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Comment by abrahamsen | Hacker News Reader

This is Microsoft's third or fourth attempt on a tablet PC, the earlier attempts all pre-date Apple's creation of the market.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_for_Pen_Computing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XP_Tablet_PC_Edition#Tablet_PC_...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocket_PC

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Good point, but why label those as "attempts"? A decade ago PDAs were pretty good devices with decent amount of free apps and an interesting range of possibilities. (For one, they were extensible via cards. Something that's not available in today smartphones I know of.) You could read books, play games, use internet via WiFi, plus there was a lot of business applications for them. Heck, my old Asus MyPal has better book reader and calendar apps than I have on my current smartphone.

Sure, there wasn't a marketing hysteria around PDAs, but they were a viable market of their own.

Tablet laptops were used by many people as well.

I loved my Toshiba M200 (http://reviews.cnet.com/Toshiba_Portege_M200_tablet_PC/4505-...) way back in 2004! I used to use it during my graduate classes to take handwritten notes. It's a little sluggish by today's standards, but lighter weight distributions of Linux still run pretty well.

If the Palm Computing IPO didn't reflect marketing hysteria around PDA's, I don't know what does. The spinoff gave Palm a market cap of over $20B, about six times the entire value of its parent company, 3Com.

Pricing.

Windows tablets used to be more expensive than laptops, and Apple tablets are significantly less expensive than laptops.

Windows CE PDAs were also very expensive, about three or four times what a current smartphone costs.

So the tech was there, but their pricing made the market very small.

If anything, prices went up.

Asus MyPal (a relatively high-end PDA) was around $400 when I bought it. That is cheaper than modern high-end phones and roughly equal to the prices of mid-level phones.

The laptop I'm writing this from costs around $400 dollars as well. This is the price of the cheapest iPad.

I had an HTC Windows Mobile phone and a Gateway XP Tablet with a Wacom screen. Other than being bulky, they were great devices.

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