I don&#x27;t think anyone didn&#x27;t think it was possible. Back in &#x27;99 I was working on a tablet w&#x2F;built in phone, and Ericsson had their ScreenPhone around the same time. Both where &quot;tethered&quot; to a base station at home (ours used a custom extension to DECT), I believe, but the intent was always to add proper mobile support.<p>In fact, when I was first sold on the concept, the guy who started the company talked me through how he imagined a &quot;home base station&quot; that he&#x27;d use while there, and how he wanted the device to smoothly hand off to the mobile network if he took it out of the house.<p>The choice of a tablet over a smaller phone was about a convenient screen size, coupled with the initial devices being tied to the home anyway. But &quot;everyone&quot; around us had PalmPilots, and &quot;everyone&quot; expected PDAs and phones to merge eventually (and they did, sort of, but to see Palm giving in and going with a keyboard was a disappointment).<p>The challenge was that around the time the iPhone launched, people did not believe the market was there yet, nor that the hardware was ready, largely because &quot;everyone else&quot; had a go too early, failed, and essentially shelved the idea for the next decade as something that was way too early.<p>What Apple got exactly right and everyone else messed up was the timing.<p>E.g. we were shopping around our tablet prototype in &#x27;99 and 2000 based on a 100MHz or thereabouts 486 clone w&#x2F;32MB RAM running Opera and a custom UI w&#x2F;resistive touch. It was a fantastic device at the time, but the combination of not yet being able to provide a proper GSM enabled device, too short battery life, low RAM, slow, horrible resistive touch, and it was a device that would have appealed mostly to a small niche of geeks, but to work financally it needed to be a mass market device.<p>With the available hardware in 2006 we&#x27;d have a great starting point if we had started around then. But when we started in &#x27;99 the discussion was never &quot;can these hardware constraints work in a way that can appeal to a mass market?&quot; but &quot;this is the price we need for it to work as a mass market device, and here are the tech specs that can fit within that price&quot; and then we tried to make something that could be mass market from that... way too early.<p>To be clear: I&#x27;m not trying to downplay what Apple did. They made a product that appealed to a vastly larger market because they understood. But it wasn&#x27;t because nobody else believed in touch enabled smart phones or tablets, but because they approached it from a usability and marketability perspective first, while everyone else were thinking like geeks willing to sacrifice usability for a &quot;imagine if..&quot; ideal of devices that were ultimately quite unfulfilling.<p>When the iPhone came out, a lot of us were pretty much &quot;so what?&quot; because we still did not understand the significance of that wait. We&#x27;d seen full screen touch, and we&#x27;d seen PDA&#x27;s married with touch, and we&#x27;d seen larger tablet type devices (basically laptops with pivot screens mostly), and the iPhone to many people who&#x27;d been through the first round of hype around these type of devices just seemed like more of the same at first.<p>Until it became clear just how much of a difference the hardware advances and Apple&#x27;s design had made to the whole thing.<p>We absolutely agree about their timing, and I think it&#x27;s important not to underestimate how important it is to understand when the time is right and not get caught up in constraints that applied last year because that&#x27;s when you started thinking about it.<p>It&#x27;s very possible that we&#x27;ll see something similar with cars. A lot of people have worked on driverless cars for a very long time, and the question is how much of the current designs are based on preconceptions that seemed to make sense a few years back, but where things can be done better today.