back to article Who'll keep taking Windows Tablets in the iPad era?

I have a lot of sympathy for people who steal their technology from the hearse, just as its driving through the gates of the great technology knackers' yard. While it is obligatory to be savoir faire with the latest in design and innovation, when it comes to my personal spending I'm right there with the laggards, on the …

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  1. Giles Jones Gold badge

    Lack of imagination

    Lack of imagination was the problem. It seems that people in charge at Microsoft are not forward thinkers, they don't seem to have any imagination when it comes creating something new. They are happy to clone other ideas and put their own spin on it once the competition has made a move.

    When the tablet PC was being worked on there wasn't anything else to compare it with. So when key people (head of MS Office for example) at Microsoft were asked to adapt software to work with the new tablet input method they refused. It's almost like they can't see the merit of doing something unless someone else is bringing in cash for a similar product.

    But this time there is a product they can refer to, they can made things happen as there's plenty of alternatives that are raking in cash.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      there were windows tablets long before that

      I deployed a good number of IBM tablets running windows 3.1 in the early 90's as in car mobile terminals. They were much thicker than today's tablets and I seem to recall they required a stylus but they still had more functionality than anything Apple or Google have to offer today. With a stripped down OS you get stripped down functionality.

      Today's tablets aren't yet worth they asking price given how little they can do.

      1. Volker Hett

        You have to compromise somewhere

        The iPad may be limited, but what it can do it does very good and it is very light and portable.

        The best Windows Tablet I have seen so far is the Asus EP121, it can do what one expects from a Windows Computer and it has brilliant Wacom input technology on top. But it's rather limited in battery life time and a bit on the heavy side, for most Windows apps you'll want a keyboard and a bigger screen and then a nice 15" notebook at the same price would do just fine or better.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Just give them six months

    First, they'll announce availability of partner Win 8 tablets. Then, the channel stuffing will occur: millions of units 'sold'. Finally, any mention of it during financial calls will just drop off until there is nothing left. Microsoft tried to do this with the iPod and iPhone, and that got them nowhere. Just because they have a pretty good percentage of the pc market, why does that make you think they'll have any chance of getting a foot in the door of a completely new market?

  3. JDX Gold badge

    Lack of imagination was the problem

    And Apple are well-known for creating new things? You don't have to innovate to succeed. Android is totally derivative for instance.

    1. Giles Jones Gold badge

      Few innovations left these days

      Scaling up a mobile OS and platform was an innovation of sorts. Everyone else was trying to scale down the x86 platform and full desktop OS, remember the UMPC market? that's died a death.

      Notice how everyone is now talking about ARM and how x86 isn't so important anymore? that could be due to the realisation that instant on and off devices are what people want now. They want the best of mobile and the best of the desktop combined.

      1. Martin Owens

        Linux

        The L word never had a problem running on ARM, anything from Android to a super computer. I don't think it's a problem of getting code from x86 to ARM and thinking smaller, it's just that all these companies write proprietary code that probably looks like barf with bits corrected in crayon.

        1. Ilgaz

          Win 8 will have full ATI/Nvidia drivers

          Nobody from Linux world could convince nvidia and ati ship drivers for linux/non x86 but Windows guys will make sure drivers for dx 11/12 will be in windows 8 for arm.

          It is not just about games you know, default UIs now need opengl.

          Oh ATI has a old powerpc driver... Thats all.

          1. Volker Hett

            Last I looked

            Honeycomb ran on NVidia Tegra with display output.

          2. Chavdar Ivanov

            Brand correction

            s/ATI/AMD/. The "ATI" brand no longer exists.

            1. Ilgaz

              ATI really

              When Linux for PPC driver shipped, it was ATI, not the AMD which messed up everything making stupid choices like not shipping win 7 drivers while Vista driver exists.

        2. Volker Hett

          Linux has an advantage

          It uses GCC on all platforms, is there visual studio with all tools and library for ARM?

          IMHO Microsoft has a lot of porting to do to get Windows and what Windows customers expect on ARM tablets.

          1. Ken Hagan Gold badge

            Re: Is there Visual Studio for ARM?

            Yes. The compiler and tools most definitely do exist because it's what you use to develop for WinCE or whatever the non-desktop thingy is called this week. They've existed for about a decade and are generally about one product cycle behind the mainstream offering.

            If MS want to offer Win8-on-ARM, the tools won't be a problem. Similarly, since Itanium is only just a thing of the past, porting the core OS isn't going to be a problem either. The only problems are political (do they actually want to offer it?) and appropriateness (is the standard desktop offering actually what you want on a tablet?).

