Reading this article on who needs tablet computers anyway brings back some memories; specifically, memories of myself asking that exact same question years ago while working with Devindra (the author of the Pingdom blog article) himself at a college IT department. My answer back then was, really, nobody. Of course, now I tote a tablet PC around all the time and use it around 80% of the time when I teach. Yet I still see the question here: who needs to use tablet PCs?

If you look at the Lenovo tablet PC site you’ll notice that it’s not for consumers. Really, consumers, it’s not for you. You don’t need to poke and stab and draw on newyorktimes.com. You don’t really need multi-touch to zoom in on things. You certainly do not need to pay $1,500 for it. Leave it to the teachers and doctors and engineers. The thing is though that lots of companies are now willing to bet that consumers would pay $500 for it. Maybe a little less, even. Do consumers really need it? No, I doubt it. But I do hope that enough consumers buy them because I do.

Imagine outfitting every student with a tablet PC that can be used as an e-book reader, a notepad and a desktop computer (either by having the device be a convertible tablet/netbook or via an external keyboard/stand) for less than $500 per student. The software is here already; all the device needs to do is to be able to run OneNote and a web browser at the same time, a task that my netbook could do easily in its default configuration. You’ll also need a good network connection to a central local server and maybe some stuff on the Internet. Some schools have already done this and the result is a classroom with instantaneous, collective knowledge sharing between everyone in the room; the stuff of science fiction, except folks are figuring out how to do it right now. The biggest problem is that to do this right now each student needs a $1500 computer. If these netbook-styled tablets take off then we can do this for the price of 1.6 netbooks per student. It’s still expensive, but the goal is that much closer within reach. Also, a $500 one-to-one program is a little easier to sell than a $1500 one.

Right now, I have the #tablets tag on Gizmodo on the top of my browser history (not to say I bookmarked it, but I go there so often Chrome knows I want to go there if I type in “tablet”) and every time a new item pops up I ask “can it run OneNote and output VGA?”. I actually want one of these myself—though there are certainly things that my X60 tablet can do that these $500 things won’t (running full screen capture for an hour, for example)—since I’d like to use something less than 2 lbs so I can be even more mobile and be able to toss it around without feeling any guilt. Of course, if you can couple one of those with a wireless projector it would be perfect on the mobility font. The problem is that, in order to drive costs down and keep hardware requirements low, many of these tablets (like the JooJoo) use proprietary operating systems which makes adapting them for classroom use hard. Yes, you heard me, I’d rather they use Windows.

My biggest fear is that there new, small, net-tablets will be unsuccessful enough before they can find a niche in the education (and perhaps, medical, professional, etc.) market. In order for a sub-$500 tablet that has a decent processor to come out on the market people need to buy the first wave of small, tablet PCs and drive a price/manufacturing war like they did with netbooks. As Devindra pointed out I don’t see a rational reason for consumers to buy all that many of them. But given that Microsoft itself is coming out with Courier (even better than just a slate-style tablet) hopefully there will be enough momentum to get schools with the resources to start experimenting with this new generation of tablets.

Wing :: Dec.22.2009 :: Posts :: 1 Comment »