As someone who "tried to invent the tablet" (we were not first, and we'd all seen Star Trek and the like; nobody at the time thought we were inventing anything new), it was very much the hardware.
It's possible software would have stopped wide adoption, but software was a solvable problem - porting Linux apps to our platform was comparatively easy, for example, and we could run Flash, so we could show fairly fancy demos.
But it never got far enough for most of these platforms for software to become a problem, other than for Palm who had apps, but stumbled in all kinds of other ways, not least in never shaking the image as a serious PDA, which instantly made it a niche product.
The devices were hampered by all kinds of hardware limitations. Screens were awful. The touch panels were awful. Even really expensive devices felt like toys because of it. CPUs were awfully slow. Lack of wifi was a big issue with the first generation tablets and solved in all kinds of awful ways. Flash was ludicrously expensive - we agonised over 16MB vs. 32MB storage. We used NanoX [1] rather than X11 for our windowing system because the engineering cost of adapting NanoX and writing our own widgets for it was worth it to save a few MB of flash and a few MB of RAM.
And so getting distributors and retailers and the like to commit crashed and burned before you got to the point of what software you could launch it with.
It's possible software would have stopped wide adoption, but software was a solvable problem - porting Linux apps to our platform was comparatively easy, for example, and we could run Flash, so we could show fairly fancy demos.
But it never got far enough for most of these platforms for software to become a problem, other than for Palm who had apps, but stumbled in all kinds of other ways, not least in never shaking the image as a serious PDA, which instantly made it a niche product.
The devices were hampered by all kinds of hardware limitations. Screens were awful. The touch panels were awful. Even really expensive devices felt like toys because of it. CPUs were awfully slow. Lack of wifi was a big issue with the first generation tablets and solved in all kinds of awful ways. Flash was ludicrously expensive - we agonised over 16MB vs. 32MB storage. We used NanoX [1] rather than X11 for our windowing system because the engineering cost of adapting NanoX and writing our own widgets for it was worth it to save a few MB of flash and a few MB of RAM.
And so getting distributors and retailers and the like to commit crashed and burned before you got to the point of what software you could launch it with.
[1] https://github.com/ghaerr/microwindows