Perhaps a bit off topic, but as a recently retired Microsofty, I thought I'd post some thoughts on MS products and positioning vis a vis remote control and home entertainment. Using the tablet PC as a remote was not much in the product thinking, but it was very much in the planning for a related product: the Smart Display (SD). SD's can be thought of as "TPC lite" -- they are intended to be 802.11 portable keyboard and screen replacements for an existing PC in the home (including the TPC if that's what exists in your home). Viewsonic is one vendor who makes both TPC and SD products -- both are derived from their preexisting AirPanel products. The Viewsonic version of the SD will come (any day now) with NEVO. In many ways SDs and TPCs are similar: the main diff is that SD touch sensitivity, handwriting & ink support is not as good as that on TPC. Processor in TPC is real intel pentium, in SD it's an Intel Xscale (As used in PPC PDAs). TPC's run a variant of Windows XP (XP Tablet PC Edition), SD runs WinCE. SD's are half the price of TPCs (still too costly IMHO). Another thought: in addition to XP for TPC, MS also has one other XP variant: XP Media Center Edition designed to be used on "Media Center PCs" as TV/Entertainment center replacements (Gateway, HP, Toshiba, and Viewsonic are some vendors of these). These come with lots of Remote Control, program guide, Tivo replacement, etc additions to OS; and controlling these with SDs was very much part of the planning process. Nevertheless these are all V1 products (they suffer from all the usual MS V1 ills), and the planning (IMO) was far from perfect (also to be fair to MS their input was severely constrained by the wants and desires of their hardware partners). Be that as it may, wave 2 of TPCs, SDs, and Media Center PCs are about to start hitting the market just about now thru September. Expect much faster H/W, more memory, and especially important to this thread, greatly expanded NEVO bundling deals. As far as I know there are no major MS software enhancements planned in this timeframe. No XP upgrades are contemplated until Longhorn in 2005. They just released a new WinCE variant for the pocket PC and an SD variant of this is in the works. Not too much effort (other than marketing) is going on in the SD space as everyone waits to see if SDs will be sucessful in the marketplace. The same is also true (but to a lesser extent) in the TPC space.

If you are like me, you are drowning in device clutter and needless complexity. I'd like one thing -- be it in a laptop, SD, TPC, or PDA form factor -- that I could carry with me to do whatever occurs to me to do (PC stuff, Internet stuff, PDA stuff, watch TV, etc). Unfortunately that's not here yet. NEVO is an Xscale only development: it runs on PDAs and SDs (Viewsonic is bundling it with Airpanel V150), it would be great if they ported it to the pentium world as well. The functionality of Nevo in the SD space is better than in PDA because they can take advantage of much larger screen (on the other hand larger screen means less portable). If you are thinking of buying something now, you might want to wait a bit as I suspect the TPC and SD world will be somewhat different come the fall. I really wish that Nevo would run on XP, or that great ink and handwriting support were added to SD -- oh well.