A new Tabet PC from Microsoft?

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You can read the full story here.  Microsoft has apparently decided to produce a tablet PC that is light and slim, and has a full-sized keyboard.  It also has a large 10-plus-inch screen with, I understand, touch capability, and an operating system similar to Windows.  That seems to cover most of the objections to tablet PCs that exist.

The Ipads from Apple had little quirks that frustrated me, and probably most PC people.  They wouldn't play Flash video, for one thing, and their operating systems were very different from the PC interface I use most often.  Facebook, for instance, works very differently, so does gmail, and many other things I keep wanting to use on my wife's Ipad.  So at crunch time, I have to give up and go get my laptop.

Some of the oddness flows from the "gestures" that are a large part of touch-screen interfaces, including the interfaces of smart phones, for instance.  You slide this way and that, tap, tap and hold, and my daughter can do it, but my wife and I find it difficult.  (Newborns this year, I'm told, come with a new touch-screen gene that will help them with these interfaces.  It shows up in the ultrasounds.)

The newer Tablet PCs have fabulous resolution.  It is not (only) that they have a lot of pixels; it's more that the pixels are closer together, and give a fabulously smooth picture, just like HD tv monitors do.  Ours is a 720p, and we are blown away daily, as we watch these new Blu-Ray videos.  I can just imagine what an 1080p display would look like in our TV room.  (Actually, I can't; 720 is about as hi-resolution as I can distinguish.)

Finally, the full-sized keyboard means you can actually type your blog, for instance.  Reading mail was OK on the Ipad, but replying was a pain.  But now, the keyboard is built into the ultra-thin screen cover.  If you've seen the screen covers of the Ipad 2, you have an rough idea about how thin this thing is.  It's ironic that Apple did not introduce this feature first.  It is slick.

Mind you, I haven't held this thing in my hands; I'm only reporting what I read in the papers, to paraphrase Will Rogers.  I'm rooting for this thing.

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