New Tablet...
Well not exactly new, but new to me… This afternoon I was helping the Tablet User Research team clean out a storeroom where they’ve been keeping their equipment that was for studies. Interestingly enough there are all kinds of interesting tablets in there particularly for certain studies, but there’s also plenty of really old equipment such as pre-production Acer TM100s and some of the early prototypes that we used way back when. As we were going through I spotted this “tablet”. So it’s now in my possession. It’s a one of the kind Compaq Tablet that was created specifically for the announcement that Compaq was entering the tablet market. Of course it kind of looks like a giant ipaq, but it’s a real tablet and was nothing at all like what Compaq released. The secret to this tablet is that it’s really the same tablet as the prototypes we had been using, but a new “shell” was constructed around it to make this prototype seem real. Way back then while Compaq was already committed to entering the market, they didn’t want their ID revealed to the world, so it was all smoke and mirrors. A little piece of Tablet PC history, rescued from the storeroom…
