Where's Waldo*?
* By Waldo, I mean TabletPC
Talk to any Microsoft employee and they're bound to mention how TabletPC is the best thing since sliced bread. I'm not kidding. Not only that, they use them, and quite publicly.
I think TabletPCs are really cool looking, cool functionally, and really impressive technologically. Unfortunately, I will never own one because I type much, much more quickly than I write. I was thinking about this a few days ago and realized that I generally never write anything unless I'm sketching out a flow diagram or something along those lines. (Those sketches are very short-lived, so I don't even have a need to store them digitally.)
So where are the users?
I live and work in Chicago, a town whose metro area population consists of more than eight million people. I've never seen a non-MSFT person using a TabletPC. I've been travelling almost every week recently and have never seen a TabletPC in an airport -- a place that you'd thing would be crawling with them.
When I read that sales were lacking (to put it lightly), I was actually pretty surprised. I thought I was in the minority in having no use for it. I hope it hasn't gone the way of the PocketPC already. (I think the PocketPC is great, too, but yet something else I don't need. During the internet boom, everyone had one. Now, it seems, it's a rare occurrence to see a guy on the bus pull out his Palm or iPaq.)
So now I'm curious: Where have you seen someone using a TablePC? HAVE you seen a person using one? I know some folks that are "definitely" going to get them, but have yet to pull the trigger. Could it just be that everyone is in limbo?