Macworld 2009: Axiotron Modbook - The Elusive Tablet Mac Appears... From A Third Party

While Steve Jobs was missing in action on last week's Tuesday for Apple's keynote speech, Wozniak, the other Steve in the Apple founding duo, was on hand at Macworld to introduce the new model of Axiotron's Modbook - the third party MacBook modding company that takes a MacBook and a Wacom tablet technology and marries them together to create the sought after Mac tablet.

The new Modbook features an upgraded chipset that allows for more efficient and faster performance, leading to quicker boot ups and longer battery life, along with better screen technology that provides a clearer picture and greater touch sensitivity. Axiotron even managed to cram a SiRFstarIII GPS chipset into the unit, allowing the Modbook to acquire a four-satellite fix and provide GPS coordinates to applications.

The new Modbook's touchscreen has 512 levels of sensitivity, and, for handwriting recognition, features Axiotron's new custom handwriting engine, Quickscript. "Last year, we were using Apple's Ink technology," (the built in handwriting recognition in Mac OS X), "but everyone kept complaining about how bad it was, so we came up with our own system that works much better," said the Axiotron rep as I fiddled with the Modbook.

I tried Quickscript out using my own atrocious handwriting (it's my dream that one day, one computer out there will recognise my chicken scratch squiggles that even *I* can't read sometimes without fail), and it seemed to recognise what I wrote fairly well, as long as I wrote slowly enough so that my letters at least resembled something legible. For those of you with neater handwriting, Quickscript will probably be very good.

"The new system works best if you write in sentences. It uses context clues in order to help it recognise what you wrote, so writing in sentences is better than single words," he told me as I tried to get it to recognise my squiggled "Hello." (It did.)

Also on display was Axiotron's brand new Modbook Pro, which, you can guess, is a 15" MacBook Pro modded with similar touchscreen technology to give you a Pro version of the Modbook, all in a new black aluminum enclosure.

The other important difference on the Modbook Pro is the ability to use both the pen and touch to input commands and write simultaneously. You can be hitting a mod key with your finger at the same time that you're writing on the Modbook Pro. Unfortunately I wasn't able to test this feature as they didn't have a functioning unit for us to play around with on the floor at Macworld, so its efficacy remains to be seen.

The Modbook Pro will be available starting May or June (they weren't specific) of this year, with a hefty price tag of $4,999 (or $3,049 to mod your existing MacBook Pro.)

If you're tired of waiting for Apple to come up with their own tablet (an idea Steve Jobs has openly scoffed at), then the new Axiotron Modbook is available now starting at $2,249, base MacBook included (or you can convert your own existing MacBook into a Modbook starting at $1,299.)

Product Page [Axiotron]