CNet has a good article that provides an overview of Vista, its features, and what equipment you'll need to run it.
The good news for the Tablet ecosystem is that Tablet bits are included in all the permutations of Vista except the lowest two: a version for emerging markets and Basic Home. Home Premium, Vista Business, Vista Enterprise, and Vista Ultimate all include Tablet bits. So now, even if you don't have a Tablet you can bring up the TIP, for instance, and try it out with the mouse or touchpad. Sure it's hard to handwrite this way, but it can be done. If you have a Tablet though or an external digitizer (such as a Wacom Graphire), the Tablet features are automatically enabled.
Now let's say you installed Vista Ultimate on an iMac using Bootcamp and you don't have an external digitizing pad. How can you test out the Tablet features? Easy. Press the Vista "start" button and then in the "run" edit field at the bottom of the menu that appears, enter "TabTip.exe" and press Enter. That'll launch the Tablet Input Panel (TIP).
In the TIP you can try out the handwriting recognition by scribbling words using your mouse. As you write your words in the TIP, you'll see the recognized words appear below your handwriting. If a word isn't recognized correctly, you can click on the recognized word and correct it using a correction window that appears. Alternatively, you can scratch out the incorrectly recognized handwriting and write the word again. Sometimes you can even write over part of a word if it has simply mis-recognized a single letter.
Yes, Basic Home owners won't have access to the Tablet features. My guess is as good as yours as to how large the market will be of Basic Home owners, but if previous permutations of Windows are any indication, this segment of the market will probably be huge. Your Aunt Sally and Grandpa Joe will probably be using Basic Home, for instance. They'll go down to the local super store and buy whatever is on the shelf--not knowing what they might be missing.
If you have an awesome Tablet app you want to share with Home Basic users, there is hope. They'll be able to upgrade as Ed Bott shows here. CNet doesn't indicate what the upgrade costs will be in their article. Nonetheless, the idea of easily upgrading my Aunt Sally to a Tablet or Media Center capable version of Home Premium sounds like a winner to me.


Incremental Blogger