  4. Chris Miller

    The problem is often

    that the bright ideas arrive before the hardware is capable of handling them. Handwriting recognition on the Newton was a genius idea, but the hardware was incapable of making it work at a reasonable speed. Building an OS on top of a database worked well (though was never game-changing) in the green screen world of Pick and OS/400, but the desktops and laptops of 2006 weren't man enough to run it with all the GUI bells and whistles (and backwards compatibility) required by Microsoft - you needed a highish-end box to make Vista, even in its emasculated production incarnation, run successfully. I wonder how it would perform on today's boxes?

    1. TeeCee Gold badge
      Stop

      Re: The problem is often.

      Much as I hate to poke holes in your argument, the '400 inherited this setup from the System/38, which also had that "the whole filesystem is an OO database" thing.

      In 1977.

      With a processor that made a 16Mhz 286 look athletic.

      Raw horsepower was not the limiting factor in 2006........

      1. Chris Miller

        Unreliable sources state:

        "In hindsight, the System/38's architecture was probably too demanding of the hardware of the era. When first launched, it struggled under the overhead of the software and operating system"

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/38#Hardware

        No doubt there were many reasons for the dropping of WinFS, but even without it the performance of Vista was less than impressive, so I strongly suspect that speed was at least a significant factor.

        I rest my case, m'lud.

  5. NoneSuch Silver badge
    Mushroom

    M$ is a Corperation

    The larger the corporation the smaller the number of innovations that are tolerated. Managers want to protect their jobs and execs want to protect their bonuses and stock options so as a result very little happens.

    True innovation is seldom an overnight success and to be appealing to a board of directors it has to be. Catch 22.

    Instead of innovating themselves, M$ buys out the smaller companies who do. Of course, they "corperatize" the new additions, make them more efficient and subsequently gut them driving off the original thinkers who cannot stand bureaucracy and three inch thick HR manuals. This is why Skype has been having service issues since M$ bought it.

  6. Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
    Pint

    "I can't see Redmond buggering it up this time, but you never know."

    I can.

    Really, even with my eyes shut.

    This is not simply MS bashing, I simply have an undying faith in the ability of people anywhere (and that includes myself) to get things terribly wrong in ways we never could imagine. This is a kind of inverse creativity embodied in Bergholt Stuttley (or Bloody Stupid) Johnson on the Discworld.

    However, MS might get it beautifully right.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    title required...

    I thought the story was that the iPad came first but then they shrunk it to a phone as there wasn't a market for tablets. Once people had used the iPhone the crys came for 'a bigger one'.

    Re the comment on dead batteries from using attached to the mains - Apple also seem to do something neat there as well. I just sold a 3 year old Macbook that spent 95% of it's life plugged into the mains. The battery on it shows less than 50 recharge cycles and the capacity was still very close to the theoretical new capacity on system profiler.

    A 3 year old thinkpad treated in the same way had completely killed it's battery. Now it might just be that the thinkpad was an older generation of tech but I didn't think Li-Ion batteries had moved on much.

    1. M Gale

      Backwards

      Laptop batteries don't get killed from you keeping the device plugged in. Constant cycles kill the battery. Any laptop these days uses an intelligent charger that blasts the battery up to about 80%, then drip-feeds it to full. From what I'm aware, rechargeable lithiums HAVE to be charged like this anyway. At least, I've never seen a lithium charger (be it li-ion phone/laptop or li-poly flying-model battery) NOT have some degree of brains in it.

      I have a 6-7 year old HP zv5000 here that still has 89% of its battery capacity, with most of that dropping off after its previous owner (hi, bro) gave it to me and I started using the battery. Previous to that it had just been used as a smaller desktop PC.

      1. peter-

        More to do with the charger letting the battery alone

        The problem here more seems to be in the power supply leaving the battery alone when it's ok.

        The last 20% charge with low current isn't good for the battery (note how you'll find plug-in hybrid vehicles never fully charging/discharging their batteries). So in "all day plugged in" environments a lot will depend on the system's strategy of when to leave the battery alone and when to actually try and top it off.

        It does indeed seem like Apple's doing something right there and that ThinkPads are a bit clunky at it, because I've seen many office ThinkPads (and the same with some Fujitsu Siemens machines) that after less than 2 years had their batteries badly degraded (<30min useful life) but nothing comparable with Macbooks, not even with the old Powerbooks.

        Now I remember from some old support documents that they left the battery alone after charging until it had fallen to 95% before trying to fill it up again. But this is many years ago and they have probably refined that

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          My old laptop

          I had* a Systemax(?) laptop that used the 95% rule.

