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The pilots will soon have tablets in to cockpit as part of the electronic flight bag project. Why are tablets safe in the cockpit below 10k feet and not in the cabin?
Because in the cockpit there would be a maximum of 2-3 such devices operating. By contrast, if tablets were allowed in the passenger cabin, there could be 150+ such devices operating simultaneously on a typical narrowbody aircraft. Maybe 250+ on a widebody. Maybe 450+ on an A380. That quantity of devices could cause substantial RF interference, possibly even if all of them were in Airplane Mode (not sure...I'm not a specialist).
Remember how Steve Jobs's demo crashed at the Apple keynote a while back? It was from having 500 WiFi devices operating in a single room. Try it in an airplane with thousands of moving parts, cables, computer-driven hydraulics, etc....