Handwriting Recognition

One early characteristic that led to the success of PDAs is their ability to recognize handwriting. Providing us with some background on the topic, Thomas Vander Wal states,

"This crossed my radar the same time as I read Jeff Hawkins' discussion about how he came up with Graffiti for Palm devices. He noticed people did not find touch typing intuitive, but they saw the benefit of it and it worked. Conversely in the early 90s people were interacting with handwriting interpreters that often did not understand one's own handwriting. Jeff came up with something that would give good results with a little bit of effort put in. Palm and Graffiti took off. (Personally, I was lucky when I got my first Palm, in that I was on the west coast and waking on east coast time, which gave me two or three hours of time to learn Graffiti before anybody else was awake. It only took two or three days to have it down perfectly)."

Jeff Hawkins is the inventor of the Palm Pilot. He founded Palm Computing and later Handspring. He is now focusing his energy on neuroscience.

Handwriting recognition is now having to compete with built keyboards, made famous on the Blackberry. Whatever your preference, you can increase your productivity with a PDA.