InterWrite MeetingPad 400 / SchoolPad 400

John Madden is famous for two things: saying "Boom" and marking up everything in sight with his Telestrator. We don’t recommend doing the former in a business setting, but you can emulate the later attention-grabbing tactic with during your next presentation with the InterWrite MeetingPad 400, which lets you annotate PowerPoint slides on the fly using a stylus and wireless Bluetooth tablet. With this tool, you can circle an important data point, underline a key phrase, or handwrite a short note on your presentation witout having to mess around with extra cables.

GTCOCalComp offers two versions of this product, the MeetingPad for business users and the SchoolPad for educational institutions. The only difference between the two versions is their color, blue for school and gray for business.

Both tablets are the size of a spiral-bound notebook (11.4 x 10.5 x 1.0 inches) and are tapered in thickness, being only 0.1 inch thin at the front. Either pad weighs a mere 1.9 pounds. The active pad area is an ample 8 by 6 inches and responds only to the stylus, not to a regular pen or your finger. On each side of the pad area is a half-inch wide strip of touch-sensitive buttons for controlling the InterWrite software. The stylus has an internal battery and can be recharged by placing it in its docking space on the pad. Its only connection to the pad is an optional nylon tether. In case the tether breaks, the manufacturer has thoughtfully included a spare stylus. The pad itself has its own internal battery that is claimed to last 40 hours on a single charge.

By itself, the tablet functions as an exceptional remote presentation pointer. Once you plug the EZURiO Bluetooth USB dongle into your laptop, the tablet can control your PowerPoint slideshow wirelessly. The range is claimed to be an amazing 300 feet.

The tablet operates in a way similar to that of a Tablet PC. The pad area is mapped to your laptop’s screen area. Hold the stylus slightly off the pad in the upper left corner and the mouse pointer appears in the corresponding area of your laptop screen. Press down on the screen and whatever is under the mouse pointer is selected. The stylus has two buttons that emulate a double-click and a right-mouse-button click. We did notice one program, ZoneAlarm, that did not recognize the stylus clicks.

The InterWrite software that comes with the tablet provides an extensive range of annotation capabilities. The Interactive Mode of the program can freeze the laptop screen and enable you to embellish it with circles, arrows, and other elements. There are many different pen styles, including one that will recognize your handwriting and convert it into text. You can also highlight areas and add various icons. If needed you can call up a blank screen or a calendar page for additional note-taking. When you finish using the software, you are given the option of saving all your annotated screens, which can later be printed or distributed.

A second part of the software, Office Mode, interacts with Microsoft Office applications such as Word or PowerPoint. This software functions similarly to the Interactive Mode, except that it enables you to incorporate your annotations directly into the underlying Word document or PowerPoint slide.

In our tests, we used the SchoolPad version and found it to be fairly useful. It did, however, take a little while to get used to the stylus. At first, we tried to use the stylus like a mouse. That is, when we moved the stylus to the right one inch, we expected the mouse pointer on the screen to move likewise. Instead the stylus moves according to where it is on the pad, as is the case with a Tablet PC. But unlike a Tablet PC, you have to divide your attention, looking up at the screen while drawing below on the tablet.

The InterWrite software has an abundance of features, but it will take a presenter some practice to master them all. A little bit of patience may also be required, as we noticed a slight time delay when we used the pad as opposed to using the touch panel on our laptop.

A few of the tools in the software could use some refinement. For example, there is a Spotlight tool which you can use to reveal only a certain circular part of the screen. Unfortunately, the button that turns on the Spotlight does not also turn it off, and it took us several minutes to figure out how to accomplish that task.

The real power of the MeetingPad may come with using multiple pads. Up to seven pads can be passed around in a meeting, enabling a number of people to have their "say" on your PowerPoint slides. As a single purchase, the MeetingPad is a pricey but versatile tool that goes beyond the functionality of a Tablet PC to keep your audience’s attention.