Tablets

January is tech month. CES, Macworld, and Apple events galore. The year of 2010 will be the year of the tablet. Apple is rumored to unveil a tablet towards the end of January and I'm guessing CES will display a slew of tablets starting with the Steve Ballmer introduced HTC tablet. It will be interesting to see how tablets play out in terms of importance in 2010. Will people carry around a device that won't fit in their pocket? Will it replace the desktop and laptop around the house? Will it replace the Netbooks that have become so popular in the last two years? Who knows. It will be very exciting to see what kind of traction these devices will gain in new year. If I can get my hands on Apple's tablet I will. Here's to hoping they even release one.

Tablets vs. Netbooks. A Tablet will be more important than a Netbook because you are getting rid of the keyboard. I'm not a hardware guy, but my best guess is that the clam shell design is only necessary because of the keyboard. Just taking a stab in the dark on this one. Get rid of the clam shell and you have one sexy device. Granted it probably won't save you on cost. It will save you space and grant you convenience. The smaller the device proportional to a larger display will yield the largest gain in terms of relevance. No longer will I need a laptop on my coffee table, but a tablet.

I'll attribute all these advances in computing thanks to Apple for their wide spread adoption of a single device. Thankfully we now have one piece of hardware that can function beautifully in part to it's inclusion of a software solution that solves the missing hardware problems. Cool!