It sounds like something handed down from the mountaintop.
It describes itself as an "all-terrain supertablet."
And this personal computer is at the crest of a wave of devices with unusual shapes and features that in the next year may refashion thinking about PCs.
Manufactured by an unknown start-up with the unlikely name of Tusk Inc., the new personal computer has been designed by managers and engineers from outside the personal computing industry.
Instead of relying on experience, they've relied on heavy market research.
Tusk is based in Lake Park, Fla., a town not often thought of as a technology haven.
"I think its design comes from another planet," said Portia Isaacson, president of Dream Machine Inc., a market research and consulting firm specializing in new types of portable computers, based in Cambridge, Mass.
"It's designed by people who didn't know you couldn't do it the way they did it."
These will be "much more sophisticated machines," often designed to be both desktop and portable machines, said Tim Bajarin, executive vice president of Creative Strategies Research International in Santa Clara, Calif.
The driving force behind the refashioning of increasingly mobile machines will be the pen. This longtime word processor is just coming into play as a means of issuing commands to computers, forcing designers to rethink the machines themselves.
"The pen-based systems allow us to have a lot more innovation. Most of the pen-based computers are going away from conventional design," said Mr. Bajarin.
The most noticeable aspect of the new computers is the frequent absence of a keyboard. Some, like those unveiled by Grid Systems Corp., a subsidiary of Tandy Corp. and NCR Corp., respond only to the touch of a special stylus on a flat screen. To tell the machine what to do, a user taps or writes on the screen with the stylus.
Such styluses are called pens, giving rise to the term pen computer. But the "pens" do not write on regular surfaces and the machines' screens do not respond to conventional pens.
Others, such as those from DFM Systems Inc. and MicroSlate Inc., respond to contact from any object, be it pen, finger or other instrument. Like Tusk, these more unusual devices come from unconventional places such as West Des Moines, Iowa, and Brossard, Quebec, not bound by traditional approaches to computer design.
But these machines are basically note pad-like slates, an inch or two thick.
