Tablets, tablets, tablets. The future of computing! Revolutionizing education! Making the world safe for democracy! Two of those are true and one probably not, but it's undeniable that tablets are fundamentally remaking the computing landscape. Libraries, of course, have taken notice.Tablets have a lot going for them: They're small, lightweight, portable, reasonably rugged, flexible, pretty affordable, and highly configurable. From lending programs to guerilla assessment and many things in between, libraries are experimenting with interesting programs and services to leverage this exploding technology. In this column, I offer an incomplete, but hopefully inspiring, laundry list of uses for tablets in libraries. These aren't pie-in-the-sky uses either. These are real-they're either doable or have already been done somewhere.While tablet mania is a new phenomenon, tablets themselves are not. Apple released a nascent tablet, the Newton, in the 1980s, and Microsoft had a tablet on the market in 1999. Early efforts, however, were hampered by bulky, heavy hardware; short battery life; and lack of applications that took advantage of the alternative methods of input, such as touch. These were ahead of their time, or ahead of the innovations that would enable Apple, in 2010, to release a lightweight, responsive, long-running tablet by the name of iPad. Perhaps you've heard of it?
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