January 08, 2010, 2:41 PM — Everyone seems more or less convinced that an Apple tablet is going to actually, really, truly be unveiled on the 27th or 26th of this month. Apparently that everyone includes Microsoft, because they unveiled their own tablet offering at this week's CES. There was a brief amount of buzz that this would be the fabled "Courier" project leaked to Gizmodo this past fall; instead, it turned out to be a prototype from HP that was basically a touchscreen computer running Windows 7. This met with such a universal lack of interest that I actually feel kind of bad for Microsoft. You'd think they'd have learned from the universe's previous lack of interest in tablet computing -- and indeed, Steve Ballmer was poo-pooing the idea literally the day after the presentation.
So, this is good news for Apple, right? Well, maybe not. There's nothing actually wrong, conceptually, with the HP gizmo Baller demonstrated. We didn't really get a good enough look at it to see if there's been any real interface improvements to make tablet computing more natural, and you can bet that Apple will come up with just those sorts of tweaks to its own device. But Microsoft's main problem was that it didn't answer the "And"? question, as in "And what do you do with it, really, that you can't do with other gadgets?" And that's and that Apple will have to answer. It seems that everyone is working on faith that such an answer will be provided; there's a story going around that Steve Jobs killed several earlier tablet projects because nobody could tell him what they were good for besides surfing the Internet on the toilet. Since the thing is actually coming to market, the logic goes, someone must have finally come up with an answer.
But if nobody has -- or if the answer doesn't resonate -- well, watch out. The high expectations aren't helping either; this list from Wired is only the beginning of what people expect from this madness.
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