Lessons to learn from tablets past (photos)

by CNET News.com | January 27, 2010 5:11am PST | Image 2 of 5

Asus tried to do something interesting with the tablet. Taking the popular and cheap Netbook concept, and making it a convertible PC with a touch screen, is a decent idea. The Asus Eee PC T91 is small and doesn't cost a lot, but the problem is that it's just a scaled-down version of any number of tablet PCs already out there, though less powerful, thanks to the Atom processor. That keeps the cost down and increases battery life, but that's not been enough to lure mainstream consumers.

Likewise, an Apple tablet can't just be a scaled-down, less expensive version of another kind of computer. The target audience for this already has a laptop--and probably an iPhone. The tablet needs to be a new kind of device that turns our old conceptions of what a tablet does on its head. If Apple is using an iPod-Touch-on-steroids approach, as has been reported, that's good. As Brooke Crothers of the CNET Blog Network pointed out a few months ago, the iPod/iPhone clearly has a design, while smaller than the tablet, that is already working based on the embrace of it by Apple customers and many other similar devices: most Android phones, the Palm Pre, etc.

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