Monday, September 28, 2009

Tablet PCs: Will the Third Time Be the Charm?

The $400 CrunchPad
(Ready for November 2009 shipping?)

Link to September 28 pcmag.com post, "10 Reasons Why Tablets Will Succeed".

Excerpt: Microsoft did everything it could to excite the public and developers about the opportunities and benefits of tablet PCs. It launched an SDK and held app development contests. It had major partners building keyboard-less tablet PCs and convertibles, the latter of which looked exactly like laptops, except you could flip the screen around so it faced up and fold the back of the screen right on top of the keyboard. Ultimately, though, tablets never rose above a niche market—popular in inventory departments and especially the healthcare and education markets, but marginalized everywhere else.

Based on this history, you might assume that this third coming of the tablet would be equally doomed. You'd be wrong. Things are different now. There are a number of technology advancements and changes in computing behavior that could spell success for this latest generation of portable devices. Here are a few:

1. Battery life
2. Better display technologies and options
3. Higher-performance, lower-power CPUs
4. eBooks
5. Faster WiFi and broadband wireless
6. iPod Touch and iPhone
7. Gesture-based computing
8. Windows 7 and Multi-Touch
9. Cloud-based computing
10. The browser is the platform

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