Tablet PC, Phantom PC

A few of my recent posts have had me passing over various software packages because I don't have a Tablet PC. Am I an oddball (at least in this particular regard)? Hardly. Although "pure," that is, no keyboard Tablet PCs have always seemed a bit of an oddity--most of us who have used computers for a long time can type faster than we can write--it really seemed to me a couple fo years back that hybrids would become one of those convergence devices that really clciked. Type on them like a regular notebook when you had hardcore typing to do. Fold the screen back and write on it when you had more graphical tasks to accomplish like annotating a Powerpoint slide.

But didn't happen. Perhaps the hardware never got reliable enough or close enough to the prices of regular notebooks. Perhaps Microsoft never put on the full-court press needed to get people really thinking about a new notebook model as suggested here.

In any case, it seems a bit of a pity. Even if we've become pretty good typists, there are a lot of things we can't easily do with a keyboard. And hauling our Wacom Tablets around really isn't a very good option.