I use a NEC Versa LitePad table every day - and have since I bought it 4 years ago. It was the only tablet worth hitting a dog in the arse with: the same useful area as a sheet of paper, reasonable speed and just enough storage to keep what is needed on it. Which, by the way, is notes (I use it instead of paper for all meetings and conversations) and documents (especially the maintenance manuals for my 50 year-old MGA). Battery life DOES suck, but I still have three to swap in when one runs down. Best of all, it cost US$900 new - cheap then and still working now.
The point here is that I do NOT use it as my desktop computer - rather, it is an adjunct that permits integrating information that normally escapes digital capture. I was using a Franklin (I think) electronic note pad (you wrote on a paper tablet with an RF pen and the tablet that was part of the folio captured the pen strokes). This was also wonderful, but no one understood the usefulness of the device and when drivers quit being written I had to abandon it.
I guess the rambling point here is that there are different uses for different devices - phone, laptop, tablet, server, etc. There *IS* merit in getting convergence in the device footprints - that is, if I had a laptop PC with a tablet screen that could be removed (completely) for use in note-taking or carrying large reference documents around, that also had a wireless telephone that could dock into it for data exchange and modem use - but could also be removed and used stand-alone as a cell phone. This *SHOULD* be easy to provide these days: the only requirement would be to have power and a USB interface and a solid dock latch into the laptop body.
Oh, by the way, my comment to this story (before I was side-tracked): there WAS a convergent device like this back in the mid 1990's. Built by AT&T, it was a tablet computer, running and advanced OS specifically geared to note-taking and information display, with an integrated cell phone that could also work as a CDPD modem. It was called the EO, and lasted all of about a year...
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Phones and Tablets
I use a NEC Versa LitePad table every day - and have since I bought it 4 years ago. It was the only tablet worth hitting a dog in the arse with: the same useful area as a sheet of paper, reasonable speed and just enough storage to keep what is needed on it. Which, by the way, is notes (I use it instead of paper for all meetings and conversations) and documents (especially the maintenance manuals for my 50 year-old MGA). Battery life DOES suck, but I still have three to swap in when one runs down. Best of all, it cost US$900 new - cheap then and still working now.
The point here is that I do NOT use it as my desktop computer - rather, it is an adjunct that permits integrating information that normally escapes digital capture. I was using a Franklin (I think) electronic note pad (you wrote on a paper tablet with an RF pen and the tablet that was part of the folio captured the pen strokes). This was also wonderful, but no one understood the usefulness of the device and when drivers quit being written I had to abandon it.
I guess the rambling point here is that there are different uses for different devices - phone, laptop, tablet, server, etc. There *IS* merit in getting convergence in the device footprints - that is, if I had a laptop PC with a tablet screen that could be removed (completely) for use in note-taking or carrying large reference documents around, that also had a wireless telephone that could dock into it for data exchange and modem use - but could also be removed and used stand-alone as a cell phone. This *SHOULD* be easy to provide these days: the only requirement would be to have power and a USB interface and a solid dock latch into the laptop body.
Oh, by the way, my comment to this story (before I was side-tracked): there WAS a convergent device like this back in the mid 1990's. Built by AT&T, it was a tablet computer, running and advanced OS specifically geared to note-taking and information display, with an integrated cell phone that could also work as a CDPD modem. It was called the EO, and lasted all of about a year...
...because it didn't run Windows...