Zoomer Tablet
Spencer Prather
E-readers are usually smaller and lighter than tablets, which make them more portable and easier on your wrists while holding, and they have a non-glare screen that makes it better to read in bright sunlight (not so easy to do on a backlit tablet).
Tablets are very versatile devices that also boast large and colourful screens, and they support countless apps at both the App Store (iPad) and Google Play (Android). Tablets have free apps for all the major e-book companies as well, including Kindle, Kobo and others. Some tablets include support for stylus pens.
Tablets can cost four to five times as much as an e-reader. For example, the Kindle Paperwhite costs $139, while the 10-inch iPad starts at $429 (or $299 for the 10-inch Samsung Galaxy Tab A). Sure, there are less expensive Android tablets, too, such as the eight-inch $188 ASUS ZenPad 8 but because a tablet can do so much more than an e-reader with more power and speed and a beautiful colour screen, you need to pay for these added luxuries. Tablets are also usually a bit heavier and bigger than dedicated e-readers. For bookworms, tablets have screens that are ideal for indoors but not so much outside because of their backlit screens, which are not glare-free.
You could say that the idea for a tablet computer was born back in the 1960s. When Alan Kay and his colleagues at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre dreamt up the Dynabook, they envisaged a portable tablet-style device that would primarily serve to give children easy access to any digital media.
While the geeks of the 80s dreamt of a futuristic Dynabook or electronic Star Trek data pad, what they actually got was the chunky GRiDPad. Built by the GRiD Systems Corporation, this tablet PC ran MS-DOS, supported stylus input on a 10-inch monochrome screen and lasted for 3 hours between charges.
Of course the PDA is an important part of the tablet story. While the GRiDPad never arrived, GRiD engineer Jeff Hawkins hit on the idea of taking the tablet and shrinking it down. He founded Palm Computing to pursue the project and produced the Zoomer touchscreen device with the help of Tandy and Casio.
It was still a struggle to get anybody to buy it. As Infoworld's Kevin Strehlo wrote back in 1993: "I still can't recommend depending on a pen-based computing device to anyone but a UPS delivery person or someone who fills out forms for a living." The world still wasn't ready for a mass market tablet device.
As we've already said, timing is everything when it comes to tablets. John Sculley, the CEO of Apple in the early nineties, coined the phrase Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) to describe the Newton MessagePad, and the device itself appeared less than a year later with a whopping 640k of RAM.
That was matched with a 20MHz ARM 610 processor and a 336 x 240 pixel display. Most people agree that Apple's Newton platform was ahead of its time, and it would be three years before Palm would respond with the Palm Pilot 1000. For now, PDAs were much more interesting than tablets.
If you look at the success of the iPad, Microsoft got three aspects of its tablet strategy disastrously wrong: it tried to make tablets full computers, it tried to sell them as primary PCs, and it focused on business users first. You get points for the vision, Microsoft, but the real world execution was lacking at this stage.
For a brief moment in 2003 we thought that the tablet had arrived in the shape of the 10.4-inch Compaq TC1000. It looked the part, weighed the part and (for web browsing) acted the part too - but matching Windows XP with a Transmeta Crusoe processor wasn't the wisest of choices. The performance was lousy.
While gadget fans waited for somebody to launch a usable tablet that wasn't trying to be a PC, Amazon went off on a technology tangent with the Kindle. While the first model was underwhelming, it proved beyond doubt that the time was right for ebooks and ereaders to make their move to the mainstream.
Plus, by making the Kindle software available on the iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone, Mac and PC, customers could buy an ebook once and read it on any device they wanted to. The idea of a tablet as a cut-down computer rather than a PC replacement had arrived, which leads us to...
The surf-from-the-sofa, pinch/zoom, Angry Birds allure of the sweetly-designed iPad also brushed over its technical shortcomings (including no camera). The masses were finally ready to welcome tablets into their lives, although there were those who didn't see the point of a tablet device (and still don't).
The second iPad was faster, thinner and lighter, and had cameras - it confirmed that yes, tablets were really a thing now, and everyone was going to have to get used to it. At this stage 90 percent of the tablets shifted in the world were iPads and it looked as though Apple had another iPhone-sized hit on its hands.
The iPad 2 was also the first device to come with iOS 4.3 installed on it, and it's important to remember the role that software has played in the evolution of the tablet as a computing device - iOS is largely responsible for tablets taking off, bring a simple, intuitive interface to a large slab of glass.
iOS was certainly way, way ahead of Android on tablet-sized devices at this stage, but Samsung just went ahead and put out a few slates anyway - 2010's Galaxy 7.0 was the first Android tablet to be released but it was only the year after that Samsung really started to get serious with its tablet devices.
