When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad on January 27, 2010, some observers dismissed it as being nothing more than a giant iPhone. They were right, except for one part: An awful lot of people just loved the idea a giant iPhone. The iPad jump-started the seemingly moribund tablet category, becoming Apple's fastest-selling new product ever and inspiring nearly every dead-tree magazine publisher to release digital editions built especially for iPad. A bevy of other gadget makers released lookalike tablets; none of them beat the iPad, and several of them flopped in spectacular fashion. By June of 2012 — four months before it released the iPad Mini — Apple had sold 84 million of those giant iPhones.