Tablet Computing Makes Another Run

Baldwin Louie — Mon, 16 Apr 2001 15:00:00 -0700

Pen computing isn’t just for the UPS guy anymore.

That, at least, is the signal from the PC industry, as manufacturers try to revive interest in tablet computers for the rest of us. Portending that revival, Fujitsu PC Corporation, a leading maker of pen-based tablet computers for niche applications such as insurance claims handling, mobile sales and health care, unveiled a model Monday aimed at mainstream businesses.

Dubbed the Stylistic 3500, the letter-sized, 1.1-inch-thick unit weighs in at 3.2 pounds. Running on Intel's 500 MHz Celeron chip and any of several versions of Windows, it boasts 256 MB of memory, 15 GB of storage, a built-in 56K modem and Ethernet connection, and four hours of battery life. It can be plugged in to various docking stations for keyboard and mouse input, which the company says makes it a viable replacement for the traditional desktop PC. The price: $3,899.

Fujitsu is hardly alone in its tablet crusade. Most notably, Microsoft has been pushing a prototype that will run on the yet-to-be-released Windows XP operating system and is expected to ship in 2002 at a cost of $3,000 to $4,000. "My view is that all PCs will eventually be like this," Chairman Bill Gates told a crowd of 3,000-plus at the CHI 2001 conference in Seattle two weeks ago, just prior to a demo of his company's tablet.

Microsoft's strategy to boost its core software business comes at a time when sales of desktop and notebook PCs have begun to flag. (Sales of portables, for instance, dropped 12.3 percent from the third quarter to the fourth quarter of 2000, according to IDC, the research arm of the International Data Group, parent company of The Standard.) The company is relying on outside manufacturers - including Fujitsu - to produce the hardware and come up with designs they think will most appeal to consumers. "This is getting to be more like consumer electronics," said Craig Mundie, Microsoft's senior VP of advanced strategies. "Go look at plain-old telephones: there are a million varieties. That's what we see happening with this."

In the meantime, a Southern California startup called Aqcess is marketing a tablet called the Qbe (pronounced "cube") as a PC replacement. Sharp introduced a Windows-based tablet called Copernicus to the Japanese market in January. The same month, IBM introduced a tablet-laptop hybrid called the ThinkPad TransNote, which allows users to take handwritten notes, annotate, search and store them as graphics. (Microsoft and its allies are pushing handwriting-recognition technologies that are still far from ideal.)

While a number of companies - Casio, Fujitsu, Intermec, Xplore, Walkabout, ViA and others - have produced tablet-style gadgets for niche markets in a variety of shapes and sizes, market researcher IDC estimates that tablet computers represent just 1 percent to 2 percent of total notebook shipments.

Even with Microsoft's clout, IDC notebook analyst Alan Promisel figures it may take several generations of products to get pen-based computers established in the business world. "The tablet PC will cost the same as a typical notebook," he explained. "When put side to side in front of an IT buyer, I find it highly unlikely that they would choose to support this new platform. Teaching people to use it - it's an enormous headache for an IT department to support."

The industry has already seen a few iterations of tablet computing, which reared its head as a promising new platform in the early '90s, only to be decapitated. The most famous flop was Go, a startup that brought pen computing into the limelight with its Penpoint software. Although handwriting-recognition technology was limited at the time, fierce competition from Microsoft - which held enormous power over hardware manufacturers - and a bureaucratic nightmare of unwieldy pacts with IBM and AT&T were instrumental in putting Go out of business.

Computer-usability researchers have long been bullish on the idea of pen computing, because it makes it easier for people to interact directly with their machines. "I think tablets are a great step in the right direction. They make mobility in the form of an electronic book practical," said Thomas Furness, an expert in computer interface design at the University of Washington.

But the market resistance that encounters any new form has left some manufacturers doubtful. "We dropped the tablet PC project a while ago," said Jungohn Yim of LG Electronics, which hopes to introduce a tablet-style Web appliance in the U.S. by December. "The cost of manufacturing for tablet PCs was just as the same as the notebook PCs. But a lot of users expect tablet PCs to be less expensive. So we had to set the price cheaper."

Such consumer expectations illustrate the challenge facing tablet proponents. Pen computing in the early '90s was all hype with little delivery. Now companies will have to buckle down to develop new pen applications, infallible handwriting recognition and longer-life batteries to prove the tablets' value. Then customers will either ditch their desktops for tablets, or they'll send tablets back to the engineers.

Michele Yamada contributed to this report.

The Industry Standard - Tablet Computing Makes Another Run - Comments

Tablet Computing Makes Another Run