Thanks for your thoughts on this. We actually are leaning towards a virtual Graffiti area type thing rather than a full-fledged skinnable interface; there's kind of a multi-function floating palette that can be enabled or disabled, resized, and put in various places on the screen and this can optionally be used as a handwriting input box. That's the current design at least.
We'll likely be using only the Palm API, so old pre-OS5 Sony devices may no longer work (ironically enough they're the only ones that support extended displays now)... this is not set in stone though.
As for handwriting recognition, basically the problem with the Motorola one we use now (however good it might be at recognizing cursive) is that it's closed-source and not being supported or updated anymore; hence, while for the time being it continues to work on the current version of Palm OS (and appears to work OK in emulation on the upcoming Palm OS 6/Cobalt too), there's always a chance that a future OS upgrade might break it, and regardless there's no way we can make it work on other platforms like Pocket PC and Symbian. We haven't been able to license another handwriting recognizer under terms we like, and even if we could we haven't been able to even find one on Palm that supports Unicode (which we need in order to recognize all of the characters in the ABC dictionary), so we pretty much have no choice but to develop our own. And honestly cursive handwriting recognition is very very tricky and we don't know how to do it (not well anyway), so at least initially our homebuilt handwriting recognizer will be optimized around writing with separate strokes. We do plan to make stroke order sensitivity an optional feature, so people who can use stroke order correctly will likely gain some accuracy if they turn the feature on, and down the line after we get through a few dozen dense ACM/IEEE research papers on the subject of Chinese cursive handwriting recognition we will hopefully be able to come up with a system that works well with cursive too, but for the time being our new system is going to be at least a little more beginner-oriented than the old one. Some of the improvements we're looking at should benefit everyone, though, so if you can resist the urge to write in cursive even an experienced user like yourself might still be happier with the new system.
On Palm OS we plan to continue including both systems with our software at least until late summer of 2005 (for various legal reasons that's a good cut-off point if we decide to drop the old one), and as I said our testing suggests that the old system still works quite well on the upcoming new version of Palm OS, so you should have both options available for quite a while. And the first version of our new system won't even appear until late fall at the earliest. On Pocket PC/Symbian/etc we will probably only include our new system, which is why it's taking so long for us to put a Pocket PC release together; we have to develop the new system and then we have to get it reasonably well optimized before we can release a product that depends on it so heavily.