September 18th, 2005 by Jemaleddin Cole

This is prob­a­bly a little pre­sump­tu­ous of me, being as how you’ve cre­ated a ton of great prod­ucts, and I’ve… Well, let’s skip ahead.

I keep hear­ing rumors that you’re work­ing on a tablet com­puter, and as a Newton-​lover, I’m excited. I always thought the hand­writ­ing recog­ni­tion was pretty good, and I’m pretty sure that it’s gotten better since then. What I’m wor­ried about is the form factor.

A lot of com­pa­nies are making tablets that are lap­tops with break­away screens. And I don’t get that. I can’t imag­ine that I’d be on the road with my laptop, which is already portable, and decide to ditch the key­board and mouse.

What I can imag­ine is sit­ting in my house, maybe post­ing on my blog, and want­ing to head to another room to browse the web while I talk to my wife. And a tablet PC would be great for that.

So here’s what we need: take one iBook, put the moth­er­board behind the screen, and create a dock­ing sta­tion that holds it up like the iMac G5. The dock­ing sta­tion should have a power supply to recharge the tablet and a data port of some kind so that it can con­tain a USB hub to con­nect to a key­board and mouse. Firewire might be nice as well. This way, I can be typing one minute, grab the bottom of the screen, push a button to release it, pull out a stylus, and keep doing what I’m doing. When I’m at my desk I can have a real key­board and a real mouse, but once I step away, I keep my desk­top envi­ron­ment, but lose the desk.

So how about it? Can you have one of these ready for Christmas?

Sin­cerely,

Jemal

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