While it may not be quite as revolutionary as touch technology, Instant-On is one of the most important (if most underappreciated) features that have been transplanted from the smart phone across to the tablet – but have still not (for reasons way too complicated to go into here) yet reached the PC.

It not only makes it much quicker and more convenient for you to turn on the device whenever you need to, but can also (certainly in my experience) help you become much more productive by giving you the freedom to type out some notes or scan a few emails at any time. This means that the tablet is particularly useful during those random “down” moments of the day when, for example, you are waiting a few minutes for a meeting to start and it’s not worth turning on your PC.

Imagine being able to use a computer without having to spend hours learning how to navigate complex menu systems using a keyboard or mouse.

That’s the promise of touch technology for the billions of people who still do not have access to PCs or the Internet, and low cost Android tablets are already beginning to deliver on it.

Although touch has been around for quite a while now, it wasn’t until the first generation of smart phones came along that the world really began to wake up to the huge potential of this technology. For the first time, the Internet was literally at your fingertips without having to touch a mouse or keyboard – with the process of accessing the information you need helped by the rapid proliferation of convenient single purpose apps.

With its larger screen, the Apple iPad has taken the touch revolution a giant step forward, enabling a much richer and more vibrant experience for consumers and also driving rapid innovation in all manner of tablet apps, digital magazines, eBooks, and hybrid text and multimedia formats by publishers looking to cash in on the format.

I’ll return to the question of the potentially disruptive nature of tablets next week, but in the meantime I thought I’d share a few observations I’ve jotted down after some fairly intensive road testing I’ve been doing on a tablet over the past couple of weeks.

While many analysts have been suggesting that tablets may be cannibalistic of netbooks, I find mine to be complementary – in usage terms at least. Having a tablet doesn’t mean I can leave my netbook at home, but it does enable me to get more work done in places like the back of a taxi cab or an airplane seat.  

Why do I think that tablets have the potential to be a disruptive, perhaps even revolutionary, device while I see netbooks as an essentially evolutionary product?

This is a big question, and as the first step in tackling it I have put together the table above comparing the main features of netbooks with those of the iPad and Android tablets. Originally, I had thought about combining the iPad and Android tablets into one single “super-tablet” category, but the differences between the devices are too great to justify this as later tablet diaries will illustrate.

One of the main reasons for the extraordinary success of the netbook has been that it is just like a normal notebook, but a little smaller, lighter, and cheaper. In other words, it represents a natural evolution of the computer rather than a revolution.

In the short term, this evolutionary approach has led to rapid growth in the market for netbooks and tens of millions of units in sales. but at the same time it has meant that the netbook has quickly reached the natural limit of its development. People still use the netbook to carry out pretty much the same tasks as on other PCs using the same old operating system and applications running on the same x86 based hardware architecture.

Just as generals tend to use the blueprints they developed in their last war whenever they lead their troops into the next conflict, it’s very tempting for analysts (and marketing people!) to view a major industry transition from the same perspective as the previous one.

It’s no surprise therefore that much of the analysis that has been published about the tablet market so far uses the growth of the netbook market as its main point of comparison – and indeed makes the potential cannibalization of netbook sales by tablets as one of its central areas of focus.

As I was being given back my increasingly battered copy of Sea of Poppies, it occurred to me that I didn’t mention another advantage of traditional books over e-readers and tablets in the social media arena: namely, that you can pass on a book to other people after reading it and talk about it with them.

With an e-book, in contrast, all you can do is recommend it – and hope that your friends like the book if they go ahead and purchase it themselves. Come to think of it, I would guess that an e-book doesn’t make such a good gift item as a traditional book either given that you can’t wrap it in pretty paper. On the other hand, the environmental benefits of giving an e-book would be enormous.

If there is one area in which traditional analog books still hold an advantage over tablets and e-readers, it’s in what we today would call social media - otherwise known as satisfying those good old-fashioned virtues of vanity and curiosity.

How do you let your fellow holidaymakers know that you’re spending your time on the beach productively reading the latest hot management tome with an e-reader? Or how do you know what the person in the seat opposite you is reading if their head is buried in a Kindle?