Gadget Graveyard: Microsoft’s Tablet PCs

The Gadget Graveyard is where old gadgets come to die. The sad thing is some of them are still in the prime of their life when they are struck down. Such is the fickle world of technology.

Don’t worry, your iPad is perfectly safe. It isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. But just because the iPad was the first tablet to be commercially successful, that doesn’t mean it was the first tablet PC. Heck, it wasn’t even Apple’s first attempt at a tablet PC. But Microsoft has been trying to get people to buy tablet PCs since 2001. Unfortunately for Microsoft, their vision of what a tablet should be and what people want from a tablet stand in stark contrast. This seems to be Microsoft’s typical M.O.

Apple cracked the tablet nut by making the iPad a much simpler device than their desktop PCs. Microsoft felt that a tablet should be able to do everything that that a normal PC could, so instead of creating a new operating system, Microsoft just slapped a coat of paint on Windows XP and called it Windows XP Tablet Edition. The only real difference between the two versions of Windows XP was that Microsoft included a special onscreen keyboard that allowed the user to write out their input instead of typing it in. Other than that, it was just plain ol’ Windows XP.

Hardware-wise, Microsoft’s vision was a laptop computer with touch input. Most Tablet PCs were simply laptops with screens that could rotate 180 degrees and close with the screen facing outward. To Microsoft, it was the best of both worlds. In reality, Tablet PCs were hard to use and had terrible battery life, rarely lasting more than two hours.

By trying to do everything, Microsoft’s Tablet PCs weren’t especially good at anything. Imagine trying to use Windows XP without a mouse or a keyboard. The buttons are just too small. In order to deal with this, Microsoft required Tablet PCs to only work with special pens. Only using your iPad with a stylus sounds like a bad idea, right? Well, that’s what using a Tablet PC was like. The tablets’ screens would only respond to special senors in the pens, meaning that if you touched the screen with your fingers, it wouldn’t work.

Microsoft hasn’t given up on tablets yet though. They’re giving it another shot with Windows 8, which features a special tablet interface called Metro.

Check out the video below. It’s an HP Compaq TC1000, a touchscreen tablet PC running Windows XP. Apparently this guy was still rocking his tablet as of 2009.

Somewhat retro commercial of the Compaq TC 1100: