Living with the nettablet
Like most netbooks, the M912 comes pre-installed with Windows XP Home Edition, and has just enough horsepower for web surfing, email, basic office tasks, and SD video playback. Gigabyte has thoughtfully updated the OS to Service Pack 3, which is a nice touch. However, this is a nettablet rather than a plain old netbook—why doesn't it come with a tablet version of Windows XP? According to Gigabyte, Microsoft wouldn't give it a license. Redmond seems intent on having netbooks running Windows XP Home Edition or Vista, neither of which is a particularly good choice given the M912's limited horsepower and tablet aspirations.

At least the M912's desktop orientation is handled gracefully by Intel's GMA 950 graphics driver. Translating stylus taps to mouse clicks presents a bit of a problem, though. The stylus is really just a precise pointing device; tapping will get you a single or double mouse click, but only with the left mouse button. To use the right mouse button, which I do quite often, one has to click a shortcut on the system tray that puts the stylus in right-click mode. This may not be the most elegant solution to the problem, but it gets the job done and isn't too inconvenient

Plenty of desktop real estate for Windows...

So we have the mouse emulated, but what about the keyboard? When running in tablet mode, the M912's keyboard is tucked away behind the screen and essentially inaccessible. Handwriting recognition seems like the obvious choice, but since this is a desktop version of Windows XP, that functionality isn't built into the OS. Windows XP does have an on-screen keyboard that one can access through the accessibility menu, but it's quite small and hardly useful for more than a word or two. Gigabyte should have equipped the M912 with third-party handwriting recognition software to make up for Windows XP's tablet shortcomings.

And in tablet mode, loads of vertical pixels for text

If you're just browsing bookmarked sites, the lack of true pen-based input shouldn't be a problem. I actually quite enjoyed reading web sites in portrait mode. Having 768 horizontal pixels still leaves plenty of room for TR content, although not the ads (my apologies to Adam, our biz guy). The portrait format should be good for ebooks, too. However, perhaps the most appealing element of the M912's tablet capabilities comes in landscape mode, where the system can be used as an over-sized media player. This setup works particularly well for movies, and you don't even need proper pen-based input—pointing and clicking with your finger works just fine.

Unless you count doodling in Microsoft Paint, that's about it for what the M912 can do as a tablet straight from the factory. Not content to leave it at that, I went in search of a third-party software solution that would allow for better pen-based input.

ritePen working comfortably with Notepad

My first thought was to install Microsoft's OneNote note-taking software. However, the latest 2007 release won't translate writing to text in Windows XP. OneNote 2003 is apparently up for the task, but I couldn't find a free trial to download, forcing me to look elsewhere. It's a good thing I did, because I stumbled upon ritePen, which is a handy little app that sits between your stylus and whatever application you like. Write anywhere on the screen and ritePen translates to text, recognizes punctuation, and even includes a custom dictionary that you can edit.

RitePen works well with my own printing, and the M912's hardware seems to have no problems handling the number crunching behind the text conversion process. I tried handwriting, too, but was less successful. It's been so long since I used handwriting for anything other than the scrawl that has become my signature that even I could barely read what I'd written on the screen. ritePen didn't have a chance. In any case, ritePen is good enough to be bundled with systems from Hitachi, Fujitsu, Sony, and Clevo, and it appears to be a good companion for the M912. If you intend to take advantage of the M912's tablet capabilities, you're going to have to add something to handle handwriting recognition.