From Telautograph To iPad: 123 Years Of Tablet PCs

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In public appearances, Ballmer seemed to refocus much of his tablet talk on the future of the form-factor, in lieu of discussing any specific devices. He also defended the stylus as an input method for touch screens, despite the industry’s growing focus on gesture control and virtual keyboards.

“Do we think people want to take notes and draw? What’s the best way to do that? Well, there are different ways to do that and we’ll support them all,” Ballmer told the audience at the same D8 Conference at which Jobs detailed Apple’s touch-screen history. “Today, we offer devices that do use a stylus. I certainly believe that people do want to take the things that they do today with pencil and paper and do them with new technologies.”

Near the end of 2010, rumours circulated that Microsoft would announce a major tablet push at January’s Consumer Electronics Show. Instead, Microsoft used the event to announce that the next version of Windows would support SoC (system-on-a-chip) architecture, in particular ARM-based systems from partners such as Qualcomm, Nvidia and Texas Instruments. In turn, that would give Microsoft increased leverage for porting Windows onto tablets and more mobile form-factors, currently the prime market for ARM offerings.

The War

As with smartphones, Google soon became the operating-system supplier of choice for manufacturers looking to break into the tablet game. There was just one tiny issue: Android had originally been developed for smartphones and their necessarily smaller screens, necessitating the creation of a tablet-optimised operating system. Enter Android 3.0, code-named “Honeycomb,” which first appeared in early 2011 on the Motorola Xoom tablet.

Around the same time, Samsung, LG Electronics and other companies revealed that their latest tablets would run Honeycomb. Meanwhile, HP announced it would port the webOS operating system onto not only mobile devices, but to PCs, as well.

“The webOS is an unbelievably attractive piece of technology, in that it can interconnect seamlessly a number of various devices,” HP CEO Leo Apotheker told reporters during a March 14 press conference. “We see this as a massive, very global platform.”

In March 2011, Apple released the iPad 2, hoping to continue its dominance of the tablet market in the face of these rising competitors. Customer response suggested the general public’s appetite for tablets hadn’t slowed in the past year. That consumer interest bled over into the business sphere, with IT administrators reporting more and more employees interested in integrating tablets into their daily workflow.

But while Microsoft had collaborated with manufacturers to produce a handful of tablets running Windows 7 — which supports gesture control — it refrained from pushing hard into the consumer-tablet market. Current rumours suggest the company will finally make its presence felt in the segment with the release of a tablet-optimised “Windows 8,” perhaps due in 2012.

The future remains unclear, although analysts generally assume that Apple’s early advantage will allow it to hold a significant portion of the tablet market for years to come. According to a recent Gartner report, Apple’s iOS will continue to dominate the media-tablet market through 2015, with a 47.1 percent share. Hard on its heels will be Android, with 38.6 percent, followed by Research In Motion’s QNX operating system with 10 percent. Hewlett-Packard’s webOS will trail with 3 percent, followed by MeeGo with 1 percent and “other operating systems” with 0.2 percent.

If the tablet PC’s past few decades are any indication, though, anything can happen.