I have to admit that I originally had another subject line up there, but thought better of it. Hilton totally made my day today: apparently Microsoft has finally taken the advice of Nintendo - touching is good and tablets are going touch screen! Let me get this off my chest now: YES!! Woo-hoo!! Yeah baby!! Finally!! As you may have noticed, I am a little excited. Make that a lot.

See, for the longest time, I was a tablet "purist". According to the specs, a "real" Tablet PC had an active digitizer, you could put your hand on the screen without messing anything up, and all that. Those weird touch-screen "tablets" were using the name in vain, and were "fake" by comparison. Over time, things started to change. People lost pens, I was frequently in a situation where I was in slate mode, hands full of things, a big fat dialog box with an OK button needed to be dismissed and I so just wished I could just poke that thing with my finger! Even worse, there were many cute little devices like the Flybook or Sony's U-series that just screamed "tablet", yet had passive digitizers that didn't seem to hamper their use all that much.

I personally think that Nintendo had the right idea with their DS portable - touching is a good thing. It's natural. And natural was what the Tablet PC was supposed to be - you know, the whole pen and paper metaphor. But you can touch the paper. Smudge your ink with your finger. Just imagine a finger painting graphics app for kids - on a touch-screen tablet. I think that would be at least a little fun. But it's also something that couldn't be done with a special "pen" because it breaks down the realism. Same thing with the dialogs, scroll bars and other UI elements: why can't I touch them, poke them, pull them? It would seem "natural" that I should be able to, no?

There are many times when I don't use the stylus on my Pocket PC Phone. In fact, recently a custom pen/stylus lost its cap and got stuck in the silo, so being lazy, I went for a few days without a stylus and just poked everything with my fingers. Not great - especially for text entry - but it worked. At the very least it's nice to have the choice, and the emergency "backup". A lost digitizer pen on the road makes a tablet - especially a slate - a whole lot less useful. Plus replacements run about $40. In contrast, if you lose a touch screen stylus, replacements are usually close at hand - chopstick, pencil, finger, and so forth.

Consumers are generally confused at the whole "special" screen concept anyway. Everything else they have seen can be touched with "normal" stylus, yet this "tablet screen" is somehow different. Less confusion, less cost, everybody wins, right?

Well, not necessarily. After all, being able to put your wrist down on your screen while writing is fantastic too. And active digitizers are much more precise, although that may not matter to a vast majority of consumers. How about a compromise then? A pressure-sensitive passive hybrid screen that can register levels of pressure in both active and passive modes, and switches to the more precise active mode when the pen is near. Plus add a manual toggle or lock switch than can switch to active mode and prevent things from accidentally getting pressed while in transit (as happens on my phone all the time). Come on engineers, take up the challenge and give us a cool new screen. Oh, and it can't be washed out looking either.