This week in TechWatch
- MOBILE TECH:
What’s behind the iPad?
Touch the nth dimension
- GRAPHICALLY SPEAKING:
Graphics market forecast
Apple looms large
- FINANCIAL PAGE:
3D printer from Stratasys and HP
- NEWS WATCH:
Technology and age
TI steering light
- TECHNOLOGY INSIDER:
CES update
Techwatch February 3rd 2010
When Steve Jobs presented the iPad, he set up the premise that we have smart phones, and we have laptops, and there is a gap between them that should be filled. As he made his presentation, I thought, I just saw this presentation a few weeks ago in Las Vegas. Jen-Hsun Huang did it at CES. Huang said the exact same things, and showed tablets that would fit in the middle. And then I thought about Intel, who also wanted to fill the perceived middle. Intel called it a mobile Internet device—MID. Intel wasn’t successful in creating that category, but a lot of interesting products were created that were neither mobile phones nor PCs. We called them gadgets, and now Intel has also adopted that term. And, some of those gadgets are tablets. Tablets, of course, aren’t new. We first started talking about them in 1970, and the first commercial product was shown in 1989, when GRID computer introduced the pen-based GRIDpad, 12 years before the Windows XP tablet, and four years before the Newton. A whole community was built up around the notion of a touch sensitive, large-screen mobile device, but no general-purpose usage model could be found …
