"Mr. Garson was carrying his music in digital form, scanned into his MusicPad Pro Plus, a five-pound tablet computer made by a company called Freehand Systems. The $1,200 device, with a 12-inch liquid-crystal-display touchscreen, is the first of a class of computers that enable musicians to store music and edit it onscreen. Soon it will also allow them to communicate with one another over wireless networks," says The New York Times [free reg req'd].
"In much the way that portable digital audio players have changed the way people consume tunes, tablets like the MusicPad are changing the way musicians use sheet music, which is so compact that it can be digitally stockpiled far more cost-effectively than MP3 audio files."
There is also a rival system: "David Sitrick, a patent attorney and engineer in Chicago, has developed a system called the eStand, which involves proprietary software installed on pairs of Wi-Fi-enabled touchscreen tablet computers. Mr. Sitrick received patents for the concepts behind the eStand in 1998 and 2000, two years before Freehand Systems patented the 'music annotation system for performance and composition of musical scores' that led to the MusicPad."
