My first experience with a tablet, was my 2005 Gateway M275. My dad bought it for my as a graduation gift and to use in college and boy did I think I was on the cusp of being super cool; little did I know my dad and Gateway were a little ahead of the tablet revolution and a little eager to put out a new communications system. As McLuhan suggest often new technologies are “put out before they are thought out” and in this case it stopped the adoption of the tablet in its tracks.
My hopes for the tablet were renewed again the first time I watched Jeff Han’s TED talk demo of a muli-touch screen a year later.
Jeff Han – Multi-touchscreen
By the end of the video I think I was picking my jaw off the floor and saying to myself, “you mean you can do more than just mouse click with one finger?! You can use ten fingers?!” And I thought, this is really going to change things and it really would. In January of 2007 Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone and there was no turning back from the tablet revolution.
Which begs the question why wasn’t my super awesome M275 what started it all and why wasn’t I the coolest kid in school. Using the proposed continuity theory from Thornburn and Jenkins, Towards an Aesthetics of Transition, I would argue that the Gateway M275 was perhaps to inline with its predecessor. It borrowed every convention from the previous generations laptop and gave no new functionality besides pretty poor drawing and note taking. In order for a new technology to change the landscape it must in some way be revolutionary and the M275 was not, the extra dollar spent did not equal an increase in user experience.
On the other hand, what Han offered up in his TED talk was revolutionary and its functionality presented to us in the form of the iPhone was enough to create such a revolution because it completely changed the functions of the cell phone. Perhaps if the iPad had first been introduced the popularity may not have been as grand and may have suffered the fate of the M275. But instead Apple reinvented the cell phone, which allowed them to use the continuity theory to make it accessible to consumers. By keeping telephone, text, and email on the phone, it remanded recognizable to consumers, but changing the way the user access and uses the technology made it new, different, and exciting. And so we find one of the many successes of Apple, keeping their new communications technologies accessible and groundbreaking to consumers at once.