Ingredients of the tablet

Take a look at the Tablet PC in some configurations and you would be forgiven for thinking that it is nothing more than an over hyped laptop PC or a flat screen. But it is the fact that the Tablet can be all of these that makes it special.

One machine offers you a PDA, jotting pad, laptop computer and desktop flat screen computer, and with no erosion to computing power. Tablet PC could be to computing what the Range Rover was to cars: a convergence of multiple existing ideas into one format which the rest of the world has to spend 25 years trying to emulate.

Microsoft expects there to be over 15 different brands available by the end of 2004, including an offering from industry giant Dell. As a result, there will be a plethora of formats to choose from. The touch screen is not the sole data entry method, it will come with a standard laptop style keyboard.

Communications will be available through a choice of methods, including 802.1X wireless local area network as standard, but also expect to see Bluetooth and GPRS. Applications and data can be accessed through a built in CD-ROM, USB connections, infrared port, a built in wireless network card and a smartcard reader.

”We see it as a machine you go in and spec yourself according to your needs, but it is very much a corporate computer,” said Daniel Beck, product marketing manager for Microsoft Australia.

Powering Tablet PC will be Pentium III processors with speeds ranging from 750Mhz to 1Ghz. The hard drive is expected to be between 20GB and 40GB, with 256MB of RAM. As a mobile computing device, battery life is highly important and the first models to hit the market will offer four hours, like most current laptop models. Mr Beck claimed that new batteries would hit the market in the middle of 2003 that would deliver six to eight hours of computing.