Tablet Talk: What Went Wrong The Last Time And Why It Might Be The ‘Last Thing You’ll Ever Read’

In the frenzy around the rumored Apple tablet, everyone has managed to remind the crowd about a long forgotten Apple product – the Newton Message Pad. Now when you look at it, it looks absolutely revolutionary given that it was so many years ago. But that any success at all. Else we would’ve been living in a world where companies handed their employees Newtons and not BlackBerries.

What most of us have also forgotten is the fact that Microsoft at one point also claimed that people are going to abandon the keyboard and go back to pens. They were projecting a future where tablets are the norm and everyone writes instead of typing. That hasn’t happened either. And people will most likely still like to type because it is much faster. But they would like to type on touchscreens.

So what went wrong with these attempts? Were there inherent design flaws in the Newton? Was it the usual Microsoft debacle? The answer would be both yes and no to both.

First, the Newton was path breaking, no doubt about that. But it was just too early — in the sense that the technology was just not there to make it a compelling enough product. Touchscreens were in their infancy and would take a lot more time for it to reach a stage when the iPhone became possible.

Then there was the problem with the software. While Apple might’ve had a chance with their UI on the Newton, Microsoft was definitely building castles in the sky by dreaming about Windows then running on tablets becoming wildly successful. Windows never was well suited for tablets up until Windows 7 showed up. And since it hasn’t been released yet, we can’t really say how good it really is. But have you ever tried closing a window by tapping on the little cross on a 10inch screen displaying a 1024×600 resolution and running Windows XP?

Also, portable storage and processing was at a nascent stage of development. It was task enough to make a portable computer, let alone a handheld one. Even if a practical tablet could be made, the price would be way too high for mass adoption at any level. Plus, what would the users have done with it? The Internet was nowhere near its current reach and digital content was still pretty much scattered all over the place. Forget online social networking.

Fast forward to 2009. The iPhone has shown once and for all that full touchscreen devices can be amazingly practical and also amazingly easy to use and beautiful, all at the same time. Its UI and plethora of apps has caused a decisive shift in the entire smartphone market.

We now have great storage solutions like flash chips and cloud storage. Wireless data networks, however slow and primitive, can be accessed in almost all the cities of the world. Also, we have compressed formats like mp3 and handy cross platform standards like PDF. And the overarching presence of the Internet has made sure that online content generation and consumption is reason enough to own a device that enables such actions while on the move.

Throw into the equation things like 1GHz mobile processors, GPS, 3G, camera, extremely accurate capacitive touchscreens and you have everyone buying mobile devices that have all these features, without a second thought. The only question is who’s got the better device.

If Apple really intends to sell the tablet as the ‘Last thing you will ever read’, they really might have a winner on their hands. With their understanding of user experience design, stress on usability and also style, it is quite possible that we will be witnessing another tectonic shift in the industry. But this time, it will be the print industry and everyone will be trying to get all the books they can to their own platform. Amen to the idea of reading books again.