Whilst Apple are reveling in all the hype of the iPad, and it’s sales success (or over-success for those on wait lists), poor old Microsoft and Fujitsu must be scratching their heads, wondering what they did wrong.
You see – the concept of a table PC has been around for quite some time – in fact I was the proud owner of a Fujitsu tablet PC way back around 2003.

The Fujitsu Stylistic was an awesome machine.  Whilst it was a little bigger, and a little heavier than the iPad, it was overall, I believe, a better machine because it had one function the iPad does not; a writing tool.

With its stylistic pen, I could call up a conventional A4 lined writing pad and scribble notes to my hearts content – and never run out of paper.

Best of all, I could review back over years of notes and easily find the page I was looking for.  I had researched thoroughly, and the Fujitsu model had the best overall reviews for writing functionality – and my personal experience was it lived up to and even exceeded its billings.

When some lowlife broke into my car and stole the tablet – it proved impossible to replace (stock not available anywhere due to low sales). So when I finally replaced it with an HP laptop with swivel screen -was not too surprised to find that their model performed poorly for stylistic writing.  Actually that’s an understatement – it was so useless that I gave up on this feature.

For the iPad not to have a quality writing feature is a very large oversight.  With this simple function it would become irreplaceable in every business persons folio – and the iPad could then not only threaten books, but would jeopardise sales of A4 writing paper world wide.  A real “save the trees/planet” marketing opportunity missed.

Microsoft and Fujitsu must be wondering about the fadnatisim type sales the iPad is experiencing despite its shortcomings – guess it was just that the tablet PC put out by them wasn’t looking cool.

So the door remains open to them to take the new wave of tablet acceptance, and come back fighting with a relaunch of a modernised version of their functional model.  But should Apple get the feedback that I believe they will, and load a writing tool into the next generation of iPads – their market share lead would leave tablet PC’s in a very low runners up position, probably forever…