The Evolution of the Tablet PC

Since the wildly popular iPad debuted in April 2010, slender touch-friendly tablets have increasingly become part of our work and personal lives. Twenty-two percent of all U.S. adults now own tablets, according to a report from the Pew Research Center. New tablets will continue to evolve before our eyes, but the “tablet” has been in development since the 1960s and available to consumers and businesses in some fashion since the ’80s. However, the technology was never quite right for widespread use … until now.

The Newton faced stiff competition in 1996 with the PalmPilot from Palm, Inc. The PalmPilot 1000 was smaller and cheaper than the Newton and released when early cellphones only made calls. The PalmPilot and its subsequent versions had the PDA competition beat on price ($300), battery life, calendar features, glass touch-screen, the ability to sync with a desktop PC, space for 500 names and addresses, and expandable memory. The PalmPilot enjoyed household name status until all-in-one smartphones like RIM’s BlackBerry changed the game in 2003. But the PalmPilot is remembered as the first tablet-like device with major mainstream appeal.

At the turn of the century, Microsoft had been trying to release a Windows tablet for years (it has been trying ever since and will try again with Windows 8). In 2002, it launched the stylus-based Windows XP Tablet PC. Its strength was in its handwriting recognition software, but the tablet tried to jam PC-level RAM, storage and CPU into a tablet. As a result, it was too heavy and expensive and was hampered by poor performance and battery life. Despite the best efforts of hardware-makers like Compaq and ViewSonic, the customers never arrived for the Windows XP Tablet.

Introduced in Sept. 2010, the Samsung Galaxy Tab was one of the first Android devices released post-iPad. With its 7-inch screen, the Galaxy Tab was smaller than the iPad and could be held comfortably in one hand. But this iPad counter-programming feature wasn’t enough to give the Galaxy Tab much headway. Its size, however, was an influence on the more successful 7-inch tablets to come such as the Amazon Kindle Fire and Google Nexus 7.