[Omaroo (Chris Malikoff)]

It'll be interesting to see how well the Windows 7 tablets turn out - because MS themselves even state that as a tablet OS, Windows 7 just isn't. Windows users have had access to tablets for years now and they've done very poorly, so why all the sudden interest?

Multi-touch technology was originally developed as a CERN project in the late 70's, and was based on their capacitance touch screens developed in 1972 by Danish electronics engineer Bent Stumpe. Pierre Wellner published a paper in 1991 called "Digital Desk", which outlined the idea of multi-finger gesturing. It is probably Apple's successful deployment of this idea in the iPhone that has sparked all the new developments. Just like back in the Lisa days (pre Macintosh) when they successfully commercialised the mouse (which was essentially a Xerox PARC project in the 60's) Apple has again been the innovator here.

With an OS that is designed from the ground up to be operated by fat fleshy things called fingers, the iPad is discernibly better at doing what it does than the Windows machines for the moment. Even though Windows 7-based tablets have multitouch gesturing built in as a core part of the OS, the GUI itself is not designed well enough for screen elements to be controlled easily and smoothly by fingers, and this extends to mouse-bound applications that run on it - read: everything. There's a long way to go for Windows to catch up in this regard. So, what's important to you? Connectivity? Probably trade off GUI usability and go Windows. A mobile device that relies on pure finger control? iPad or maybe (and that's a big maybe yet) Android. A few more apps and it may get there yet.