Loren's recent comments about his use of a Toshiba M200 contain a couple of interesting observations:

"Sometimes when I'm typing in notebook mode, I find myself wanting to make a quick note or drawing in OneNote and the easiest way to do this is to try to write on the display as I prop it up with my other hand. I haven't caught the hang of this though. My handwriting is almost a total mess when I write this way, but I just don't want to take the effort of folding the display around to Tablet mode to write something down."

"I'm typing more and taking fewer handwritten notes. What, you say? Well, since I'm using the Tablet 100% as a development machine, I'm typing most of the time and I'm using the Tablet in notebook mode so handwriting is awkward since the display is basically vertical. I keep wanting to detach the display so I can jot quick notes on it or grabbing for a second Tablet."

That pretty much matches my own experiences. In a way, I hate the convertible factor in general, and the M200 in particular, because it's a decent enough notebook - with a full (albeit badly laid out) keyboard and a high resolution screen - and I frequently forget it's even a tablet. Like Loren, I type a lot, and I am frequently lazy to twist the screen just to write something. Even worse, when I'm in OneNote, I am tempted to just type way too often. I even frequently carry the M200 around as a notebook, even with the screen open. But unlike my older TC1000, I can't detach the display and have a "real tablet". And since the keyboad on the HP units is a tad cramped (but still pretty handy), handwriting was a lot more tempting. Not anymore.

Some aspects of the M200 design make things worse, too. The pen is flimsy, hard to get out of the silo, and at the bottom of the unit when in primary portrait orientation. The five-way joystick is just plain painful to use when scrolling documents. The already crappy speaker gets covered up. And so forth.

Thus Toshiba is pretty much making it unpleasant to use the M200 in slate mode, while the notebook experience is actually not that bad.

And then there is the software side of things. ISVs have just not created many must-have tablet applications, thus they don't provide any incentive for me to convert the unit either. Of course, Microsoft is not really marketing the tablet OS anyway, and Lonestar is drowning in the SP2 delays.

Ultimately, I think all this means that the Tablet PC will die. No, not in the sense that the technology will fail. Quite on the contrary - pens and digitizers will quietly infiltrate the portable segment and become just another feature on most machines. Ink features will slowly appear in all flavors of Windows. In 2006, you will most likely be using an ink-enabled portable computer as your primary device - a "Tablet PC" in today's terms. You just won't know it. The features will all be there, but unless there is some killer software, and hardware makers actually make it a compelling experience to whip out the pen and ink something, you just won't care. You'll use your mobile PC the same exact way you used a notebook in 2003. Poor Tablet PC, we hardly knew you!