It's just that during the first generation of smartphones and tablets the hardware simply was not there. The wide bezels you see in my link above, for example, were strictly dictated by what was possible to make work with the hardware specs, which were already too limited, but the best we could do at a reasonable price while staying small enough.

The big bulky thing at the back was making the best possible out of the battery space by turning it into a stand of sorts. The FreePad industrial design was actually quite amazing given the constraints, but the constraints were too severe to make a viable product possible.

And instead of waiting for it to be possible, we all compromised the hardware without realising that turned it into something most customers didn't want.

And so most companies that tried abandoned that market and took the wrong lesson from it that customers had rejected the whole product category rather than just the ugly, underpowered hardware that was possible at the time.

Apple's success in this space came in understanding that customers had rejected the design, not the product category.

Ironically, Apple's app store happened first after they had to concede web based "apps" had exactly that problem: The technology was not there yet, and insisting on only web apps did not give people the experience they wanted. But that was a problem that could be solved without waiting for hardware to catch up.