E-gizmos as fashion statements? Or far more?

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By David Rothman

Tablet PCs and other e-book-capable gizmos are like literature and fashion. Styles come and go.

Now a Web site owned by Conde Naste, a conglomerate famous for its fashion coverage, tells us that “Tablet PCs might be headed toward a revival.”

The Conde-owned Wired site made that observation in a  write-up on the $500 Archos Tablet PC, which will run Windows 7.

Says Wired: “Until earlier this year, most analysts and industry watchers saw tablets as a category that wouldn’t catch on with consumers. Tablets are not as compact as smartphones and don’t have a physical keyboard that could make them a real alternative to netbooks. But with rumors of Apple working on a tablet, the category seems to have caught the interest of other device manufacturers. Dell is also reportedly working on a tablet.” And of course we know about the Courier prototype, the fold-like-a-book prototype from Microsoft. But $500 for a non-Apple tablet from Archos?

What will excite me will be cheapie, Asus-style netbooks serving also as tablets and maybe using the PixelQi display, which can show color for many purposes, but can slip into a low-power E Ink-style monochrome mode for e-reading. Now that would be undeniably useful innovation.

Meanwhile all the talk about dual-screen notebooks amuses me. Old stuff, friends. A company called Every Book—one or two words?—was pushing the concept around ten years ago or so. There was also the iRiver protype shown here. I see that the new iRiver e-reader has shed a screen. A lesson learned somewhere?

But wait! Will the Microsoft Courier prototype set the latest trend after all, with its twin screens? You never know. Some TeleRead community members are warming up to the dual screen idea, for reasons noted here.

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