the newton was the first and, by all accounts, the best entry into this field for a long time. people still get misty talking about the platform.

microsoft was first to introduce a tablet "pc" but... *they got it all wrong* so i wouldn't really be trumpeting that. they weren't ignored because they were ahead of their time; they were ignored because they sucked. this was my basic point. and if they didn't pretty consistently do this, i wouldn't think much of it. but... that said, if apple *had* released their tablet earlier, it too probably would've sucked. they didn't, however.

i'm interested in what, specifically, you feel apple took from with their iphone os UI. i know people worked on core elements of the UI and know the items that they really labored over and they happen to be the things that, imo, really differentiate the platform (or at least did). these are things like the elasticity of the scroll bars, etc.

when i say "got lucky", i mean that they essentially *found* a mobile UI that would work as is on a tablet. i don't think that was planned. and it works so well in fact, that apple hasn't even had to answer questions about why there's no pen to go along with it.

absolutement. anybody who's lived with technology and the internets the past 10-20 years and developed in this space should get this. that was exactly what i saw in wave.

um... not really. gates was trying to aggressively jump into a new market at the time but the there was no big vision. they were not ahead of the game. apple and others have been working on this idea and the press was buzzing about tablets well before their first tablet was released. also, don't forget that apple had been tweaking a tablet for many years before the ipad was released. if you follow the rumors or know people who work there, you know that the iPad was a long time coming. what happened was that apple correctly gauged the market and held off until they had a product that was ready for the market and vice versa. they got lucky, perhaps, along the way when iphone became a hit and pointed the way toward a new approach to UIs for mobile devices. after the initial success of the iphone, the writing was on the wall.

as for the old and new windows tablets - they'll serve a niche market but the people have spoken with their wallets. microsoft really has no idea what their doing when it comes to this kind of stuff. they just don't get it. the failure of kin (among many others along the way) really underscores this fact. apple isn't the only company out there able to consistently capture the consumers imagination but microsoft is probably the only company that consistently fails in that regard. it's really gone beyond comedy. certainly there are some smart people doing good stuff there but the culture is so different from that of apple's. they'll never capture the user's imagination with the current culture/management. i'd suggest dumping ballmer and co. and trying to reinvent themselves while they still have the cash.