Consumer Gadgets: 50 Ways to Have Fun and Simplify Your Life with Today’s Technology…and Tomorrow’s

Chapter 31. The Next-Generation Laptop: Tablet PCs

You may intuitively think of tablet PCs as providing a subset of the functionality offered by a traditional laptop and being more closely related to handheld personal digital assistants. In fact, the opposite may well be closer to the truth. Tablet PCs are becoming a superset of the traditional laptop, providing all the features you expect in a laptop together with powerful new features such as digital pen and ink, and speech recognition. Digital pen-and-ink capability means that these tablet PCs can be used to record your own handwriting directly onscreen by using a special pen, and the tablet PC will render your writing in a digital ink on the surface of the screen. What’s more, when compared ...