For the third year in a row, the hot topic at Comdex was the tablet PC. This is not a good sign for the industry: In 2000 Bill Gates gave us the concept, in 2001 the prototypes and in 2002 the products themselves.

To begin with, I guess I'm having a hard time understanding all the hoopla. The idea goes back to the Grid Systems GridPad and Convertible products of the 1980s. They didn't sell well, but they influenced a huge number of successful products, such as the industrial tablets sold by Symbol Technologies and others. The fact that we're seeing an annual rehash of an old idea with spiffy new software that almost works is the bad sign. Innovation in the PC space, long the driver of high tech and much of the economy as a whole, is dead. And if business wasn't affected so much, no one would care.

Comdex, by the way, remains an interesting, if significantly smaller event. There are still lots of great products and technologies to be seen, if one ignores the buzz and digs a little.

For example, while I don't think we'll all be carrying tablet PCs around, I do think that a derivative of this genre will be part of everyone's future. In a small tent outside the main hall at Comdex (away from the show floor, I was told, to avoid RF interference!), Microsoft and others were showing the Smart Display "monitor of the future."

What is it? Well, it looks just like a tablet PC, but is in fact a thin client using Microsoft's Terminal server over an 802.11b link to view the display of a remote system running XP Pro. Smart Displays are a lot cheaper than tablet PCs, but alas, they're still a bit heavy and undoubtedly fragile. Nonetheless, I love the concept: Instead of yet another computer, I have a link to the computer I already own. I don't have to worry about copying files, synchronizing or backup. In theory, this concept should work just fine over public wireless access points and even wide-area wireless networks. Maybe this is what the PDA of the future will look like as well, once we have ubiquitous broadband wireless networks.

Will many of us replace our notebooks with tablet PCs over the next few years? Sure; the additional cost is minimal. But as we begin to think beyond the PC, technologies like the Smart Display will play a huge role.

CRAIG MATHIAS is an analyst at the Farpoint Group (Ashland, Mass.).

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