When Bill Gates took the stage for his keynote address at the annual Comdex show, he found himself securely in position at the industry's summit. Gates gains in self-confidence every time his company gets a reprieve from the government. On top of that, he's got a newly released Windows XP selling faster than any previous Windows version, a video-game console called the Xbox that is all the buzz, and a vision of where computing is going in the form of the so-called Tablet PC.

Think of a flat, thick electronic notebook that you can write on with a stylus, and you get the concept of the Tablet PC. It will offer a color screen crisp enough to read documents and e-books with ease, and it will provide two modes: an "ink" mode, where it emulates a paper pad by letting you write or draw with the stylus; and a "recognition" mode, in which the machine turns your words into digital text and operates like a word processor.

But you don't have to give up notebook computer functions with a Tablet PC. Several of the prototypes that Gates displayed have convertible screens that can open like a conventional laptop and then be rotated to cover the keyboard, thus creating a tablet. Others come in "slate" form, a flat system unit with a detachable keyboard. Add wireless messaging capabilities, and you create a combination note-taker and communicator of great power.

While hardware companies refine their prototypes for a 2002 release, Microsoft is tuning up a version of Windows XP that will run on these gadgets. Gates predicts that Tablet PCs will be the most popular form of computer in five years. In fact, he believes that devices like these will help business double the productivity gains it saw in the 1990s. It's a vision that's welcome news to industry execs who have lived through the dot-com collapse and are wondering if the business cycle will ever return to normal.

In other developments:

If your shoulders are aching from carrying around a notebook computer with a bag of accessories, consider Dell's latest offering. The Latitude C400 (a little more than $2,000 in its base model) features a Pentium III-M processor with speeds as high as 1.2 gigahertz and optional wireless connectivity. It's a clean machine with 12-inch display, 128 megabytes of RAM and a 10 gigabyte hard drive, but its standout feature is its weight: a mere 3.6 pounds. Even better: an external pack will boost battery life to seven hours.

Handspring's Jeff Hawkins talked about where his company was going in a speech of his own, one that took place as competitor Palm tries to regroup after the resignation of its chief executive officer, Carl Yankowski. Handspring is preparing to launch a handheld called the Treo that will also function as an e-mail device and telephone. The cover of the device flips up to become the telephone earpiece.

Expect several Treo devices to appear in January, competing against RIM's popular BlackBerry units and the Motorola Accompli, which offers always-on e-mail as well as telephone functions. Treo intends to add always-on e-mail through a software upgrade that will be released in mid-2002. The device operates on the GSM network and will likewise be upgradeable to the coming General Packet Radio Service, or GPRS, system. Expect to pay between $400 and $600, depending on your choice of screens and features.

From Sony comes the latest version of its home robotics product, a mechanical puppy named Aibo. For $1,500, you can have the ERS-220, a canine robot that will wirelessly connect to your PC, download your e-mail and read it back to you. The pup's head contains a camera that can send streaming video to your desktop machine, and it can be programmed in surveillance mode to guard a room. With blinking LEDs and a spotlight, Aibo has a vocabulary of 75 words and will respond to whatever name you give it.

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Paul A. Gilster can be reached at gilster@mindspring.com