Will tablets hook the masses?

A couple of weeks ago I went to a fairly routine presentation about the latest optical and magnetic disk storage technologies. However, I was soon distracted by the person next to me, who pulled out a stylish-looking Tablet PC, fired up the Windows Journal application and begin scribbling enthusiastically.

Was I envious? Well, there are some Tablet PCs out there which go some way to reproducing the feel of writing with a pen on a piece of paper, but there are also some out there which one of my colleagues memorably likened to pushing a poker across a sheet of glass.

However, my main gripe with Microsoft's wonderful new toy is that my handwriting is usually converted to hilarious gibberish by the onboard recognition software. So, I haven't really been inconvenienced by my lack of a Tablet PC, yet. In fact using pen and paper has its advantages, since anyone looking over my shoulder and trying to spy on my jotted-down thoughts would have as much success as if they were trying to read Martian. Even if I could write legibly, I think that A4 tablets are the wrong format.

Recent surveys show that Tablet PC sales are slow - shipment figures are much lower than forecast.

One of the best standard notebooks I've used was Panasonic's CF-R1 Toughbook.

This had a great A5-size format, with a usable keyboard and enough processing power to run just about any business application. Turning one of these into a Tablet PC with a swivelling screen à la Toshiba's Portégé 3500 would be a winner, in my opinion.

Of course there are old hands in the office who harrumph loudly when the conversation turns to Tablet PCs, and they then start reminiscing about Psion's handhelds and become all misty-eyed. Well, their dreams may become reality because Sony will soon be launching its Clié UX50, a clamshell PDA that can double up as a tablet device by swivelling the screen and folding it back onto the keyboard like the aforementioned Toshiba Tablet PC. But the keyboard does look a tad small for people with meatier fingers, and until I get my grubby mitts on one of these devices I'm not going to speculate on how good it is.

However, I will speculate that Windows-compatible hardware in this format would be a real attraction to buyers. At this point the thorny problem of battery life still remains, although NEC is due to release a fuel-cell-powered notebook within the next six months. Intel's Pentium M mobile processor has proved quite a powerful chip, with benchmarks placing it not far behind the top-end Pentium 4 desktop processors. So, maybe a Centrino Tablet PC powered by fuel cells and in an A5 format could finally lay to rest the conventional notebook.

Plumbing a VGA cable from one of these systems into a nice flat panel and attaching a USB keyboard and mouse could also lay to rest the desktop PC. Now, how about a journalists' discount on one, please?

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