James Kendrick wonders why the new ultra-portable PCs aren’t Tablet enabled. I agree.
“I’ve been thinking about the (Sony) U-70 a lot, as I tend to do when a really nice piece of mobile tech comes out. The only drawback I can see with the U-50/70 is not having the Tablet PC operating system installed. I don’t know why Sony chose to go with pen-enabled Windows XP instead, it doesn’t make sense to me. So I’ve been researching if it’s possible to put the Tablet PC OS on one of these little jewels. I’ll post here what I find and if anyone can contribute to this effort please feel free to add anything you can.”
In a comment James mentions that someone is saying that they’ve successfully installed the Tablet OS on a U-70. Unfortunately there isn’t an active digitzer on board, but at least the onscreen keyboard and other features are.
I talked with some FlipStart reps at Demo this past spring and asked if they were going to release a Tablet version of their forthcoming ultra-portable PC. They said they had not gone beyond the investigative stages. I wonder if user “upgrades” like this will change their thinking. Seems like it would be a good match. It very well may bring more PDA users and developers into the Tablet market.