Though a fairly recent advancement, visions of a notepad style computer existed long before people even had home computers. The first serious idea for a real-life tablet computer came from the imaginative mind of American computer scientist Alan Kay.
His concept, the Dynabook, was published in and detailed a personal computing device for children that functioned similarly to a personal computer. In advocating for the feasibility of such a technology, there were suggestions on which sort of existing hardware components could work inside, which included various types of screens, processors and storage memory. As he envisioned it, the Dynabook weighed about two pounds, came in a thin form factor, featured a display boasting at least a million pixels and had a nearly unlimited power supply of power.
It also included a stylus. Keep in mind, however, just how far fetched and grandiose his idea likely seemed at the time. The notion of home computing was still quite novel and laptops, of course, had yet to be invented. The GRidPad, the first tablet pc to hit the consumer marketplace, did eventually debut decades later courtesy of Grid Systems, one of the earliest Silicon Valley startups.
Prior to its release, the closest thing were products known as graphics tablets, essentially input devices that connected to a computer workstation and allowed for different forms of interfacing such as drawing, animation and graphics through the use of a stylus. These systems, often used in place of a mouse, included the likes of the Pencept Penpad, the Apple Graphics Tablet and the KoalaPad, which was geared toward schoolchildren.
It weighed almost five pounds and was rather bulky. The screen was a far cry from the million-pixel benchmark that Kay set forth and was barely capable of displaying in grayscale. Still, it widely picked up by large companies and government agencies that used it to help streamline record keeping.
Personal Digital Assistants PDAs could hardly be considered tablet PCs relative to the functional wizardry offered up by products currently on the market. Whereas the GRidPad ran on a version of the archaic MS-DOS, pen computing devices were among the first commercial products to wed portable computing with consumer friendly operating systems. Soon, more established players such as Apple, Microsoft and later Palm begin putting out competing pen computing platforms.
For instance, Fujitsu launched in the Stylistic tablet, which featured an intel processor and came with windows 95 and followed it up two years later with an improved version, the Stylistic That might have all changed in had the newly released Windows XP Tablet lived up to the hype. Introduced at the Comdex technology trade show, Microsoft founder Bill Gates proclaimed tablets to be the future and predicted that the new form factor would become the most popular form of PC within five years.
Its ultimately failed, partly due to the underlying incompatibility of trying to shoehorn the keyboard-based Windows OS into a purely touchscreen device , which resulted in a less intuitive user experience.
Perhaps you could say we have surpassed what Kay envisioned. Time will reveal what other advancements we can get in tablet technology in the future. Blog - Apps and mobile devices. Back Next. What do business ratings and reviews actually mean?
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Of course the PDA is an important part of the tablet story. He founded Palm Computing to pursue the project and produced the Zoomer touchscreen device with the help of Tandy and Casio. It was still a struggle to get anybody to buy it. As Infoworld's Kevin Strehlo wrote back in "I still can't recommend depending on a pen-based computing device to anyone but a UPS delivery person or someone who fills out forms for a living.
As we've already said, timing is everything when it comes to tablets. Most people agree that Apple's Newton platform was ahead of its time, and it would be three years before Palm would respond with the Palm Pilot For now, PDAs were much more interesting than tablets. Microsoft tried to get us all interested in tablets again at the turn of the millennium, and two years later in Bill Gates said: "The tablet is a PC that is virtually without limits — and within five years I predict it will be the most popular form of PC sold in America.
If you look at the success of the iPad, Microsoft got three aspects of its tablet strategy disastrously wrong: it tried to make tablets full computers, it tried to sell them as primary PCs, and it focused on business users first.
You get points for the vision, Microsoft, but the real world execution was lacking at this stage. For a brief moment in we thought that the tablet had arrived in the shape of the It looked the part, weighed the part and for web browsing acted the part too - but matching Windows XP with a Transmeta Crusoe processor wasn't the wisest of choices.
The performance was lousy. What we really wanted was an iPad, but we just didn't know it yet. While gadget fans waited for somebody to launch a usable tablet that wasn't trying to be a PC, Amazon went off on a technology tangent with the Kindle.
While the first model was underwhelming, it proved beyond doubt that the time was right for ebooks and ereaders to make their move to the mainstream. Plus, by making the Kindle software available on the iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone, Mac and PC, customers could buy an ebook once and read it on any device they wanted to. The idea of a tablet as a cut-down computer rather than a PC replacement had arrived, which leads us to Apple launched the iPad in April with a 9.
Like most Apple products, it wasn't just early adopters and gadget-obsessed fanboys who slapped down their money and shouted: "I want one! The masses were finally ready to welcome tablets into their lives, although there were those who didn't see the point of a tablet device and still don't.
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