The evolution of tablets

The Evolution of Tablets According to the IDC forecasts global tablet shipments will top 227 million in 2013. This huge growth in tablet adoption has been phenomenal but the tablet is not a new idea. Take a look at how tablets have changed over the last 25 years. 1989: GRIDPad: 1992: Tandy Zoomer: Although a more portable version of the GRIDPad the touchscreen Zoomer The first commercially available portable tablet PC. Included a fax modem card, internally floppy drive, 3 hour battery life and a backlit 10" screen. It ran on MS-DOS and still struggled to make an impact accepted Stylus Input 1993: Apple Newton Messagepad: Apple CEO John Sculley first coined the phrase 'Personal Digital Assistant' or 'PDA' to describe the Newton MessagePad. This was the beginning of Apple's leading innovations in the tablet market 1997: PalmPilot: The second generation of Palm PDA devices produced by Palm Inc had the competition beaten on price, battery life, calendar features, the ability to sync with a desktop PC and expandable memory. The PalmPilot enjoyed household name status until all-in-one smartphones were released. 2003: Compaq TC1000: The TC1000 tablet/notebook with its 2000: Microsoft Tablet PC: Gates boldly stated that "the Tablet is a PC that is virtually without limits", unfortunately this wasn't the case for the Microsoft Tablet PC which flopped due to a high price tag and a lack of direction detachable 10.4 inch touchscreen certainly looked the part and briefly made us believe the tablet PC's time had finally come. Alas a poor choice of processor meant Compaq's failure to impress and a clouded future for the tablet 2005: Nokia 770 Internet Tablet: 2007: Amazon Kindle: The Linux powered tablet launched before its time. Users could browse the While gadget fans waited for somebody to launch a usable tablet that wasn't internet as well as play a wide range of media files. The 4.1" display combined with a substandard processor meant Nokia's first tablet struggled to sell trying to be a PC. Amazon went off on a technology tangent with the Kindle. Making the software available on all platforms however was a wise move and introduced e-books to the world 2010: Apple iPad: 2010: Samsung Galaxy Tab 7: With a 9.7-inch display, 10-hour battery| While Apple were thinking bigger is better, Samsung disagreed and launched the Galaxy Tab 7.0. The mini tablet included a 7-inch TFT LCD life, powerful 1GHZ A4 processor and access to the biggest app library on the planet, the arrival of the iPad easily blew everyone and certainly the competition away. To this day it still is display and ran Android 2.2 Froyo. The Korean company turned out to be one of the most popular tablets/gadgets right with Apple and many other manufacturers following suit and launching mini tablets of their own on the market 2013: Microsoft Surface: While the Tablet PC of 2000 didn't win consumers over the Surface is a different story. With its Core i5 processor, 4GB of RAM, 64GB to 256GB of memory, it definitely hits the nail on the head in terms of features Insight UK.INSIGHT.COM