The Tablet PC, Microsoft’s latest brainchild, was unveiled with much fanfare at the recently held Comdex in Las Vegas. It is being seen by many as a move to replace the desktop PC, a perception vehemently denied by Microsoft. The Tablet PC is an integral part of Microsoft’s Dot Net vision. It’s a pen driven, fully functional computer, the size of an examination pad and weighing approximately 2 to 3 lbs. It has a 500-600MHz processor, 128MB RAM, 10GB hard disk, USB port for keyboard and mouse and runs on Whistler, the 1.0 release of Dot Net based on Windows2000.

The ayes
It is targeted at people who spend a part of their day away from their desk and would require access to their computers. Let’s say you have to attend a meeting, while others would be scribbling furiously on pads of paper you would be doing it in style on your Tablet PC. The handwriting technology that the Tablet PC incorporates allows you to do just that. The electronic ink technology or ‘rich ink’ as Microsoft calls it, allows you to write directly onto the screen. Not only can you take down notes, you can also edit, insert spaces, move, copy text, sort and search these handwritten notes. Microsoft’s ClearType technology makes text on LCD screens easier to read. It also supports wireless standards such as 802.11 and will eventually support Bluetooth. This means that while you are at the meeting you can still be connected to the Internet, LAN, access e-mail, transfer the presentation that you’ve created on your desktop to the Tablet PC and transfer the notes that you’ve jotted down on the Tablet PC to your desktop with ease. The Tablet PC will also include speech recognition technology.

The nays
Now that we’ve got the good part out of the way let’s see if we really need a Tablet PC and even if we do why Microsoft’s? Well, let me justify this question by putting forward some arguments to support my case. Firstly, the Tablet PC falls in the segment between handhelds and laptops. It in fact tries to integrate the two and is priced in the same range as laptops. On one hand, handhelds are truly convenient to carry around and on the other laptops with their keyboards allow you to do the kind of stuff you would normally do on a desktop. With the kind of sleek and lightweight laptops doing the rounds, is there a segment into which the Tablet PC can fit?

One viewpoint could be that the Tablet PC allows you to write on the screen while laptops do not. But talking of writing on the screen, I’m sure typing on a keyboard would be more preferable to scrawling on the monitor. It not only saves you trouble but also a lot of time that would otherwise have been spent on trying to make sense of what you’ve written later on (people who try to pass off fowl scratch as handwriting would wholeheartedly agree with me on this). As for speech recognition, imagine a whole bunch of people entering information into a word document or Excel sheet via voice. This in addition to all those people chattering away on their cell phones.

Lastly, but by no means the least, the question of why Microsoft? People who’ve read about and taken a peek at the Qbe range of products from Aqcess Technologies would have gotten my drift. For those who haven’t, you can check it out at the Web site http://www.qbenet.com/ and see for yourself the astonishing similarity between these products and the MS Tablet PC. This is just one among the many different kinds of Tablet PCs that are already in the market. This just goes to prove that Microsoft’s Tablet PC is really not the innovative or brilliant product as the company would like us to believe, nor is it entirely Microsoft’s vision. There are similar if not better products already out in the market. But of course they don’t have the all-important Microsoft seal on them. But does that really matter?