They haven't gone mainstream the way Microsoft had hoped....but tablet PCs are alive and well. Bloomberg Boot Camp, a report on today's technology. Lenovo is out with the ThinkPad X60 Tablet....light on weight at four pounds...and heavier on performance. Equipped with a Core Duo processor, an 80 gigabyte hard drive...and up to 4 gigabytes of memory...it has a feature Lenovo calls Active Rotate. It uses an accelerometer to automatically determine the orientation of the screen....and switches from landscape to portrait automatically. But demand for tablet PCs that let you use your own handwriting on the screen....hasn't been what Microsoft had envisioned. Lenovo's Mike Hagerty says the X60 may help to change that...

"What we're doing in order to help with that is, one, work closely with Microsoft on their ideas for tablet functionality in the future. And also work with independent software vendors."

The IDC research firm estimates about a million tablet PCs will ship this year...and that may climb to four million by 2010. A key feature to making tablets more useful is battery life. And that is improving...

"We're offering two batteries with any standard configuration. One gives you 3.3 hours. And the other will give you about 7.5 hours."

On the minus side...Lenovo doesn't include an optical drive....selling it instead as an option. Pricing for the X60 starts at about 18 hundred dollars. Bloomberg Boot Camp, I'm Fred Fishkin.