From Luke Francl:
Dan Bricklin, creator of VisiCalc and pen computing pioneer, reviews the Toshiba 3505 Tablet PC he purchased. Bricklin has an interesting perspective because he was co-founded Slate, which developed software for the Newton, Microsoft’s earlier Pen Computing platform, and Penpoint. In his review, Bricklin addresses specialized e-book readers:
If reading on screen is so important, why not just build an electronic book for reading? The answer is simple. You need to have a portable general purpose machine like a laptop anyway for composing, calculating, and running specialized applications. By the time you build a good enough “book” machine that can also connect to the Internet with whatever technique you have available (dial up, 100baseT, 802.11) and connect to the devices you’d like (USB), and be upgradable, etc., you’re already spending enough for most of a laptop. It’s silly to pay twice, so the more general laptop has always won out. It’s only in the case of a completely different form factor, and a price down in the range of a software package or PC peripheral (which is what a Palm cost and was positioned as) that you’d buy both. By making the Tablet PC a full-fledged Windows machine, with access to all the normal peripherals and applications, you don’t have that tension of needing to pay twice as much.
