Tablet PC, your next laptop!

First things first, the tablet PC is the destiny! Imagine this,

• You can hold a LCD just as holding a book, reading articles, surfing webs just with your fingers.
  
• Taking notes on your computers, especially, with heavy math formula, chemical symbols, musical notes, or any graphical objects.
  
• Giving interactive lectures or presentations: you can write on a computer(via a projector) the same way that you write on a blackboard, while you can pull out any multimedia objects for demonstration.
  
• Painting on LCD screens just as painting on papers.
  
• Listening to music or watching movies the same way you are using an IPOD touch

If you have ever thought about any of these, you want a tablet PC. Actually, after using a Nokia N770 tablet(with a 4in touchscreen) for a couple of months, I got tired of keyboard.

With the invention of active digitizer(compared with the conventional passive digitizer relying on pressures), writing on computers are much more easier and with much better accuracy. Buy Wacom stocks! (Can anybody tell me how I can buy stocks from Japanese stock market directly?)

Tablet PCs usually cost around $2000, beyond the reach for normal users. HP has introduced a budget tablet PC, tx2000 series (from the modification of the previous 1000 series). You can purchase a tx2110US model for $899 at Office depot this week. So, I believe the hardware cost is already within the range, and I believe by the end of this year, every PC manufacturers will have their budget tablet PC models. But the question is, whether the software companies are ready?

My comments:

• Apple has already successfully introduced the touchscreen on iPhone and done many good things. I am looking forward to the Mac Tablet: 1) Apple appears to have the ability to do things right. For example, there were already so many manufacturers for MP3 players before IPOD but none can be compared with IPOD. 2) Apple's "imaginative" realization that, you can use two fingers to magnify or shrink the screen. Yes, we (most) have ten fingers, which should be much more flexible than a mouse. I believe that the next patent will be filed on using more fingers and the combination of fingers and a digital pen.
  
• Microsoft is everywhere. Unfortunately, perfection is what it lacks. It already has several softwares for touchscreens and digitizer pens, such as Math journal( it's free, which is a rare thing for Microsoft). But they are just usable. Come on, do something better than that! Don't wait until Apple has done it again!
• Tablets will greatly affect the orgnization of web pages and web applications. They will be more "finger"-friendly, at least, some bigger touchable items for easy browsing with fingers.