Courtesy of Toshiba America Inc.

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SANTA ANA, Calif. — Toshiba has unveiled the Portege M700 tablet PC, aimed at educators, health-care workers and anyone who needs to fill in forms outside an office.

The M700, unveiled last week, is Toshiba's ninth tablet. It introduced its first tablet PC, the Portege 3500, in 2002.

Kevin Roberts, Toshiba's M700 product manager, said the technology is just five years old but has improved significantly in computing power, weight, price and design. Compared to their first tablet PC, the M700 includes a hard drive that is up to four times larger, a processor that is twice as fast, battery life that is an hour longer, a price that's $500 lower, and features that protect the tablet from being damaged when dropped or when liquid is spilled on it.

Advanced technology made it possible to add those features while keeping the M700's weight and size about the same as the first Portege.

"This computer is not meant to just be in the office. It's always on the go," Roberts said.

But not just the Portege has changed since 2002; so has the market.

"A lot of people thought the tablet PC market would take off, but it didn't really happen," said Brian O'Rourke, a principal analyst with market researcher In-Stat who has followed the tablet PC market since 2002.

Because of their touch screens and pen-shaped styluses, ancestors of today's tablet PCs were called "pen computers" when they first appeared in the early 1990s. The term "tablet PCs" emerged early the next decade, and those evolved into today's models, with screens that flip to reveal a keyboard, allowing the computer to be used like a laptop.

O'Rourke said tablets were seen as the future in 2002 and were championed by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates. But over the years, O'Rourke said, tablets have moved away from the mainstream and into niche markets where workers need to use computers in the field for forms, capturing digital signatures or taking notes without using a keyboard.

Research company Gartner Inc. also sees tablets as a niche product right now, saying the majority of tablet sales are in fields such as health care, insurance, real estate and public safety.

A Gartner analysis on the tablet market in April said the right operating system, applications and computer design could push tablets into the mainstream computer market in 2008.

While Toshiba's Roberts says those three elements are beginning to align, the M700 is still aimed at mobile workers.

Andre van der Hoek, a professor of informatics at the University of California at Irvine, is testing a tablet system that he thinks will help teach software design.

Early this year, he received a grant from Hewlett-Packard for tablet computers, and he plans to begin using them in classes next fall.