Tablet computer


A tablet computer, commonly shortened to tablet or simply tab, is a mobile device, typically with a mobile operating system and touchscreen display processing circuitry, and a rechargeable battery in a single, thin and flat package. Tablets, being computers, have similar capabilities, but lack some input/output abilities that others have. Modern tablets are based on smartphones, the only differences being that tablets are relatively larger than smartphones, with screens or larger, measured diagonally, and may not support access to a cellular network. Unlike laptops, tablets usually run mobile operating systems, alongside smartphones.
The touchscreen display is operated by gestures executed by finger or digital pen, instead of the mouse, touchpad, and keyboard of larger computers. Portable computers can be classified according to the presence and appearance of physical keyboards. Two species of tablet, the slate and booklet, do not have physical keyboards and usually accept text and other input by use of a virtual keyboard shown on their touchscreen displays. To compensate for their lack of a physical keyboard, most tablets can connect to independent physical keyboards by Bluetooth or USB; [|2-in-1 PCs] have keyboards, distinct from tablets.
The form of the tablet was conceptualized in the middle of the 20th century and prototyped and developed in the last two decades of that century. In 2010, Apple released the iPad, the first mass-market tablet to achieve widespread popularity. Thereafter, tablets rapidly rose in ubiquity and soon became a large product category used for personal, educational and workplace applications. Popular uses for a tablet PC include viewing presentations, video-conferencing, reading e-books, watching movies, sharing photos, and more. As of 2021 there are 1.28 billion tablet users worldwide according to data provided by Statista, while Apple holds the largest manufacturer market share followed by Samsung and Lenovo.

History

The tablet computer and its associated operating system began with the development of pen computing. Electrical devices with data input and output on a flat information display existed as early as 1888 with the telautograph, which used a sheet of paper as display and a pen attached to electromechanical actuators. Throughout the 20th century devices with these characteristics have been imagined and created whether as blueprints, prototypes, or commercial products. In addition to many academic and research systems, several companies released commercial products in the 1980s, with various input/output types tried out.

Fictional and prototype tablets

Tablet computers appeared in a number of works of science fiction in the second half of the 20th century; all helped to promote and disseminate the concept to a wider audience. Examples include:
Further, real-life projects either proposed or created tablet computers, such as:
  • In 1968, computer scientist Alan Kay envisioned a KiddiComp; he developed and described the concept as a Dynabook in his proposal, A personal computer for children of all ages, which outlines functionality similar to that supplied via a laptop computer, or a tablet or slate computer, with the exception of near eternal battery life. The target audience was children.
  • In 1979, the idea of a touchscreen tablet that could detect an external force applied to one point on the screen was patented in Japan by a team at Hitachi consisting of Masao Hotta, Yoshikazu Miyamoto, Norio Yokozawa and Yoshimitsu Oshima, who later received a US patent for their idea.
  • In 1984, Hartmut Esslinger created a touchscreen Macintosh concept, featuring a touch display and a keyboard, a prototype of which sits in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
  • In 1992, Atari showed developers the Stylus, later renamed ST-Pad. The ST-Pad was based on the TOS/GEM Atari ST platform and prototyped early handwriting recognition. Shiraz Shivji's company Momentus demonstrated in the same time a failed x86 MS-DOS based Pen Computer with its own graphical user interface.
  • In 1994, the European Union initiated the NewsPad project, inspired by Clarke and Kubrick's fictional work. Acorn Computers developed and delivered an ARM-based touch screen tablet computer for this program, branding it the "NewsPad"; the project ended in 1997.
  • During the November 2000 COMDEX, Microsoft used the term Tablet PC to describe a prototype handheld device they were demonstrating.
  • In 2001, Ericsson Mobile Communications announced an experimental product named the DelphiPad, which was developed in cooperation with the Centre for Wireless Communications in Singapore, with a touch-sensitive screen, Netscape Navigator as a web browser, and Linux as its operating system.

