A happy consequence of the legal litigation between Samsung and Apple has been the public appearance of these sketches that Steve Jobs was already driving in the year 2002 , long before the iPhone even went on sale, and eight years before the first iPad model that began to be marketed in 2010. The illustrations allow us to carry out a hindsight exercise to have some notion of how Jobs began to imagine a future today very present in the world of computing.
In 2000 Microsoft launched its Tablet PC, it was an adaptation of its Windows XP operating system specially designed to run on a device type Slate touch screen. It had a fairly advanced voice recognition system and it worked with a pencil. It presented a first version of electronic ink that adapted the thickness of the line to the pressure that was made when writing. However, this model had difficulties to break through, it was hardly publicized and its initial price was very high. Still, as Wikipedia claims, it managed to gain a foothold in hospitals and mobile businesses.
However, despite the apparent short range of the device, it seems that it left an important legacy, as it served as inspiration to Steve Jobs when he began to conceive his iPad. The founder of Apple, who considered that the Microsoft device was "disastrous", knew how to see beyond the first concept, for which the company of Bill Gates never got to bet seriously, and imagined a design quite more attractive, which ended up giving rise to the first iPhone and a little later to iPad.
In the images there are really few changes in relation to the current iPad: smooth lines, curved edges and minimalist design. These seemed to be concepts that haunted Jobs, as well as the device thickness that model after model we see as it is decreasing, without ever being completely clear what are the true physical limits of information technology.