Guy Kewney

Everybody wanted to like the Tablet PC when it was announced five years ago.

My colleague Martin Veitch grudgingly admitted that “those in the know promise that this time the flat format won’t fall flat”. Sadly, one of “those in the know” was probably me as I do remember promising that this time it would work.

The thing didn’t fall as flat as the parallel fantasy product – the Smart Display, which was code-named Mira – but I have to say that I’m still almost the only Tablet user I know.

The thing that I still can’t understand is why Tablet PC Edition was not the standard Windows operating system. Most of Tablet is simply Windows XP – or, these days, Vista – with extra features: a pretty decent handwriting interpreter, a quite impressive voice-recognition system and a couple of very innovative word processors, Journal and One Note.

I couldn’t see what Microsoft gained by selling these separately at a premium but it’s not hard to see what the drawbacks were: corporates hate having too many editions with different pricing levels, licensing policies and update cycles.

It’s not too late. For its fifth birthday, the Tablet was given a mainstream operating system by Microsoft and all those extra features were put onto every PC you license.

Who knows, it may even sell some copies of One Note as a result.

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