Windows Phone Thoughts: Pocket PC vs Pen and Paper: Fight!

As you may already know, I recently reviewed PhatPad, and writing the review really got me thinking about the Pocket PC as a replacement for pen and paper. So this time I'm going to take a closer look to see if our favourite gadget, teamed up with an application such as PhatPad, really stacks up as a credible alternative to pen and paper.

Now I'm not talking about all the stuff we've already replaced with our Pocket PC: the diaries, phone books, calculators, handheld games consoles, mp3 players, etc. I'm talking about going back to basics: can the Pocket PC fundamentally replace that simple plain piece of paper that I bet many of us still have to hand to fulfill a myriad of miscellaneous tasks?

So in the blue corner we have the Pocket PC running PhatPad; in the red corner, the undefeated champion: a piece of paper and its tag team partner, a pen. Who's your money on?

I've already looked at PhatPad in some detail, so in this follow-up I'm just using it as an example of state-of-the art note-taking software on the Pocket PC, rather than picking on it particularly. After all this article is really about the Pocket PC itself, but clearly the hardware's no good without some decent software.

The Challenge
To even enter this contest the Pocket PC solution must provide standard pen and paper features such as easy editing, the ability to use different colours and line thicknesses and support for sketches and diagrams. To stand a chance of winning, it must overcome paper and pen's key strengths, namely fast start-up time and speed and fluidity of writing.

The new kid on the block (new as compared to how long paper's been around) may try to distract us with advanced features such as handwriting recognition and text searching. However, the old dog still has some killer blows up its sleeve, such as near-zero thickness and persistence; can these still outweigh the bells and whistles of technology? Seconds out...

Round One: Flat or Phat
A single piece of paper may have near-zero thickness, but a pad of several hundred pages certainly doesn't. Clearly this isn't a problem on the Pocket PC, as the number of notes or pages you can have is only limited by your storage memory, and the only physical space taken up is the Pocket PC itself. This is fine unless you only want to make a few short notes, which is after all the focus of this comparison, and in this case the Pocket PC is bloated to say the least.

So Round one goes to pen and paper. Pocket PC: 0, Pen and Paper: 1.

Round Two: Size Isn't Everything
Paper comes in many sizes, but unfortunately Pocket PC screens don't. However, applications such as PhatPad allow you to create notes in a variety of virtual sizes with enough zoom options to make the most of them, and in any case the Pocket PC isn't competing with Letter or A4 size paper - that's a job for the Tablet PC.

Round two goes to the Pocket PC. Pocket PC: 1, Pen and Paper: 1.

Round Three: Time to Write
In a straight race against the clock, I can be ready to write with pen and paper in a second or two (assuming of course that I can actually find a pen). With the Pocket PC it's at least two or three times slower: fetch Pocket PC, open case, turn it on, launch PhatPad, extract stylus, select 'New' menu option; by this time I may have forgotten what I was going to write.

So Round three goes to pen and paper. Pocket PC: 1, Pen and Paper: 2.

Round Four: Speed and Fluidity of Writing
With paper you can choose your favourite writing device, be it cheap ballpoint or gold fountain pen - pick the right one according to your taste and writing with it can be as smooth as silk.

Advanced digital ink technology in applications like PhatPad makes handwriting on the Pocket PC screen almost as smooth and quick as writing on paper. As an aside, the only fly in the ointment here for me is the less-than-substantial stylus that came with my Axim X5 - the device's only Achilles heel in my opinion.

Round four is close enough to be a draw. Pocket PC: 2, Pen and Paper: 3.