with pen and paper and then wondering what to do with them, it saves you filing them, wasting time typing them up or forgetting to take them to the next meeting. Audio recordings automatically synchronised with notes mean you can click on an action point and hear who actually agreed to take it on.
In short, you're more likely to do something with the notes you take in meetings, and that could be well worth the cost of a Tablet. But it's not just arguments about whether Microsoft charges too much for the Tablet PC-operating system that are holding the market back. While there are interesting tools such as Franklin Covey's TabletPlanner - which combines the familiar DayPlanner system with a link to Microsoft Exchange - the major software players haven't got behind Tablet PC. It needs more than one application that works better with a pen to make the Tablet PC a compelling platform.
