There's been a lot of buzz over the last few days about a new ultra-portable, tablet pc product that Microsoft will be launching soon.  It looks like MS even kicked off a bit of a viral campaign, posting an extended spot on YouTube and a cryptic flash site.

I'm told that this is something entirely seperate from the Windows Mobile group, so my guess is that it'll run the latest incarnation of their full-fledged tablet OS instead of something more akin to the embedded OS on the Pocket PCs.

We should know more details "very soon" (likely tomorrow), but from the looks of things, it's a half-notebook sized PC tailored for portability and device connectivity.  The video emphasizes the device's handwriting recognition capabilities, which I'm hopeful for.

I got a chance to play around with an XP Tablet PC a couple years ago, and I ended up becoming really frustrated with its voice recognition system.  Hopefully we'll see some improvements here as well.

What has me excited about this, I guess, is that it appears that MS is making a stab toward a combined hardware/software platform, similar to what they've done with the XBox, or Apple has done with all their music products.  Perhaps with control over both the hardware and software, they'll be able to really fine tune some of the more advanced interface features.  Fingers crossed for the best.

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