The information technology industry has been working itself into paroxysms of excitement lately over an idea that is not exactly new: tablet computers.
Quietly, several hi-tech companies are lining up to deliver versions of these keyboard-free, touchscreen portable personal computers in the next few months. Industry watchers have their eye on Apple, in particular.
Tablets have been around in various forms for two decades, thus far delivering little other than memorable failures. None-theless, the new batch of devices has gripped the imagination of technology executives, bloggers and gadget hounds who are projecting their wildest dreams onto these blank slates. In these visions, tablets will save the newspaper and book publishing industries, present another way to watch television and films and play video games, and offer a visually rich way to enjoy the Web and the expanding world of mobile applications.
"Desktops, laptops - we already know how those work," says Brian Lam, editorial director of the popular gadget site Gizmodo, which reports and hypothesises about these devices almost daily. Tablets, says Lam, "are one of the last few mysteries left".
Tablet computers were first conceived as a way to supplant plain old paper, in the same way that personal computers replaced the typewriter. In 1993, Apple's Newton MessagePad, with its expansive screen and stylus pen, became known less for its innovative features than for being lampooned in the comic strip Doonesbury, which ridiculed the device for its flawed handwriting recognition. Steve Jobs killed the Newton upon his return to Apple as its chief executive in 1997.
Then, in 2001, at industry trade show Comdex, Bill Gates introduced Windows software for tablets with a bold prediction: within five years, he said, tablets "will be the most popular form of PC sold in America".
It didn't happen, of course. Tablets running Microsoft's Windows software sell only a few hundred thousand units a year, mostly in business fields such as health care and financial services.
There were basic problems with these early tablets: they cost too much and did not do enough.
"Software engineers got ahead of the hardware capabilities," says Paul Jackson, a consumer product analyst at Forrester Research. "But we may be finally getting to the point where the dreams and aspirations of those designers are actually meeting capable and reasonably priced technology."
People can thank Moore's Law, which says the number of transistors on a chip doubles every 18 months, and the immutable advance of technology for that. Integrated microchips nowadays combine wireless connectivity and support for features such as multimedia, global positioning system functions and rich graphics. They are also more energy efficient.
At the same time, Apple's iPhone and its imitators have demonstrated that new touchscreens work and that people are comfortable with them. They never got accustomed to using earlier tablets and stylus pens.
The drumbeat of tablet product introductions has already begun. In June, French consumer electronics company Archos began selling a small touchscreen tablet running Google's Android software. It plans to introduce another tablet that runs on Microsoft's new Windows 7 operating system, which has built-in support for touchscreens.
Industry blog TechCrunch has commissioned its own Web tablet, called the CrunchPad, which it says will start selling later this year.
Despite its past bruises in the tablet business, Microsoft appears ready to try again. Last month, images of a book-like Microsoft device called Courier, with two seven-inch colour screens, surfaced on Gizmodo. Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's chief executive, will not discuss that product but says the company devises such prototypes all the time, so it can take them to its hardware partners. Still, rumours of a Microsoft tablet computer sparked interest.
Apple's rumoured tablet is the most anticipated of the lot. Analysts expect Apple to introduce an expanded version of its iPod Touch early next year, priced at about US$700. Last month, Apple rehired the original chief marketer of its Newton, Michael Tchao, who was working at Nike. Tchao's former Apple colleagues believe he will be a great help in marketing this new device.
An Apple spokesman declined to comment on the company's hires or product plans. But Apple's tablet will most probably have little in common with the Newton, which was essentially a personal digital assistant. The new crop of tablets is being viewed as more flexible - gadgets that combine elements of the iPhone, e-book readers, such as Amazon's Kindle, and laptops.
Apple has been working on such a tablet since at least 2003, according to several former employees. One of the prototypes used IBM's PowerPC microchip, which was too power hungry.
"It couldn't be built. The battery life wasn't long enough, the graphics performance was not enough to do anything and the components themselves cost more than US$500," says Joshua Strickland, a former Apple engineer whose name is on several of the company's patents for multitouch technology.
Another former Apple executive said the tablets kept getting shelved because Jobs, whose incisive critiques are often memorable, asked, in essence, what they were good for besides surfing the Web in the bathroom.
The success of the iPhone may have partially helped to answer that question. As of last month, developers had created 85,000 applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch - video games, social networking software, restaurant finders and more. Analysts believe that all those programs will work on the new tablet while developers begin to tailor software for the larger screen.
Despite the preponderance of apps, there is still the persistent question of whether regular people will find a use for tablet computers. Smaller mobile phones are increasingly multipurpose and fit into a jacket pocket. And low-end laptops are inexpensive, run a full-fledged operating system and offer the luxury of a keyboard.
"I can imagine something like the iPhone with a much bigger screen being a gorgeous device with great capacity but I don't know where I would fit that into my life," says a former Apple executive, who declined to be named because of the secrecy around the company, but who nevertheless anticipates an Apple tablet next year. "Those are the debates that have been happening inside Apple for quite some time."
The New York Times
