Opinion: All I want for Christmas is a new PC

This obviously can’t happen. Even Dr Who would have a problem performing this trick. So what we really need is a notebook with no keyboard, for most of the time, but with the ability to easily acquire a keyboard when you need to type more than CUL8R.

This fantasy notebook will run Windows. Yes of course, if you want, you can run Linux on the thing. But in order to sell like hotcakes and therefore become affordable, it needs to run what everyone uses and that means Windows. If you don’t like that, buy a shedload more Linux notebooks and the power of market share will eventually be on your side. The next thing it needs is a widescreen, but it needs it oriented vertically, like a piece of paper. So it really needs a long screen.

The shape and orientation of notebook screens have been constrained by the need to hang a keyboard off the front of the thing. If we didn’t need to lug along a keyboard, then the notebook could be more useful shaped like most people – taller than we are wide. OK, about now you’re thinking, this is a Tablet PC he’s describing. Well, it would be, if any of those things were any use to anyone. I’m yet to find one that performs as advertised.

The problem with Tablet PCs seems to be the insistence that they also do really good voice recognition so you can shout your commands at them, or that they do really good handwriting recognition so you can scribble away at random and have the thing understand you. Both these input efforts require preposterous amounts of computing grunt, leaving the Tablet PC with nothing left to do some work for its hapless owner. And it’s not as if the voice or handwriting stuff even works properly.

What we need is a Tablet PC with no frills at all, just a touch screen to make it do most of the stuff you need done when you have no keyboard. It’s still faster to tap an on-screen keyboard for entering small amounts of text than it is to write it out by hand and hope to achieve recognition, so why fight it? When the CPUs are so powerful that these problems are solved, we’ll be doing things entirely differently anyway.

Right now, we just want a Tablet PC that’s about the size of an A5 page, with no spinning bits inside. And 3G wireless broadband. And a foldable keyboard for the times when we need to actually write a few words. Let me know when you find one.