Gates sees a tablet PC for every student

IDG News Service - The uphill battle that tablet computing continues to face in winning favor with consumers hasn't dampened Bill Gates' enthusiasm for the technology. Microsoft Corp.'s chairman and chief software architect said today that someday tablet PCs will replace textbooks.

"We do see, over time, that the ink input for the tablet and speech input will become as important as the keyboard, not replacing it but equally important." Gates said at a news conference in Tokyo.

"In fact, we see a day where every student, instead of their textbooks, will simply have their tablet computer connected up to the wireless Internet," he said. "And so the teacher can customize the material, they can quiz the student. That student can have that tablet with them wherever they go and it's actually lighter than the textbooks and more flexible, richer in terms of what it can offer."

Tablet computing has long been a technology that Gates has believed in.

After some early trials of the technology, Microsoft gave it a major push in 2001, when Gates launched the tablet PC platform at the Comdex trade show. "It's a PC that is virtually without limits, and within five years I predict it will be the most popular form of PC sold in America," he said.

After the first tablet PCs came on the market in 2002, Microsoft and hardware makers hoped to push the technology into the mainstream, but that dream never came true. Today, tablet PCs are used in several vertical markets but have yet to gain popularity among average consumers.

Now, the technology is about to get another chance.

The most recent iteration of the technology is Microsoft's Origami platform, which is based around a tablet version of Windows XP. The software is used in Ultra Mobile PCs (UMPC), a small computer developed by Microsoft and Intel Corp. that is intended to fill the niche between laptops and handheld devices.

Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., which will begin selling its Q1 UMPC on May 1, expects to sell about 400,000 of the computers in its first 12 months on the market.