    Early tablets

Following earlier tablet computer products such as the Pencept PenPad, the Linus Write-Top, and the CIC Handwriter, in September 1989, Grid Systems released the first commercially successful tablet computer, the GridPad. All four products were based on extended versions of the MS-DOS operating system. In 1992, IBM announced and shipped to developers the ThinkPad 700T, which ran the GO Corporation's PenPoint OS. Also based on PenPoint was AT&T's EO Personal Communicator from 1993, which ran on AT&T's own hardware, including their own AT&T Hobbit CPU. Apple Computer launched the Apple Newton personal digital assistant in 1993. It used Apple's own new Newton OS, initially running on hardware manufactured by Motorola and incorporating an ARM CPU, that Apple had specifically co-developed with Acorn Computers. The operating system and platform design were later licensed to Sharp and Digital Ocean, who went on to manufacture their own variants.
Pen computing was highly hyped by the media during the early 1990s. Microsoft, the dominant PC software vendor, released Windows for Pen Computing in 1992 to compete against PenPoint OS. The company launched the WinPad project, working together with OEMs such as Compaq, to create a small device with a Windows-like operating system and handwriting recognition. However, the project was abandoned two years later; instead Windows CE was released in the form of "Handheld PCs" in 1996. That year, Palm, Inc. released the first of the Palm OS based PalmPilot touch and stylus based PDA, the touch based devices initially incorporating a Motorola Dragonball CPU. Also in 1996 Fujitsu released the Stylistic 1000 tablet format PC, running Microsoft Windows 95, on a 100 MHz AMD486 DX4 CPU, with 8 MB RAM offering stylus input, with the option of connecting a conventional Keyboard and mouse. Intel announced a StrongARM processor-based touchscreen tablet computer in 1999, under the name WebPAD. It was later re-branded as the "Intel Web Tablet". In 2000, Norwegian company Screen Media AS and the German company Dosch & Amand Gmbh released the "FreePad". It was based on Linux and used the Opera browser. Internet access was provided by DECT DMAP, only available in Europe and provided up to 10 Mbit/s. The device had 16 MB storage, 32 MB of RAM and x86 compatible 166 MHz "Geode"-Microcontroller by National Semiconductor. The screen was 10.4" or 12.1" and was touch sensitive. It had slots for SIM cards to enable support of television set-up box. FreePad were sold in Norway and the Middle East; but the company was dissolved in 2003. Sony released its Airboard tablet in Japan in late 2000 with full wireless Internet capabilities.
File:Fujitsu Siemens Lifebook T3010.jpg|thumb|upright|A Fujitsu Siemens Lifebook tablet running Windows XP, released in 2003
In the late 1990s, Microsoft launched the Handheld PC platform using their Windows CE operating system; while most devices were not tablets, a few touch enabled tablets were released on the platform such as the Fujitsu PenCentra 130 or Siemens's SIMpad. Microsoft took a more significant approach to tablets in 2002 as it attempted to define the Microsoft Tablet PC as a mobile computer for field work in business, though their devices failed, mainly due to pricing and usability decisions that limited them to their original purpose – such as the existing devices being too heavy to be held with one hand for extended periods, and having legacy applications created for desktop interfaces and not well adapted to the slate format.
File:N800 frontside2.jpg|thumb|The Nokia N800, the second tablet manufactured by Nokia
Nokia had plans for an Internet tablet since before 2000. An early model was test manufactured in 2001, the Nokia M510, which was running on EPOC and featuring an Opera browser, speakers and a 10-inch 800×600 screen, but it was not released because of fears that the market was not ready for it. Nokia entered the tablet space in May 2005 with the Nokia 770 running Maemo, a Debian-based Linux distribution custom-made for their Internet tablet line. The user interface and application framework layer, named Hildon, was an early instance of a software platform for generic computing in a tablet device intended for internet consumption. But Nokia did not commit to it as their only platform for their future mobile devices and the project competed against other in-house platforms and later replaced it with the Series 60. Nokia used the term internet tablet to refer to a portable information appliance that focused on Internet use and media consumption, in the range between a personal digital assistant and an Ultra-Mobile PC. They made two mobile phones, the N900 that runs Maemo, and N9 that run Meego.
Before the release of iPad, Axiotron introduced an aftermarket, heavily modified Apple MacBook called Modbook, a Mac OS X-based tablet computer. The Modbook uses Apple's Inkwell for handwriting and gesture recognition, and uses digitization hardware from Wacom. To get Mac OS X to talk to the digitizer on the integrated tablet, the Modbook was supplied with a third-party driver.
Following the launch of the Ultra-mobile PC, Intel began the Mobile Internet Device initiative, which took the same hardware and combined it with a tabletized Linux configuration. Intel codeveloped the lightweight Moblin operating system following the successful launch of the Atom CPU series on netbooks. In 2010, Nokia and Intel combined the Maemo and Moblin projects to form MeeGo, a Linux-based operating system supports netbooks and tablets. The first tablet using MeeGo was the Neofonie WeTab launched September 2010 in Germany. The WeTab used an extended version of the MeeGo operating system called WeTab OS. WeTab OS adds runtimes for Android and Adobe AIR and provides a proprietary user interface optimized for the WeTab device. On September 27, 2011, the Linux Foundation announced that MeeGo would be replaced in 2012 by Tizen.