Allen was the one who pushed for the clamshell design from the start, said Dave Moore, senior director of products at Seattle-based FlipStart in comments at a conference in Indian Wells, California. FlipStart officials gave a of the product here Monday.

"We meet with Paul [Allen] on a regular basis, and the team has met with Paul every week for six years just about," Moore said.

"The clamshell design is Paul's vision, and it was his preference in the beginning," he said to IT managers at the Frost & Sullivan Mobile & Wireless Enterprise conference.

A clamshell style, similar to a laptop PC, protects the screen and the keyboard and doesn't require a special cover as a tablet model would, Moore said. "With a tablet, you're always worried about the screen. We looked at including touch screen" but decided against it for several reasons, he said.

Touch-screen technology that is part of a tablet "wasn't a necessary requirement ... and doesn't work well with character recognition and handwriting on a small screen. Plus, it would have cost more," Moore said. But Moore said FlipStart Labs, a subsidiary of Allen's Vulcan Portals, plans to listen to customers and would remain open about including touch-screen technology in the future. By comparison, OQO Inc.'s ultramobile PC, a potential competitor to FlipStart, employs an active pen technology, as well as a keyboard that slides out.