Tablet PCs find a niche

Rudolph Muller

Rudolph Muller is the editor at MyBroadband and covers telecoms and broadband news. Rudolph comes from an academic background, but left the University of...

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Back in 2002, with the launch of the first set of commercially-available tablet PCs running Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, Bill Gates predicted that these new devices could spell doom for the common household PC or notebook.

Six years on and tablet PCs may not have become completely mainstream but they have established themselves a niche.

This is according to Reon Coetzee, marketing manager for Toshiba South Africa and Africa, as the company launched its new Portege M700 Tablet PC offering.

"Whether used in education, insurance, medicine or even retail, tablet PCs have clear advantages over conventional notebooks, particularly from a manageability perspective," Coetzee says.

"Notebooks are great tools for mobile business people but sometimes even the most portable notebook can be unwieldy when, for example, there is no table or flat surface to rest it on to type an e-mail or make notes on a document."

The Toshiba Portege M700 Tablet PC replaces Toshiba’s Portege M400 adding a number of new features making it a worthy addition to any business’s mobile workforce.

Weighing in at 2kg, the Portege M700 can be used as a regular notebook with a full keyboard, or the screen can be twisted and flipped down over the keyboard to turn the M700 into a touch-screen slate for use with a digital pen or even the user’s finger in selected models.

The Portege M700 includes a web cam, a DVD Super Drive, a smart card reader and a battery life of more than 4 hours.

Tablet-PC discussion