When the Xoom went on sale in February 2011, certain models shipped with an EV-DO Rev. A radio for wireless data plans offered by carriers like Verizon. Motorola made it clear, though, that if you bought one of those cellular models, you’d eventually be able to send it in and have that slower component swapped out for a brand-new LTE radio. No one feeling out the tablet space had tried anything nearly as gutsy, though the upgrade process wasn’t quite as smooth as Motorola had promised. If the Xoom was known for one thing, it was the fact that it was the first tablet to use Android 3.0 Honeycomb — the first and only tablet-exclusive Android update. 

As we saw with the Galaxy Tab, tablets running Android 2.0 and up basically just acted like jumbo smartphones. Honeycomb was a sign of Google’s recognition that tablets demanded their own tools, features and interfaces. Because of that, Xoom owners got the first taste of Android’s Tron-like redesign, its support for dual-core processors, its easy multitasking — the list goes on. It was hardly a perfect update, but Honeycomb gave the Android tablet experience a sense of cohesion that it never really had before. Unfortunately, none of this turned the Xoom into an iPad-style success: Motorola sold a few hundred thousand units in the months after launch, and at the end of 2011, it was replaced by another, incredibly poorly named Motorola tablet called the Xyboard. That follow-up failed to catch on, too, and Motorola bowed out of the tablet race soon after.

Fun fact: The man who spearheaded that Android redesign, Matias Duarte, laid much of the visual groundwork for Palm’s webOS. That means he’s also tangentially connected to another disappointing tablet: HP’s TouchPad.

Shafted by software

People mainly remember the TouchPad for two things: It was the first tablet powered by webOS, and that its all-too-brief life ended in an insane fire sale. When it launched on July 1, 2011, the base model TouchPad with 16GB of storage cost $500 — a reasonable price for a tablet with a 10.1-inch screen. Less than two months later, HP (which acquired Palm in 2009 in large part because of webOS), discontinued all of its webOS hardware in one swift strike. Before long, you could walk into a big-box store and waltz out with a brand new, big-name tablet for $100. 

In that moment, HP robbed TouchPad of any future it might have had, but I have to wonder how  much of a future it had anyway. (Nearly a decade later, that’s still hard for this old Palm nut to admit.) The hardware was decent enough for the time, with a 1.2GHz Snapdragon processor, 1GB and surprisingly solid screen, but none of that was enough to fix the platform’s most dire issues. Chief among those problems: webOS was a delight to use, but its foundation made it nearly impossible to develop ambitious, high-quality software. Remember, it was called webOS at least in part because its apps were built using HTML, CSS and Javascript. That was great if a developer wanted to cobble together a Twitter client, but nearly worthless for creating the kinds of experience that could coax people into embracing a new platform. 

After all that, HP continued to make Android-powered tablets — including one that used an Intel Atom processor, another evolutionary dead-end for mobile devices — to little fanfare. And webOS? The TouchPad’s greatest asset and the albatross around its neck? Well, if you have an LG smart TV, you’re probably using it right now. 

HP wasn’t the only tablet maker to ultimately get screwed by its software. For some reason, BlackBerry — a company that struggled to make compelling all-touch smartphones — decided to build a slate of its own. When the PlayBook launched in April 2011, the hardware didn’t give us much to complain about — it packed a TI OMAP4430 chipset with 1GB of RAM, a 5,300mAh battery and a pair of capable cameras into a sleek, understated body. Sure, the bezels around its 7-inch screen were wide enough to make it look more like a digital photo frame than a productivity machine, but that’s mostly just how things were back then. 

No, the real knock against the PlayBook was that BlackBerry’s tablet OS was based on QNX. It looked lovely (and very webOS-y) thanks to some design help from The Astonishing Tribe, but it also meant the company had to try and build a viable app ecosystem from scratch. Spoiler alert: It didn’t work. There was something like 3,000 apps available at launch, a decent number of which were half-baked Flash app conversions, and the company couldn’t give enough people a reason to develop apps for the PlayBook. It didn’t help that the PlayBook lacked some obvious apps from the get-go. The tablet didn’t even ship with email or contacts apps, for instance, a frankly ridiculous omission for a company that pegged itself as a friend to business customers.

BlackBerry Tablet OS 2 launched six months later and brought with it the ability to run Android apps, but by then, it was too late. The PlayBook’s chances of outselling the iPad, or literally any other tablet for that matter, were nil.

Google and Microsoft enter the fray

While HP and BlackBerry were floundering, Google was quietly working with partners to create tablets of its own. In many ways, these Nexus tablets were the clearest spiritual l counterparts to the iPad: Because they ran clean software and benefited from Google’s input on hardware, they were effectively the standard-bearers for the Android tablet experience. 

Over the years, different companies produced the hardware — it was ASUS in the beginning, later followed by Samsung and HTC. And, with a handful of exceptions, they were mostly solid machines. The Nexus 7s in particular were two of the best Android tablets you could buy in 2012 and 2013, and their roughly $200 price tags made them accessible to almost everyone. They remain perhaps the most beloved of all Nexus tablets, mostly because the models that came after weren’t particularly great deals.