I like these concepts for combining tablets and keyboard docs. I think the tradeoffs are still horrible for emulating a full desktop experience on the tablet, but I think this extends the functionality of the tablet.

This is the long way of saying I’m conflicted about devices like these. On the one hand, they’re ridiculously under powered, even compared to ultrabooks which are a bundle of tradeoffs that don’t seem reasonable to me either. That said, my iPad2 offers a very good experience, and a keyboard dock definitely enhances that experience…

The tablet with dock looks more practical to me than a netbook, because having the ability to just have a tablet is transformative, especially if you can still get work done. But it very much is in that bracket where you wouldn’t want one as your primary computer. The issue I have is that they don’t seem to have really worked out the kinks yet, and iOS and Android are limited when it comes to emulating a device that really begins to look like a traditional clam shell style machine. That said, Win8 has issues too. I guess the real issue is that $500 is a lot of money for me right now to pay just so I can be a guinea pig with no guarantees that this device will be supported in the future or have a viable upgrade path, let alone applications designed to work within the trade offs this device poses. This is especially true since Google has publicly come out and said that this isn’t the direction they see Android going even though not pursuing it seems asinine.

I guess I’m just leery of the entire market segment right now. It feels like we’re on the edge of this convergence between mobile and laptops, and it isn’t at all clear what systems are going to win out right now. It isn’t to me at least, so betting with my own money, the time I’d have to invest to learn the device, and ultimately how to develop for it, isn’t something I’m willing to do.