There has been much discussion of late centred around whether the UMPC will displace the Tablet PC. It started with the now infamous prediction number 10 in this post on Ultranauts.com.
I don’t think it will and I outlined my reasons in my rebuttal here. Colin, jk and Warner also added their thoughts. The whole discussion left Dennis Rice over at GottaBeMobile.com wondering why we can’t all just get along.
In OnTheRun with Tablet PCs show 20 Marc Orchant hoped that people would start looking at the relative merits of the various devices rather than declaring theirs to be the best and closing their minds. Well – I mused about doing just that at the end of my rebuttal so I guess now that Marc wants it I have to do it! 
Before I get into weighing up this against that I want to refer back to the model I’ll be using to frame the discussion. I wrote a couple of weeks ago about how we should stop thinking about specific categories of devices. Instead think in terms of where a particular device sits on a continuum of mobile devices.
I’ve tidied up the graphic somewhat and – in the interest of keeping the series of posts shorter – I’m going to leave out PDAs and SmartPhones. Other than that this is the same continuum that I referred to previously.
I’m going to work through this diagram left to right and weigh the pros and cons of each pair of devices. Here are the posts – I’ll add the links after I post each one.
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Introduction – this post.
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Laptop vs. Convertible Tablet
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Convertible Tablet vs. Slate Tablet
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Slate Tablet vs. UMPC
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Conclusion