Tablet PCs have been a long time coming. They have been on futurists' drawing boards since at least the early 1980s. And Microsoft's Bill Gates says they finally arrived last year.

Bill is an optimist! Granted, his company has released software that drives Tablet PCs and convinced a few manufacturers to produce the products that use this new software, but today Tablet PCs are an entire industry in beta release. Save your money for at least another year, and probably a lot longer than that.

Tablet PCs are not a specific product but a class of technologies that can either stand on its own, or be an add-on to something else, say a traditional laptop PC.

This ain't exactly the truth, but the easiest way for most consumers to think of Tablet PCs is "its a laptop that let's you write on the screen."

In reality, they are more than that. They can (in theory) read your handwritten scrawl and transcribe it into keystrokes. They can also record your doodles and stretches.  In theory, they can retire keyboards and mice (that's the multiple of mouse.)

Prefected, Tablet PC technology could be a real boon to many (most?) of us. The problem is: the technology is not perfected yet, and by consumers' work-a-day standards, doesn't work yet.

Think of it as equivalent to Windows version 1.0. Windows version 1.0 ran on my 1984 8088-based PC. It was so slow no one did anything practical with it. It was an industry joke. Version 2.0 wasn't much better.

It fact, it was only after Microsoft gave away zillions of copies of Windows 3.0 that the pundits began to admit Windows had potential. A little later Windows 3.11 drew a following, but it wasn't really until Windows 95 arrived (a decade after Windows 1.0) that Microsoft had a true winner.

Expect Tablet PCs to follow a similar route to success. Tablet PC technology is definitely coming. But so slowly we can safely ignore it for this year.