I'm hopefully going to have my first IT tomorrow (fingers crossed). Being an ex-Newton user, I was wondering whether it is worth my time persevering with the handwriting recognition on the N800? I had the HWR on the Newton 2100 working very sweet, plus I became very quick at writing in Graffiti on a Palm (Graffiti 2 was a big mistake). After searching the forums, it seems most people here give it a miss.

As another ex Newton user, it's the biggest abomination of HWR you can imagine. It's like worst of Graffiti (with the limited entry area) and the terrible god-awful recognition of the Newton 100 (but worse )—it's about as bad as it could be.

Learn how to use them thumbboard well and you'll better than a good handwriting pace (30-60wpm).

Much appreciated. I guess I didn't realise how good we had HWR with the Newton :-)

At least I know now to not waste any time with the N800's HWR and spend more time on other things.

The HWR in OS2008 has been greatly improved.
I've never used Graffiti and sure it does not follow the same approach, but in OS2007 I tried to use the N800 HWR and it was useless.
In OS2008 I assure you it is far more usable and far more reliable.

Give it another shot, it's a new product.

Yeah . . . no. Better? A little, but stile a very far shot from the perfection that was the Newton's HWR.

I can't compare (and I think we should not) with the Newton's HWR.
Almost no other device out there is comparable to that one.
That's what we have today.
Still I did switch to the HWR on the OS2008 and it recognizes many of my letters even without teaching it how I write them (I have to tell it about my 'g' tho).
Os2007 was a real pain where you know the pain usually goes

Isn't the Hand Writing portion of Maemo open source?
I would like to think it will mature with age and/if more devs decide to have a crack at it OSS style.

That said, the only thing I would really like to see is allowing transparent hand writing over the text fields in web browsers when in hand writing mode.

Then you don't need to bring up a giant box to write in all the time...

-Rip

Why would Nokia release a tablet + keyboard and work really hard at improving handwriting recognition at the same time? It doesn't make much sense.

It's hard to believe they could beat or match grafitti anyway. But I'll try to give it a try...

I'll be holding off on upgrading to 2008 until it comes out of beta. It would be cool though if you could write directly into text boxes. That was an awesome feature of the NewtonOS (and I'll do my best not to compare too much).

As a veteran of HWR back from the original Newton Messagepad I have to say I find the HWR on OS2007 quite usable. There are some tricks to making it so. One is to write your letters much further apart than would be natural, another is to change the way that certain letters are formed (I had a problem with the letter 't' for example).

As an input method its slower than using cursive recognition (a la Newton or Windows Mobile) I but I do prefer it to either of the keyboard based input panels.