Mac OS X Tablet : Now Or Never

Apple is closing on Microsoft at the operating system race track. Of course this does not mean Mac OS X sales are anywhere near the sales of Microsoft Windows, but there are areas where Microsoft used to race alone, without any competition and that competition starts showing its strengths. One such area is a Tablet PC.

Apple was early to the market with the Newton. Way too early, just before the Internet in fact. And they finally dropped the product line. Microsoft tried to approach the Tablet PC a number of times. They had various Windows CE - based designs, like the Vadem Clio (too early and too slow). Then decided Windows CE was not up to the task (that seems strange to me, but well...) building the first generation of Windows XP - based tablets like the Compaq TC1000 (I really liked that one and am thinking of buying its more powerful brother - the TC1100 - back). And then they started persuading us Vista is the way to go... Until last week when they gave up... Allowing users, who get Vista with their new hardware downgrade to the XP. This move is very controversial, actually meaning Vista is not all that better than XP, at least in some areas of use. One such area are tablets. Tablet computer is designed to be portable. Portable means low weight and no AC power supply. Low weight means batteries cannot be extremely big. And no AC power means the designers have to squeeze as much time as possible from whatever batteries they have. Most of the time this means using slow processors and less memory than recommended to run Vista. Tablet community confirms this. Most of the people I know are using tablets stick with XP or downgrade Vista down to XP or at least complain how slow Vista runs on their tablets. Not to mention it eats more precious juice to do what XP does...

Vista is a complete overkill for a tablet. What typical tablet user needs is a Web browser with fast AJAX engine and Flash support to run all these Web-2.0 applications like GMail, Google Reader, Flickr or whatever you like. A multimedia player for pictures, music and videos and some light office applications like a document editor, a spreadsheet and an offline email application. Why would you need to load all these goodies like RPC, DCOM, and hundreds of other performance bogging processes. To eat your battery and slow down your CPU? After a few weeks with the Nokia N800 I have to say with its capable browser it is very close to the experience and fields of use of the XP-based TC1000 I had four years ago. Yes, I would still prefer a bigger display and a thumb keyboard. But it runs Web 2.0 quite fast on the 300MHz ARM processor. And stays on long enough (actually I do not know how long... that means long enough not to bother measuring the battery performance).

Now I hear rumors Apple is coming back with a portable tablet computer. After squeezing the Mac OS X down to run on the iPhone and on the iPod touch I bet they can make the operating system perform brilliantly on the tablet form factor gadget. And unless Microsoft brings a real AJAX performance to the Windows Mobile - based tablet sporting a decent (800x600 or better) touch screen, Apple is poised to regain the tablet crown and capture a significant market the Origami failed to impress...