Perhaps due to their relatively high price, tablet PCs, with their flip-screen ability, never really took off. But that's set to change, since Taiwanese company Gigabyte is doing for the tablet PC what netbook manufacturers did for notebooks.
The first distinguishing feature of the Gigabyte TouchNote T1028 is its rotatable 10.1-inch touch screen, which can be flipped to cover the keyboard. This means you can read documents on the TouchNote much as you do with a flat piece of paper. It also gives you a touch interface, like most PDAs, which is particularly useful for writing non-ASCII languages like Chinese.
The rest of the TouchNote is pretty much like your standard netbook. It's powered by an Intel Atom processor running at 1.66GHz, Windows XP Home, an Intel 945GSE Express graphics chip, 1GB of memory (upgradable to 2GB), and a 160GB hard-disk drive.
Gigabyte also took the liberty of putting in a six-cell battery as standard in the T1028, which is definitely a helpful feature which means more than six hours operating time.
You also get a 1.3-megapixel webcam, as well as wireless LAN and Ethernet as network connections. There's also an option for an integrated 3G modem (only available with the T1028G).
The TouchNote is priced slightly higher than the basic netbook at HK$4,990. But even that is nowhere near the premium set for its tablet predecessors.