The New Tablet PCs by Microsoft!

What is it?  The Tablet PC is the evolution of the notebook PC that lets you use your PC in new and different ways.  The Tablet PC makes it possible to control a computer with a pen. The pen can be used like a mouse for navigation and to enter text either to be stored as handwriting (or "digital ink") or to be converted into computer text.  A pen-based, tablet PC has been a quest for Microsoft Corp. Chairman William H. Gates III since he and high-school chum Paul Allen first dreamed up Microsoft a quarter century ago. Microsoft, Apple Computer and others have tried and failed over the years to make a go of the business, in part because the technology wasn't up to snuff.

After many trials and failures, Microsoft says it finally has tablet PC software that works. For years, William H. Gates III and Warren E. Buffett have routinely mailed each other magazine articles that have caught their eye. They rip pieces out of the magazines, jot notes in the margins, and pop them in the mail. Gates anticipates the day when he won't have to mess with all that. With his new Tablet PC, he plans to call up articles from the Web, scrawl thoughts on the screen with a digital pen, and shoot it off to Buffett via e- mail. He's already using an early version of tablet software to send electronically annotated articles to Microsoft colleagues. "I have anticipated this for many, many years. And here it is," says Gates.

The Stylistic is a bit like an electronic clipboard. There's no mechanical keyboard, and data entry is done by writing with the special pen or tapping a virtual keyboard on the screen. Radio-frequency pens and digitizers A caveat: You don't want to lose the pen with any tablet--unlike touch screens, you can't substitute another stylus, a regular pen, or a finger.

Design Tablet PCs come in a variety of designs, all of which will include a keyboard. Convertible Tablet PCs look much like today's notebooks with integrated keyboards and clamshell designs. With a convertible Tablet PC, you simply rotate the screen and lay it flat to convert to Tablet mode. In this way, the convertible model offers all the advantages of pen-based computing with immediate access to the integrated keyboard.

Things learned from Microsoft's first stab at pen computing: In Pen Windows, the handwriting- recognition stuff wasn't that great. The pens weren't that great. The battery life wasn't that great. They were never good enough that anybody at the company ever decided, "I'm going to show everybody by just using this thing."

SLEEPLESS NIGHTS  Gates' revolution will have to start without two of the industry's most important soldiers: Dell Computer and IBM.  Dell President Kevin B. Rollins says it will wait to see how the market develops before jumping in.  IBM is more circumspect. "We don't see significant growth opportunities," says Fran O'Sullivan, general manager of PC products and services at IBM. If that changes, IBM will get on board.

The new Tablet PCs hold promise for select users, but they aren't ready for prime time It is neat for a while to watch a PC turn the handwriting into text--getting about 9 out of 10 words right. But actually, that gets old pretty fast. And while storing handwritten notes, drawings, and doodles in a computer has its uses, I don't think it's enough to make a user to run out and buy a $2,000 Tablet PC.

The Real Strength  The real strength of the Tablet--and what will determine whether there is a substantial market in its future--lies in the third-party applications being developed to take advantage of its unique abilities, especially the direct manipulation of objects on the screen. These include drawing programs from Corel (CORL ) and Alias/Wavefront; Zinio, a service that turns a tablet into a magazine reader; and an application from Franklin Covey that lets you write appointments and notes on screens that resemble its planner pages, then merge the data into Microsoft Outlook.  The tablet would be a wonderful way to use an image- editing program like Adobe Photoshop--if there were a way to emulate the shift, alt, and control keys the program uses extensively.

An Image-editing Program

Question Would you shell out $ to buy a Tablet?