There are wildly differing viewpoints on whether or not the tablet is on its way out, as you might guess. One perspective is that of the smartphone taking over what the tablet does; which is basically content consumption and creation, albeit the latter on a more limited scale than, say, a standard desktop or convertible Ultrabook.

The era of the subscription-based online game has well and truly ended in 2012. It had a good run, really. Fifteen years is quite a long time for anything to stay static in the land of gaming. Ultima Online introduced the idea back in 1997, when those of us who had internet access were mostly still on dial-up and got booted off...

Out of nowhere, Microsoft had an announcement to make. Nothing concrete leaked ahead of the event except that it would be tablet-related. Everybody was skeptical, myself included.

The presentation began and it seemed like more of the same. Don't call it a tablet -- it's the new "Surface"… boring. It's thin, but not much more than existing tablets. It has a kickstand... umm ok. A magnetic cover -- yeah, we’ve seen that somewhere before. Oh, and it doubles as a super-thin keyboard. Wait, what?