Home and Office Use:  

This OS may work for home use but it is not intended for home use. It is designed for portability.

XP Tablet Edition was designed with mobile business needs in mind. The focus is of course on mobility. Since a keyboard is not needed, users can enter data easily with a stylus or pen so only one hand is required to interact with the tablet. Additionally, it can recognize speech and input it as text and accept voice commands.

Otherwise, the XP Tablet Edition can also work with the most standard XP Pro features such as the ability to work with Microsoft Office Word, Microsoft Office PowerPoint, Microsoft Office Outlook and Microsoft Office OneNote. It also has networking and administration tools.

If you need a non–English interface, you can choose from 20 different languages and download the interface free. It is also Unicode compatible and can display a huge variety of character types.

Multimedia:  

This OS is not intended for entertainment. It can run many entertainment type programs but it is designed primarily for mobile business use. If the tablet PC has a good graphics card and the correct software it could play video, but if this is your main interest, then you may want to consider a mobile media pc.

Security:  

This OS has many of the same security features as XP Professional. It has administration and networking tools as well as wireless security features.

Networking:  

This OS is similar to XP Pro and is intended for business use. It offers some networking abilities such as simple networking, remote access, roaming user profiles and it can support multiple users. It can also accept group policy settings as well as per user profiles.

Ease of Use:  

This program is as easy to use as XP Pro, but does have some additional features that take a bit of time to set up, such as the handwriting and speech recognition tools. Furthermore, the user has to learn how to use the stylus for mouse functions.

This OS is perfect for what it is intended, which is tablet PC use. Since it comes preinstalled, the price of the program is included with the purchase of the PC and the updates are free. It also offers most of the same functions as XP Pro, making it extremely functional, secure and compatible.

Technical Help/Support:  

This OS comes with general support, but since it is so specialized, they do not offer as many tutorials, seminars or webcast/podcast topics as they do for some of their more popular operating systems.

This program is for tablet PCs, not laptops. Many tablet PCs do not even have a keyboard and lots of them have rotating screens. However, this OS offers many of the same functions to tablet PCs as the other OSs do for laptops, such as power saving features. It also has the ability to re–orientate the display image when the screen is turned.

This version is being phased out and instead of being replaced with a new version Microsoft is adding tablet functions to its business versions.