Time tests Tablet concept

Time Magazine showed off a tabletized version of Sports Illustrated today. TechCrunch and others have the details.

For those that have been following the ins and outs of digital content over the last handful of years, this isn’t going to look exactly earth shattering, but it is worth a walk through.

Here are a couple things that caught my attention:

– Lots of AIR. In fact, the whole “application” is AIR worthy–the app is written on Adobe’s AIR platform. Reorder pages, resize photos, and on and on.

– An HP Tablet PC was used to demo the system. This in itself is probably not a big deal, but for the capacitive touch that’s built into the HP, has its benefits. I’m not sure how the multi-touch really works out in AIR, but I’m guessing that it’s on par with some of Windows 7’s features. That’s just a guess.

– Is a Tablet PC, complete with handwriting recognition and the like, really needed? Probably not. In fact, Time says that they are considering other platforms too. The HP is simply one possible platform. We’ll have to see how it really pans out across multiple device types though.