Since the moment it hit store shelves, Apple’s iPad has been a runaway success. Even with a glut of Android, QNX and -- albeit briefly -- WebOS powered tablets flooding the market, the Cupertino designed iOS device has not only held its own, but stifled the sales of computing hardware like the Xoom and Eee Pad Transformer.
Despite being the yard stick against which all other current tablet hardware is measured, Apple’s slim sliver of awesome wasn’t the tablet to hit the market. Far from it, as a matter of fact. We’ve put together collection of five tablets that, while may have been technologically tasty in their day, faded into obscurity as the days wore on.
1979 was an exciting time for computers, but a lousy time for computer aided design. With applications like Photoshop and AutoCAD still years away from their debuts, drawing of any sort on a personal computer was a clunky, frustrating process.
Enter the Apple Graphics Tablet: a device designed that allowed users to sketch their creations into being with a connected stylus and then transfer the drawing to an Apple II computer. This Apple tablet's so old school, it had to be attached to a computer to run!
Sadly, the device wasn’t the runaway hit that Apple had hoped it would be. Priced at $650 (That’s $1926 in 2011 dollars) the Graphics Tablet was well out of reach of most consumers. Not that it mattered: Shortly after the tablet’s release, the FCC tuned into the fact that the Apple Graphics Tablet caused radio frequency interference and saw to it that the device was discontinued.
Weighing in at just a hair under five pounds, the GRiDPAD was developed for Grid by Samsung, who based the device on the design one one of their product that never made it past prototyping. With a 10-inch grayscale VGA display, internal fax modem and the option to rock a spacious 120MB hard drive, it was a lean mean computing machine.
There was just one problem: No one really knew what to do with the thing. When it came to mobility the 1980s were ruled by beefy, expensive laptops that provided much of the same functionality as their desktop cousins did, making the GRiDPad an odd duck. That said, Jeff Hawkins, the founder of Palm Computingm has said that the device was one of his primary inspirations in bringing the Palm handheld computer to market.
While the Apple Graphics Tablet might have been the company’s first outing of a flat thing, their second go round was, until the advent of the iPad, arguably their most popular. In fact, the Apple Newton MessagePad hardware has scored such a place in the hearts of mobile computing fanboys that over a decade since Cupertino shuttered the device’s production, a devoted community of users continue to develop new software for it.
Work on the Newton OS started back in 1987, with both Apple and Motorola contributing their tech to bring the platform to life. In a sea of namby-pamby Personal Digital Assistants, the MessagePad was king. With it’s generous screen size, a respectable number of peripherals and a life cycle that spanned seven different iterations of the device (if you include the eMate 300), Apple’s pen-interface driven darling stayed at the top of the Mobile hardware dog pile until its production came to an end in 1998.
Oh, Microsoft: You and your crazy schemes. The stuff of and speculation, the UMPC was first virally marketed Project Origami. As a result of the campaign, a lot of folks ended up thinking the device was Microsoft’s bid to drink a bit of Nintendo and Sony’s handheld gaming milkshake. Too bad that wasn’t the case. Instead, the project was revealed to be a new category of handheld computing devices based around Windows XP. Microsoft and their hardware partners insisted that they were introducing a new category of devices that would put the power of a personal computer in the palms of our hand. With small screens, even smaller keyboards, a handwriting recognition engine that had a hard time recognizing handwriting, interest in the devices fizzled out quickly. A few companies, such as Mobile Demand, still provide UMPC hardware to niche market customers.
If you blinked, you would have missed it. Pepper Computer’s Pepper Pad made its first and last appearance in 2007. Designed to function as a internet access point and moonlight as a handheld game console, the device boasted a Linux operating system baked in wireless internet and bluetooth, a 20 or 30 GB hard disk and 256MB of RAM. Sound good? It could have been, but the device also had an awkward split keyboard, poor software support, and some pretty lousy battery life. That said, it’s hard to entirely pan the Pepper Pad. After all, the device definitely showed us what we didn’t want in a device.
manuels
September 20, 2011 at 3:58pm
How come the Compaq Concerto from 1992 was not mentioned? That was probably the first ever true tablet computer with a removable keyboard and which ran on windows PEN operating system. I owned one of these units and it was probably one of the most innovative designs of the early 1990s. The Concerto along with the ultra-portable Compaq Aero.
