Some of the best products ever created failed to make it in the marketplace. Perhaps they were flawed (despite their greatness) or priced too high, or a better product came out. Sony's Beta recording technology, for instance, was superior to VHS in many ways; but VHS won the hearts of consumers leveraging lots of prerecorded movie titles and a lower price.

Will Windows XP Tablet PC Edition become the next great product to join the dinosaurs? I hope not. This excellent version of Windows XP lets you handwrite or draw directly on your screen without a keyboard. It uses audio input to record your meetings while you write; and when teamed with tools like Microsoft's OneNote software, Tablet PC can help you organize your thoughts, documents, and actions like never before.

This month, Microsoft is releasing an improved version of Tablet PC. It now integrates with Microsoft Office, so you can annotate your Word Documents, create written notes, charts and graphs in Excel, and use "ink" in your PowerPoint presentations.

With the new capabilities of Windows XP Service Pack 2 built in, and a redesigned input panel, the Tablet PC product catalog is growing with applications from the likes of Franklin-Covey and Brown University, each taking advantage of the pen and ink interface to go a step beyond normal computing.

It also lets you handwrite your e-mails in Outlook, instead of making you type, thereby introducing e-mail as a tool for an entire new class of users who didn't want to learn how to type (and those who don't want to take the time).

Despite the huge benefits of Tablet PC, and all the drooling I have done over it, I still have not taken the step to buy myself one. Every time I think about it, I'm dissuaded by the price-performance and the alternatives. I look at notebook computers in stores and online catalogs, and see the Tablet PC versions weighing in at more than $2,000 complete with processors in the 1 to 1.6 Gigahertz performance range. Those aren't very powerful by today's standards. The underwhelming specs of these devices become even more noticeable when you look at alternative offerings. You can get a faster, better equipped notebook system for half the price.

I finally wiped the drool off my mouth and asked John Nagle from CompUSA why the specs of the Tablet PC devices are so poor compared with standard Windows XP devices. He told me that full functionality of Tablet PC requires special sensors to be embedded in the monitor; so power consumption of the Tablet PC monitors is tremendously heavy. To compensate for the power drain of the monitors, PC manufacturers try to conserve power in other places, such as using slower processors and less memory. Otherwise, your battery would run out in no time.

John told me that many of his customers who really want the Tablet PC choose other systems instead because you can get so much more for your money in other ways. That's unfortunate; because if Tablet PC caught on, we'd be ready for the next great phase of computing -- without heavy reliance on keyboarding.

Personal digital assistant users already get many of the benefits of Tablet PC -- in particular, having your device recognize what you write on the screen. But, with minuscule displays, using a PDA is still not the same as having a virtual 8 1/2-by-11 memo pad that saves your information and adds value to your everyday documents. So I guess until the hardware catches up with the software, we'll continue to dream -- by choice.