Category: Tablet PC

I have a tablet PC in the house. I finally took the bold step and got a Tatung TTAB B12D.

I have to say; it is great! It is small, sleek, light and works fine. More later.

I’m contamplating whether I should buy a Tablet PC. I’m looking at the LE1600 from Motion Computing and at the Tatung TTABB12D. There is about a €1.000 difference between the two of them, which is largely due to the Motion Computing name.
The first time a worked with a Tablet was about two years ago when I started a pilot together with HP at a customer I worked for. Even as the machines were flimsy (10″ displays, bulky, slow, etc), the pilot was a success. The company bought the machines and they are pleased with them. Then all the Microsoft people I regularly work with started working with Tablets. I work with a laptop during meetings but using a Tablet at a meeting seems so much more natural.

The company where I did the pilot has moved on to the second generation Tablet PC’s, Fujitsu Lifebooks in this case. They tried the slate models but were not completely pleased with them, so they went for the convertible model. Most of the drawbacks, size – speed and power, are now gone and you can really choose a Tablet PC as a replacement for a normal PC or Laptop. The only thing is the price! Any way you look at it, it still is a lot of money.

We’ll level with you: the Tablet PC hasn’t exactly been the massive hit Microsoft hoped it would be.
There’s plenty of blame to go around (pick your pet theory: that people simply don’t want to write by hand anymore, that Microsoft made a mistake by charging OEMs more for the Tablet PC OS than for the regular version of Windows, that everyone did a terrible job at marketing these things, etc.), but there’s speculation that Redmond is getting ready to take the wraps off some sort of hybrid Tablet PC/eBook reader that’s about six inches by eight inches in size (no pics yet, that’s just a generic Tablet PC pictured at right).
Sounds a bit like other mini tablet-style PCs we’ve seen, like Sony’s Vaio U-Series, but apparently these new hybrid tablets will use the same active digitizer technology found in regular Tablet PCs rather than the more traditional touch screens. Assuming this is for real (and it sounds like it is), Microsoft Watch seems pretty sure that Microsoft will be showing off a prototype during his keynote at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference on April 25th.