Tablet.(the new laptop)(Brief Article)

For more than a year now, Bill Gates has appeared at computer shows, captain-of-industry hoedowns and, for all we know, weddings and bar mitzvahs, waving what looks like a bulked-up Etch A Sketch, and saying that the tablet will smite the laptop.

What's a tablet? It's Microsoft's ambitious effort to remake the PC landscape by kick-starting a cate-gory that's been in the minds and business plans of visionaries for decades but has never caught on with the public. The new Tablet PC is a pen-based computer that uses special software cooked up by the brainiacs in Redmond. (The actual machines will be built and marketed by the usual suspects in the PC business.) Due to arrive in October at prices between $2,000 and $3,000, the Tablet PC is meant not to supplement your current laptop, but supplant it. You'll ramble down the hall with your tab, take it to your meetings and use it to take notes, surf the Web and maybe even doodle--all while maintaining eye contact with others in the room. (Try that while pounding on a keyboard.)

Previous efforts flopped because the machines were too bulky, too limited and too clueless when it came to interpreting people's handwriting. (Call it the "Doonesbury effect" because of cartoonist Garry Trudeau's hilarious evocation of the way Apple's Newton device julienned the language like a digital Cuisinart.) While the Tablet PC does a somewhat better job at translating a user's jottings into text, Microsoft's wisest choice was innovating in the area of "digital ink." When you write on a tablet's display screen (using a special notepad program called Journal), your jottings are faithfully captured, as if you wrote them on paper. Twitch the pen in a scratching-out gesture and you delete a word or line. Another feature allows you to quickly move blocks of text around. (Bonus: special settings allow the tablet to more deftly interpret the motions of left-handers.)

Digital ink is also a powerful tool when you use tablets on a network. It's easy to send e-mail with handwritten text, and even easier ...