Tablet offers tonic to lift PC market

By PETER GRIFFIN

Enthusiasm in the sluggish PC market may be at an all-time low, but Microsoft is hoping to revive it - with a tablet.

Or a Tablet PC, to be precise. After a couple of years of flogging the Tablet PC concept at every trade show or technology fair Microsoft had a presence at, Bill Gates' baby project is just about ready to go to market.

And the main selling feature remains the same - being able to convert the screen of your laptop into a blank canvas where notes and pictures can be scribbled and stored digitally or converted into text and picture files.

A prototype from computer manufacturer Acer - one of around 10 manufacturers who have backed the Tablet PC - was doing the rounds at Microsoft House last week.

In effect, it is a laptop with a reversible screen allowing input with a pen stylus. It runs on the new Windows XP Tablet PC Edition operating system and has an inbuilt 802.11b wireless card.

A thinner "slate" version which features the screen only is also planned by many of the vendors for specialised use in areas like medicine, insurance or retailing.

The screen is tapped in much the same way you would with an Ipaq or Jornada PDA, but rather than having a touch screen, it contains a digitiser which can only be activated using a magnetised stylus.

Nathan Mercer, a technology specialist at Microsoft, said the tablet design was aimed at the "knowledge worker" - those of us who spend the day running between our desk and meetings and work our way through a forest of paper each year.

"Three to five years down the track we envisage most laptops will ship as tablet PCs. But we see this purely as a business PC. It is not aimed at consumers although many people will want to use it in the home as well."

Entering text through the "Windows Journal" application gives an idea of how advanced handwriting recognition software has become. Gone are the days of training the software to suit your style or conforming to a digital alphabet.

My slanting scribbles were translated well and the pen flows easily over the screen, like using a felt tip pen on shiny paper.

Once users adapt to tapping on command boxes with a magnetic pen, they can easily transfer their notes into applications like Outlook or Word using a wizard or the "clipboard".

But Microsoft figures users would be more interested in retaining digital copies of their handwritten notes than converting scrawled musings into neat lines of text, said Mercer.

The handwritten notes, which can be written on digital lined paper and searched for key words, will require more disk space to store. Half a page of handwriting made up a file of 30KB. The same in plain text, 5-10KB.

Software vendors such as Adobe Systems were designing applications to run on the tablet, said Mercer.

Microsoft was aiming for a commercial launch of the Tablet PC in the second half of the year, with a price similar to that of a mid-range laptop (around $4000).

Likely to come in at a much lower price will be a stripped-down tablet for the consumer market which Microsoft has dubbed "Mira".

That device will have an embedded Windows CE-based operating system and connecting wirelessly to a desktop PC will allow web surfing through to note taking from the comfort of the couch.

But at this stage of its development, however, Mira has one major design limitation that may stop the general public from shelling out.

While Mira will be able to access all of the applications stored on a user's desktop, only one person will be able to use it at a time, effectively tying up the main computer while Mira is in use.

Mercer said Windows XP allowed only one connection at a time and many non-Microsoft applications were not licensed for concurrent sessions, ruling out multi-user prospects.

Waiting in the wings also is "Freestyle", a technology that Microsoft claims will allow you to access your digital pictures, mp3s music files and control live TV through your PC from anywhere in the room using a remote control.

For business or home users the tablet will have its fans and detractors, but the industry support it has gained means it is unlikely to go the same way as its ill-fated predecessor, Pen Windows, which was introduced by Microsoft in 1988 but sank from view soon after.

"I think the market has changed since then," said Mercer.

"Mira": Windows XP Anywhere in the Home Tablet PC