[sd]

Back at the 2001 Comdex, Bill Gates announced that by 2007, such devices would be the most popular form of PC in the U.S. Although his timing was off, I think Gates was definitely on to something.

Yet as brm notes, it's probably going to take more than just the open source community. Open source seems great for advancing the bleeding-edge; but honestly, unless money is on the line, how many devs are going to cut out their cool feature that they spent hours developing, just because it's hard to use or might make the device more complicated?

Perhaps, a team (but not necessarily a large team) of hackers devoted full-time to making a successful interface / kiosk for this might make it big. Perhaps, such a business might make a good fit for Y Combinator. ;-)

[g00dn3ss]

I do think Bill Gates was on to something. From a UI perspective, a pen/touch screen is superior in that it removes one level of indirection in a UI paradigm that is attempting to be "direct manipulation".

However, for this to be the most popular form of PC, I think there will need to be a breakthrough in text input. I've looked at a lot of alternative text input techniques and I don't think any of the current ones will cut it. This includes soft keyboards, crazy dasher-like things, predictive stuff, handwriting recognition, gestures, voice, etc. The huge advantage of keyboard entry is not only the tactile feedback, but that it has a fairly low cognitive cost. In other words, you can think about other things while you type - it's automatic. Pretty much anything aural or visual will take away from thinking about your real tasks.

[jkent]

In Gates' 1996 'The Road Ahead' he was talking about the convergence of devices to what seemed like a mobile, touch screen web browser (within 5 years, a bit optimistic).

He talks about the wallet pc, a sketch of which looks like an iphone in landscape mode.

Why didn't Microsoft try this?

[raganwald]

I owned a TabletPC. I argue they did try it, and did a decent job of it. However, the big roadblock was the fact that they are at the mercy of their hardware vendors.

Consider multi-touch. When Apple decided that multi-touch is the future, they simply started building it into their laptops. If Microsoft decides multi-touch is the future, they build an API and some of the vendors offer a few models with multi-touch and the market decides whether it wants to pay a premium for multi-touch or not.

Meanwhile app vendors sit on the sidelines while everyone plays chicken and egg. This is why tablets went nowhere... the market refused to pay a premium for tablets, so the vendors only made a few, which kept prices high, which kept sales low, and so forth...

[cubrilovic]

yes Gates was onto something. nobody has done it right though