The criticism many have laid at the door of Windows 7 for tablets is that Microsoft's OS is just too bloated to work well on such specialised machines. 

Rather than gloss over such views, however, Microsoft has decided to embrace them at CES 2011, promoting three new tablets that make no effort to tone Windows 7 down.

Instead, they all come with some added bulk of their own.

Slip and slide

Samsung's Sliding PC 7, for instance, verges on netbook territory. The tablet sports a slide-out keyboard hidden on the back of the device, enabling users to switch between using it for work and play in seamless fashion.

Acer's Dual-Screen PC comes with much the same aims, featuring two 14-inch touchscreens mounted face to face. As such, the bottom screen can also act as a keyboard, giving the device a laptop feel with the looks of a tablet.

Even Asus' Tablet PC – though lacking any form of keyboard of its own – attempts to do something different, making use of a stylus on a super-bright screen that can be viewed at almost any angle.

Tablet trilogy

All three devices offer different experiences to the standard tablets currently in development for Android, as they attempt to fill the gap between netbooks and tablets rather than using Windows 7 as a poor substitute for Google's OS.

The possibility of Microsoft utilising Windows Phone 7 as an alternative tablet OS remains unofficially on the agenda, though. The company offered no comment on the subject at CES 2011 however. 

[source: Mashable]