O'Reilly Conference and Tablet PCs

I'm at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference this week, and have to admit that I am surprised that Tablet PCs are recognized by so few people. In one of the presentations on "Tangible Computing", given by Nokia, they actually mentioned that they see Tablet PCs as one of the high-growth areas.

At the same time, it is wild to see how many people here are all continuing to use laptops ... and Apple iBooks at that! I'm not against either of these, however it seems that in such a leading-edge crowd I would have seen more Tablet PCs being used. There is a lot of utility that can be gained.

I have to admit that I came here with my own expectations of what I would see at the conference. I expected to see a lot of Linux laptops ... and I am coming away seeing very few! It seems that there are all of the users who still use Windows, and then the always growing crowd that are now using the iBook.

It now appears to me that there are two key steps in the continued growth of the utility of "tablet computing." The first step will be the Linux community fully supporting the Tablet PC hardware and mimicing/extending the feature set of Windows XP for Tablet PCs. The second will be when Apple introduces its own "iTablet" ... the Apple version of the Tablet PC.

In all ... I have to say that I can only see growth of this segment and utility ...