Tablet PC RIP? Nope, that story is ALL wrong

Michael Gartenberg | May 13, 2004, 12:16 AM

I've been games focused this week but let me take a quick break here to comment. Let me be clear. Tablet PC is not going away. Feel free to argue and debate it but it's not going away. Period. Tablet for the foreseeable future will be a superset of computing. Something that is a Notebook Plus. Overtime, that will probably change but not every notebook will have Tablet functions. Just like today, not every notebook has an optical drive. Now having said that, the Tablet team has not done the best job marketing (this is becoming a familiar theme). Where are the ROI numbers to justify the marginal cost that Tablet increases? Where are the evangelizing efforts to show the world what they are missing? Where's the buzz about Lonestar? Tablet is here to stay but it could be a lot more successful if Microsoft and partners put together a coherent and cogent marketing effort behind it. (oh, and someone builds a device like the X40 that can get me through a full day without a recharge and still weigh less than four pounds).

eWeek: TabletPC could quietly vanish.

This, and other press, has gotten all my Tablet PC friends up in a frenzy. My IM has been busy all day long. One thing I've noticed is that everyone has a different idea of what Tablet PC really is. Here's a look at the different "TabletPC's" I've identified:

1) The concept. You know, a portable computer that you could write on with a pen. Alan Kay is responsible for this meme. But some people believe that a tablet concept includes everything from an Apple Newton to a Palm Pilot to Alan Kay's Dynabook. Christopher Coulter has a tablet history here, for more details.

2) The product. You know, a full Tablet PC that you can buy. Like the Toshiba Tablet PC that I'm typing on right now.

3) The hardware, slate style. Like my old NEC. No keyboard. Just an LCD with a digitizer. Note that the hardware alone does NOT equal a "Microsoft Tablet PC." I ran Linux on my NEC, just to see if it'd run. It did. But the Tablet experience wasn't close to the same as when I ran Microsoft's technology on it.

4) The hardware, convertible style. Like the Toshiba I'm typing on now. Looks like a regular laptop in one mode, but then the screen flips around so I can hold it like a pad of paper and write on the surface.

5) The digitizer. Because the digitizer on most Tablet PCs is different from most other digitiziers, some people believe that's what makes a Tablet PC. The digitizer in my Tablet PC is an active style (it requires a stylus). Why is that better? Because you can put your hand on it and it doesn't confuse the cursor. It also gives a far higher sampling rate, and much more accurate positioning. This makes the quality of your inking much better than the digitizers that are included on most palm-style devices.

6) The inking technology. A few of my IM'ers thought this is what really makes a Tablet PC. The inking technology is quite interesting. When you write on your Tablet, the Tablet records the stylus' direction, pressure, speed, and location. The ink datatype is actually a vector graphic, not pixels. So you can enlarge it and keep its shape. It also converts -- underneath -- to text so that you can search through all of your notes using ASCII text commands. This is so cool and is why a Tablet is far more useful than a pad of paper or a book.

7) The user interface (oh, sorry, since I work at Microsoft we're supposed to call this "user experience" now). The user experience is about to get a huge update on the Tablet PC. I can't say "huge" enough. The difference between the old version and the new version is like the difference between TV and Radio.

8) The SDK. Developers use the Software Development Kit to build applications that use the Tablet PC hardware and software.

9) The Team. I noticed that when some people talk about Tablet PC, they are actually talking about the people who work over in building 32. And, some even mean specific parts of the team like management or PR or developers.

10) The future. Some people put all their frustrations and hopes onto a future version of the Tablet PC.

Anyway, now that we've identified all the different "Tablet PC's" we can have a good conversation about the TabletPC.

[Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]