Over on WhatIsNew’s forums, dmdsoftware linked to FCC documents of an IBM Tablet PC.
James Kendrick has extracted the pictures from the linked PDF documents.
The Tablet is designated an IBM ThinkPad X41 Tablet PC and shares many similarities to the IBM ThinkPad X41–except most noteably the display case. Looks like IBM’s doing an excellent job of moving status LEDs, finger print scanner, and most control buttons to the display so that everything is right there when in Tablet mode.
Now nothing says that this Tablet will actually make it to market (also, rumors have been circulating the last couple weeks that sales reps have been showing potential customers an IBM Tablet), but this engineering sample sure gets me thinking. If this is a signal that IBM is going to enter the Tablet world soon, then I’m betting we’ll see an even more substantial growth in Tablets this year.
I’ve talked with a couple companies over the last couple years that are IBM-only shops. And eventhough they’ve tried Tablets, they won’t buy any non-IBM products. Further, there are many people that have grown to trust the IBM notebook brand. Here’s a Tablet for them.
Oh, so much for WinHec news. This is the scoop of the year.