The tablet-specific Android 3.2 Honeycomb (remember that?) was on board the device and this slate set the basic foundations for the really rather good Samsung Tabs that are on sale today. Back in 2011, though, Samsung and Android were still a long way behind what Apple was doing with the iPad.
The first real Android tablet success story: the Nexus 7, made by Google and Asus. Okay, Android was still clunky on screens above 5 inches, the design aesthetics didn't come close to the iPad, and it certainly didn't run as smoothly, but the Nexus 7 was fun, friendly and - most importantly - very cheap.
It was a tablet to toss on the sofa or to let the kids loose on, and it beat Apple to the 7-inch punch - that size of tablet that fits in one hand comfortable and often makes more sense than something approaching 10 inches diagonally. It was of course followed by another successful model the year after.
In 2012 we realised that actually what we all wanted was a 7.9-inch tablet not a 9.7-inch one - the smaller size seemed to fit a lot of tasks better, made the device more portable, and of course reduced the price too. It made the original iPad size look laughably large by comparison for a lot of casual users.
The iPad mini had us all asking that perennial question again: what exactly are tablets for? What can they do that a big phone can't? The iPad mini 2 added a Retina display, but since then the smaller iPad has been rather neglected by Apple (perhaps because the iPhone has become bigger), which is a shame.
The history of the Surface is closely linked to Windows 8 and then Windows 10 - Microsoft's mission to build an operating system that would switch smoothly from desktop to tablet and back again. Just like the software running on them, the Surfaces have got better over time, and the latest models are very good devices indeed.
The Surface line (and indeed Windows) is now hitting its stride, even though the first device was something of a disaster. Even if Microsoft didn't get it right first time, its vision of super-thin, 2-in-1 tablets with keyboard covers was a solid one, and one which virtually every hardware manufacturer has copied since.
Google seems to have abandoned the idea of making cheap Android tablets now, but Amazon has picked up the slack with some gusto. It's released a dizzying number of Fire tablets since its first slate back in 2011, with last year's 7-inch model costing a mere 50 (or $50 in the US). That's a very, very cheap tablet.
Of course you don't get much in the way of specs for that price, but we're talking tablet milestones here - and the 50 Kindle Fire was a new milestone in cheap, almost disposable tablet devices. In fact, there seems to be very little middle ground in the tablet market right now, which brings us neatly to the...
How do you reinvigorate a tablet market you helped properly establish five years previously? If you're Apple, you make a tablet that's bigger and more expensive than ever - the 12.9-inch iPad Pro is a gigantic, super-powered tablet with a starting price of 679/$799, which is enough to bag yourself a decent laptop.
With a gorgeous screen and a creative stylus, the iPad Pro redefined the tablet once again. Not only that, it followed the template Microsoft had set (and Google has since copied) for 2-in-1 tablets with thin keyboards and capable OSes. Where the tablet goes next, well... it's going to be interesting to find out.
Dave is a freelance tech journalist who has been writing about gadgets, apps and the web for more than two decades. Based out of Stockport, England, on TechRadar you'll find him covering news, features and reviews, particularly for phones, tablets and wearables. Working to ensure our breaking news coverage is the best in the business over weekends, David also has bylines at Gizmodo, T3, PopSci and a few other places besides, as well as being many years editing the likes of PC Explorer and The Hardware Handbook.
Hello! (last I saw this question being asked in this community support, it wasn't answered correctly, It is tricky to explain I am trying to dumb it down for sake of my own understanding and surely yours too.) I have a Wacom Intus tablet, it is connected to my laptop, so I use it in illustrator to draw While looking on my laptop screen. The zoom tool in illustrator usually allows me to draw a box with the Wacom pen to zoom in, and holding alt allows me to zoom out. The same thing applies when I tap the pen onto the tablet.
Yes, I was having a similar problem: I like the animated zoom, rather that the pannning zoom, which is the one you're reffering to, drawing a rectangle and immediately zoom to that specific space. My problem with that option using the pen with a Wacom tablet is that it won't allow you to zoom out using the pen + Ctrl (Cmd). SO if you're looking to the animated zoom method just go to preferences > Performance > GPU Performance and check animated zoom if you wish to zoom in and out by draging your pen left or right with your pen. Leave it unchecked will default your zoom into drawing a rectangle and zooming into that particular space.
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