Dell tablet to debut at CES, says rumor. Is a 5″ screen really a tablet?

Dell plans to launch a tablet computer — one with a touchscreen instead of a mouse and keyboard — based around Google’s Android mobile operating system, says a report attributed to “multiple black ops sources” on gadget site Pocket-lint.
Dell has not yet responded to requests to confirm or deny the rumor. And at this point, there are no photos of the rumored device on the Internet, only artists’ conceptions of possible tablet devices.
If the story is true, Dell’s tablet has a chance to beat another rumored tablet from Apple to market in a new product category.
Unfortunately, the rumored device is rumored to have a 5-inch screen, closer to that of a smartphone than a personal computer. Pocket-lint names the Archos 5 Internet Tablet as a competitor, but the Archos’ 4.8-inch screen is also small to be considered a tablet. A rumored touchscreen computer from Asus, similarly, is said to have a screen in the five to seven-inch range.
These smallish screens aren’t in line with the original concept of a tablet PC, whose screen would be the size of a clipboard or a laptop. A startup effort, the JooJoo tablet, is based around a 12.1-inch touchscreen. Now that’s a tablet. But the JooJoo is not yet in customers’ hands, and its $499 pre-order price seems a large amount of money to risk on an unproven twelve-person company’s first model.
The tablet computer has, in the past year, gone from sure-to-fail niche product to eagerly-anticipated Next Big Thing. That’s because the original tablets were envisioned as workplace tools, replacements for the clipboards and binders carried by doctors and other knowledge workers. They were designed to be tapped at with a stylus, a design obsoleted by the iPhones’ wildly popular touchscreen in 2007.
The new vision for tablets is couch computing — a way to check Facebook, watch YouTube, tap at Twitter, and putter around the Web in a relaxed, leaned-back way rather than leaning intently into a desktop or laptop keyboard for high-speed work.
Do you ever lie down with your laptop on your chest? A slim, light tablet — basically a touchscreen with some miniaturized guts behind it and a wireless Net connection — would be much better than a folded-out laptop. It’s the computer you could keep tucked under your pillow.