The beautiful Motion Computing medical tablet

March 27th, 2007 • computing, tablets

Approximately three years ago, at my former job, we got a fancy new toy: a Motion Computing tablet PC. It was the first tablet I’d ever seen and was arguably one of the first tablet-only tablets on the market. It was very lightweight, had a clean front bezel and human interface and I saw a lot of applications for it. Since I was at a University, the possibilities only boggled my mind because I knew we’d soon be ordering a million of them for all the teachers. Unfortunately that never happened and we only kept the one tablet for whatever reason which was soon relinquished back to the IT Department for re-deployment after the user got a fancy new IBM X60 tablet (which later was replaced by a monster Macbook Pro).

I was always envious of this tablet because of its sheer simplicity and value-add for the product itself. In foresight, I knew it’d hit vertical markets such as warehousing and inventorying with a swiftness, which it did. One thing I had always waited to see was its application in the medical field because frankly, it could easily replace stale old paper notes and information that stays with the doctor or the patient in their room. Now, Motion Computing has finally released their Medical tablet and it’s gorgeous looking. The ergonomics and form factor truly fit in with someone in a hospital having to lug it around whereas they used to cling between the breast and forearm and now they can just carry it like a shiny white tote. It looks like they’ve taken some of the ruggedness and durability from their industrial outings and put it to good use with the C5 Medical Tablet (see rubberized handle) and make excellent use of rounded corners to avoid any snagging on clothing or equipment.

I know I could never afford one of these things but I’d sure love to get my hands on one just to see how well they designed the UI for medical use.