iPads of Dune

Dune was a very good science fiction series by Frank Herbert, later ruined by his son and a guy who writes Star Wars novels in a series of dubious prequels. The original book centred around an unobtainium called 'the spice', which was necessary for interstellar travel and such. Later on, things went off in a different direction a bit but this remained quite important.

In the early 90s, Cryo made a computer game based (loosely) on the book. It was groundbreaking in a number of ways; it was amongst the first resource (spice, of course) management games, giving rise to Dune II and ultimately Command and Conquer; it was also one of the first games to feature speech throughout. And that requirement for speech lead to something interesting. The first versions (for Amiga and PC) didn't have speech, and, of course, it being a resource management game, numbers sometimes came up. The designers managed this by just showing the numbers in the on-screen speech bubbles. Of course, once they had speech, they didn't have the bubbles, just subtitles, saying the same thing as the voiceover. So:

An iPad!

As you can see, the emperor skimped on his gadget budget, and got something with a smal screen and keyboard, probably running Windows Mobile.