Graffiti 10 years later.

Good handwriting recognition has been elusive in the PDA market. It was laughable on the Newton. Palm made their users learn an entirely new script. Modern PDAs, like the Apple itouch skip it entirely, even though they have 100s of times more powerful hardware (if not more), and rely on soft keyboards instead.

I was a relatively early adopter of the Palm - my 1st was a b&w Palm 3. Though the onscreen keyboard was clearly quicker to learn, I stuck with graffiti thinking it would eventually be faster. Maybe so, but 10 years latter when I pull out my old handspring visor I find that the onscreen keyboard is at least as fast as my relatively practiced graffiti.

A big part of this is that I still make typos using graffiti. If the software could just catch those few remaining mistakes i think it would beat the keyboard. With all the increase in processing power you would think a modern PDA might be able to do it, too. I doubt we will ever find out, though. The days where you could expect users to learn a new form of handwriting are probably over.