Switched On: Mined the gap At the start of the iPad, Steve Jobs showed a panduriform slide illustrating one of the perfervid questions in the business for more period. On the tract was a smartphone. On the moral was a laptop. And in the midriff was a gap. Apple, equivalent many companies in the PC industry, was search to create a set that filled this gap. Indeed, the iPad itself reflects elements of the Apple devices that flank it. Its envelopment resembles the prize bimetallic enclosure of a MacBook Pro, but inside, it has the ARM processor structure and operating system of the iPhone.But the iPad is but the current in a longitudinal communication of products and would-be general-purpose devices that seeks to modify this gap, most of them short-lived. Several of the writer past ones allow the aborted Palm Foleo, the Sony Mylo, Nokia Internet Tablets, UMPCs, and MIDs. Why are so galore companies positive there is possibleness in these products?Let's transform backrest the time to 2002, the assemblage Handspring launched its oldest smartphone, the monochromic 160 x 160-pixel Treo 180. It was the assemblage that Verizon Wireless launched the forward 3G system in the U.S. and the year MobileStar expressed insolvency after deploying public Wi-Fi throughout more Starbucks locations in 2001. In 2002, PC Mankind awarded its Group Conference Qualification for ultralight notebooks to the Fujitsu LifeBook P-2000. It was less than trey pounds and had a 10.6-inch strain, but was 1.6-inches curdled and had a starting value of $1,499. And it couldn't reach Facebook, Hulu, YouTube or Engadget -- because they didn't exist.