James Kendrick at jkOnTheRun has posted rumours of a Dell Tablet PC that could appear late this year. Or not. Dell is a mass market supplier and it's not Dell's modus operandi to pioneer new areas -- that's a risky and expensive business. You could, perhaps, claim that the Tablet PC is now a standard mass market form factor and therefore suitable for Dell's cost-reduction treatment, but I rather doubt it.
If a Dell Tablet does appear, it will be around five years after the launch of the Microsoft Tablet PC system. (Of course, tablets go back much further, to things like the DOS-based GridPad in 1989.) I was just looking up my pre-launch story in what was then Guardian Online: Keep taking the tablets. It includes this paragraph:
It's an idea that is dear to the heart of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who has hyped the Tablet PC in his last two Comdex computer show speeches in Las Vegas in 2000 and 2001. "I'm already using a Tablet PC as my everyday computer," he said last year. "It's a PC that is virtually without limits, and within five years, I predict that it will be the most popular form of PC sold in America."
Well, five years later, it's clearly not.
