Tablets could be the best medicine

Keyboard fans may protest, but others would welcome a device they can use standing up, says Guy Kewney

On Toshiba’s 130th anniversary, the company rolled out a tiny computer, literally half the size of the normal small notebook: the Libretto.

I hate it. It has been a successful form factor in Japan, and this isn’t the first time Toshiba has had a successful Libretto there, where clearly, the small keyboard is acceptable. I can’t tell you why it might be acceptable to Japanese users, but it’s certainly not acceptable to me. As far as I’m concerned, a keyboard should be keyboard sized, or thumb-board sized like the original Psion Series 3.

The following day, I played with the new Motion sub-tablet. In many ways, you might say the Motion was a lower spec machine. For example, the new Libretto has a high-definition display, 1,280 x 768 pixels, suitable for watching widescreen DVD movies. And it has a suitable add-on: a DVD drive that clips under it. By contrast the Motion has 600 x 800 pixels – almost a joke in a world that regards XGA-resolution as the absolute basic.

Putting the two mini-PCs side by side, there’s no question which one I’d want to use. Same form factor, but totally different usability.

I don’t like writing with a pen. I’m a keyboard junkie. Seriously, I can barely write: I am far too impatient a person to crawl along at handwriting speed when a Qwerty keyboard is my servant. I can type at 100 words a minute, or even faster if I don’t mind some errors.

Worse still, when I try handwriting, I can’t read it. Neither can the computer; my experiments with pen input are easily the worst failures of anybody I know. Here’s a sample: It’s as it I had never Iosrodooada... ah, forget it.

Nonetheless, I’d rather have the Motion tablet. For a start, I wouldn’t expect to be Qwertyless. I’d get a collapsible Bluetooth keyboard, which is small and light. Motion designers are expert in finding ways to make a Tablet stand up without a keyboard base, and so if I were able to find a chair and a table, I’d be OK. By contrast, if I were standing up trying to use the Libretto keyboard, I’d be sunk; and if I were sitting down, I’d not be very much better off.

We’re on the verge of a big change in PCs: the time has come to take the tablet seriously. That means asking ourselves several hard questions. The hardest one is whether we really are avoiding situations where we might use a computer standing up.

Pocket PCs and Palm PDAs show that the answer is probably yes; when the first pen-driven PDAs appeared, they exploded into the market. Today, the lesson of the PDA is being interpreted negatively; sales of the PDA are not rising, and the few devices that are sold are being used together with GPS devices. My own interpretation is not that people don’t like pens, however: I think the problem is that people don’t want something that isn’t a phone. We need to keep in touch and the phone makes that possible. Given a choice between something to play with, however great, and something to call home with, we take the phone.

Until now, the choice has been between something big and heavy, and something pocket sized. Take something Libretto or Oqo sized, and make a Tablet out of it, and the game changes: suddenly, you realise that this will run full-screen PC software, and you can rest it on one arm and write on it with the other.

The other thing that’s changed is Microsoft’s attitude. The last time I wrote about tablets, I castigated Bill Gates for saying that he was a big fan of the format, and giving the lie to this by penalising those who used it by charging a huge premium for the Tablet OS.

Today, the price of Tablet Edition XP is still higher than ordinary XP Pro, and I still think this is a dumb move. But at least the margin is much less; some PC makers are talking about a $15 (£8.50) delta for the extra features. And that means you can get a Tablet for about $100 more than the equivalent notebook.

So, who will buy it? First, schools. They traditionally don’t have a high budget, but then again, they don’t have high aesthetic requirements. Very ordinary displays will do. Chunky, lumpy devices are OK, battery life isn’t critical. But what is critical is that they are accessible to young users; and there, the tablet scores. Typing doesn’t come easy to the primary-school student; they find writing on a tablet far more natural, and it encourages the dyslexic, according to Research Machines, who may otherwise be daunted.

Then, a lot of people who have been struggling with the tiny screens of Pocket PCs, and hating them: car rescue services, factory production people, delivery van drivers, and so on. For some, the power of a Pocket PC processor will be enough, but for others, a half-sized tablet may just make it possible to access power applications out in the field.

The time has come to rethink. I’m not utterly sold on tablet computing, but suddenly, I’m going to pay more attention.