Touch screen tablet - 5 reasons touch tablet PCs didn’t won user hearts in the past

As we said in many other posts Touch Tablets are not a new thing. We deal here with an old concept that this year seems to be re-born thanks to the rumors about Apple’s upcoming tablet. We really hope that future Touch Tablets will solve all the problems that prevented tablet PCs from becoming a successful product.

Someone from New York Times made a list of problems that made Touch Tablet fall in disgrace in the past. In this post we’ll try and analyze those motives:

1. The commitment problem: no manufacturer really made an effort to design the perfect tablet. All tried the waters with different variations of the concept, but none of them took things further than this stage once they’ve hit the first wall
2. The technological problem that translated in faulty hardware, especially when it comes to touch screen interaction. Apple was the first that showed things could work flawlessly thanks to resistive screens and special designed interface of the iPhone. Battery life was a problem too as the devices couldn’t run for more then an hour or two, needing an external laptop battery to increase autonomy, which doesn’t makes sense for portability.
3. Input systems are also to blame as you can’t rely too much on a hardware keyboard when the touch tablet’s screen is folded. In this case handwriting recognition and voice commands were inadequate (and pretty much still are)
4. Price, maybe the biggest issue from my point of view. Why pay a premium for a device that doesn’t work well when it came to touch input and performs in the rest of the time worse than a laptop
5. Software support – all touch tablets (or over 99% of them) used a poorly designed Windows OS, which was not thought like a touch interface from the ground up. If you like analogies is exact the same situation like Windows Mobile which is practically unusable without a stylus.

Do you have other reasons you believe made Touch Screen Tablets fail in the past?