Now that China officially has the second largest GDP in the world, it has never been more important to gain a deeper understanding of the historical and cultural forces that are driving the rapid growth of the country.

An excellent place to start is by reading China’s Cosmopolitan Empire, Mark Edward Lewis’ outstanding history of the Tang Dynasty. Straddling nearly three centuries from 618 to 907, this is widely regarded as China’s “golden age”, a period of rapid territorial expansion, growing urbanization, and burgeoning foreign trade with Asia and the Middle East accompanied by an explosion in literary and artistic creativity.

In what may be rather a telling comment on my exciting social life, I’ve been spending a lot more time than I probably should have this weekend trying to understand the mini-furor surrounding Wired Magazine’s latest cover story lamenting the impending demise of the wild, wild web.

According to Chris Anderson, “semiclosed platforms” such as tablets and smartphones are creating a new “paradigm” in which rather than going out and searching for breathtaking new insights on the web we are now passively allowing information to be sent to our devices through smartly packaged apps.

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.

Today we’ve announced that our ultra-compact VIA ARTiGO A1100 is now available in the Indian market through Shestra eTechnologies. To give Indian consumers a “hands on” look at the system, it will also be showcased at selected shopping centers in Mumbai and Delhi as part of an ‘Experiencing Zone for Taiwan Excellence and Taiwan International Brands’ tour that takes place from August to October this year. For more information please see the press release here.

Coincidentally, PC World has just published a review of the VIA ARTiGO A1100, concluding: “If you're interested in a fun side project, VIA's Artigo A1100 has enough muscle to perform as a fairly capable media machine, as well as to tackle light productivity tasks.”

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.