Ask Paul: June 12 (Premium)

Happy Friday! With summer finally in full swing here in the Lehigh Valley, we can look forward to a nice weekend for a change.
Excel inking follow-up
Last week, jt5 asked:

Do you have any update on the Excel ink to text feature that was demoed last year? The last I heard is that it would be coming this spring...

I asked Microsoft about this and was told only that this feature will become available in the coming months.
Fitness tracker
GeekWithKids asks:

I was wondering what fitness tracker you are using. I remember reading that you had ordered a Samsung Fitness tracker when you got the S20. Did you switch to it or are you still using a Fitbit. My Charge 2 is on its last legs and I'm thinking that Father's day will be a good excuse to replace it.

I did test the Samsung fitness tracker for a few weeks and I preferred its color display, which made it easier to see for some reason. But I’m still using the Fitbit Charge 3 that I bought about a year and a half ago.

I mostly like it, except that I can’t customize the display that appears during a workout (like weights) to have bigger text; it’s just really hard for me to read something that small. I think about replacing it from time to time, but I’m unsure which direction to go. I will probably stick with Fitbit, and suspect that one of their smartwatches would be easier to read during workouts given the larger displays, but I don’t like having a big thing like that on my wrist. And I’ve even gone back and forth on just getting an Apple Watch. But … I don’t know.

Vaguely, I like that this is all Fitbit does. Buying a fitness tracker from a big tech company seems odd to me, like buying headphones from Microsoft. I just don’t think I’d ever do that.
iPad influences
ErichK asks:

Paul, aside from some obvious things like thinness and lightness, how do you feel the original iPad learned from tablet PC's mistakes?’

If you haven’t done so, I recommend reading the official Steve Jobs biography, which contains a great passage about a dinner party that Jobs attended where there was a Microsoft executive bragging about the Tablet PC.

“This guy badgered me about how Microsoft was going to completely change the world with this Tablet PC software and eliminate all notebook computers, and Apple ought to license his Microsoft software,” Jobs recounts in the book. “But he was doing the device all wrong. It had a stylus. As soon as you have a stylus, you’re dead. This dinner was like the tenth time he talked to me about it, and I was so sick of it that I came home and said, ‘Fuck this, let’s show him what a tablet can really be’.”

The Tablet PC was literally the inspiration for the iPad: At work the next day, Jobs told his design team to design a multi-touch tablet with no keyboard or stylus. That work, curiously, resulted in the iPhone because by the time this project became viable as a form factor, Jobs and Apple felt that a phone was m...

Gain unlimited access to Premium articles.

With technology shaping our everyday lives, how could we not dig deeper?

Thurrott Premium delivers an honest and thorough perspective about the technologies we use and rely on everyday. Discover deeper content as a Premium member.

Tagged with

Share post

Please check our Community Guidelines before commenting

Windows Intelligence In Your Inbox

Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Thurrott © 2024 Thurrott LLC