Do you remember April 2010? That was when the tablet market sprang to life.
Tablets had been around for more than a decade, but hardly anyone outside of certain vertical industries (utilities, for example) had noticed them. When Apple released the iPad in April 2010, everything changed.
The iPad wasn’t destined for some niche market; it was an object of desire. Apple claimed that it sold 300,000 iPads on the first day that it was available. No other vendor had technology that could come close to competing with iOS on the iPad.
Many tried. There was the now largely forgotten Moblin operating system, RIM’s PlayBook OS, Intel and Nokia’s short-lived Meego, Chrome OS and, of course, Android, most promisingly realized in the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. None of them was good enough to seriously compete with Apple, in either 2010 or 2011.
But now it’s 2012, and at long last, we have a contender: Google’s Nexus 7, running Android 4.1.