NEW YORK - Microsoft borrowed some of Broadway's glamour for its Thursday Tablet PC send-off, during which Bill Gates and a host of top executives from companies manufacturing the devices gathered at the Ambassador Theatre here to demo and publicize the new PCs.

While Gates proclaimed himself optimistic about the market's eagerness for the new devices and forecast shortages as buyers clamor for the devices as soon as they are available, one executive at the launch adopted a more pragmatic tone.

"I think we all know new categories start with early adopters and then, as technologies become more mature and the price points become more mainstream, that's when the growth explosion really takes off," Scott Eckert, CEO of Motion Computing Inc., said during a press conference.

Executives from vendors including Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, Acer, NEC and ViewSonic turned out to support the Tablet PC and discuss their expectations for it.

"This is about drawing new users and creating an additional category," said Hewlett-Packard Chairman and CEO Carly Fiorina. "Our objective is to continue to innovate in a pragmatic way, and also to continue to drive our cost structure even lower. This is all about the combination of the right price point for the right value, the right market."

Handwritten e-mail messages, a feature enabled by the Tablet PC's "ink" technology, are already floating around at Hewlett-Packard, she said.

Gates also discussed the Tablet PC's ink technology during his keynote address. For the past several months, the Tablet PC has been his primary machine, he said -- and in his role as Microsoft's chief software architect, he's been verbose in his feedback to the product team.

One of the first problems that cropped up with the ink and handwriting-recognition technology emerged after he began testing it. While the product team described the software as working quite well, it served Gates badly. His left-handedness was the problem, he realized: Only right-handed testers had worked with the software until then.

"I think my record was 30 e-mails in one day, some titled things like 'the poor left-hander' or 'time for more integration,'" he said.

Tablet PC integration will be a major part of the next version of Microsoft Office, due out in mid-2003, Gates said. While an add-on pack is now available with Tablet PC support, Office 11 "will go even further in terms of its native support for ink in the applications... in fact, a lot of the work in Office is based on that," Gates said.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.