There is no doubt in my mind that the building wave that is the netbook craze is going to renew interest in tablet an touch technology. Windows 7 provides a really nice tablet experience and is much more touch aware than Vista was.
We are also seeing something in the netbook craze that I think a great thing for all mobile PCs. Lots of competition.
The Atom processors provide excellent performance and battery life, but they don’t seem to suffer the same heat problems.
Could it be that the planets are aligning for not only more tablets, but perhaps even more slates? I think maybe the answer is yes. The critical question is one of demand. Is there demand for slate devices, particularly in the consumer space?
There is certainly interest – remember the interest sparked last year when it was revealed that an enterprising user was making a tablet out of an eee PC?
And there is interest on the manufacturer side as well. In December Fujitsu announced its first new slate in quite some time.
I hope we will see a revival of the slate form factor.