          * Actually, I still have it, but the screen has key marks on it (too much squeezing into a packed rucksack) and it has 3 broken keys so eventually I replaced it.

          (?) I think it was Systemax. It was actually a rebadged Acer.

    2. JohnG

      WindowsCE, PPC, XDA/MDA

      "I thought the story was that the iPad came first but then they shrunk it to a phone as there wasn't a market for tablets."

      Everyone seems to have forgotten that MS dominated this field only a few years back with PDAs (such as those from HP, manufactured by HTC, Mio, etc) and the XDA/MDA phones. Aside from web browsers and media players there were apps for navigation, VoIP, games and even VPN clients.

      These now live on as PNAs - some with WinCE but many with a Linux OS.

      Then there were older products like the SIMpad from Siemens. Running WinCE, the SIMpad would allow users to browse the Internet, view MS Office documents, etc. using a large touch-sensitive screen. These never caught on until Apple re-invented the idea with the iPad.

      I'm just impressed that Apple has convinced so many people that the iPhone and iPad are so novel and now own the field, just as they did with MP3 players and the iPod.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Forgotten because it didn't happen

        Microsoft never dominated the PDA market. They had at most 50% market share at one time, which was due to Palm's abject incompetence rather than Microsoft making a good product. They also never dominated the smartphone market. IIRC they maxed out at 30% market share in the US and 10-15% worldwide.

        The iPhone and iPad ARE novel, in that they are [relatively] reliable, easy to use, attractive, have good battery life, and don't require a stylus.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Arm netbooks conpicuous in their absence

    Aren't they? Computex 2009, Asus shows an Arm based netbook running Linux to be released Summer 2009.

    Cue joint presentation by Asus, Intel and Microsoft iterating over and over again how important Intel's hardware and Windows is to the future of netbooks and Asus.

    Asus Arm based netbook did you say? What Asus arm netbook? (The cancelled smartbook).

    http://www.jkkmobile.com/2009/04/no-arm-based-netbook-from-asus.html

    This year Asus have commited to releasing a Tegra 3 based netbook running Chrome by the end of 2011. I wait and hope.

    Really realy want a netbook that runs all day without recharging and that has a friggin keyboard so you can actually do some work on it.

    Meanwhile in 10 years we might get prood that Intel/Microsoft paid Asus and other manufacturers off so they don't defect to Arm and not-Windows, much like their past dealings.

    http://www.netbooknews.com/28796/asus-to-launch-arm-powered-13-inch-android-laptop-by-the-end-of-the-year/

    1. David Paul Morgan
      Thumb Up

      Asus EEE 'fAndroid' says...

      ... I've been very pleased with my Asus EEE winXP 1000HE.

      the form-factor is just right for my daily rail commute.

      However, I thought the Asus Transformer was the 10"-er that I wanted.

      I bought the one with the keyboard dock and it updated to Honecomb 3.1 Android as soon as it was on the wifi.

      It's lite and has a great screen.

      As a local government Councillor, I'm using it for PDF reading instead of printed reports that would kill the cat if they landed on it in the morning.

      The e-mail and Google integration, along with Evernote and the bundled Polaris Office make it a great travelling companion.

      With keyboard dock, it's the same 'form factor' as my WinXP, but as a fondleslab (nice use in the article, btw) I'm using small-factor swype, or palm-pilot grafiti and a Griffin capacitative 'crayon' rather than trying to type - I don't like the lack of feedback.

      plus, the ability to stream web content direct to the TV via the hdmi is a great added bonus for music and video. (I recommend Ghost for audio).

      I love it and so do the friends and colleagues I've shown it to, not just fAndroids, but Fanbois too!

    2. John Smith 19 Gold badge
      Unhappy

      @zef

      "Meanwhile in 10 years we might get prood that Intel/Microsoft paid Asus and other manufacturers off so they don't defect to Arm and not-Windows, much like their past dealings."

      The first priority of an effective monopoly is to deny it exists.

      The second is to protect it at *all* costs.

  9. Don Mitchell

    eBooks & Surface

    I worked with the eBooks team in the late 1990s, so I saw Microsoft's vision for tablets. The problem was not a lack of imagination by the developes or product teams, it was a lack of imagination by Ballmer and his executive vice presidents. The only cool idea to survive that project was ClearType.

    They also failed to leverage the MS Surface tecnology, invented by researcher Dave Kurlander. You see that multitouch UI in the new versions of Windows, and everyone assumes they just copied the iPhone, but in fact they had this a long time ago and just failed to make good use of it.

    1. asdf
      FAIL

      ballmer sucks

      I laugh when i hear the term corporate goverance. The fact Ballmer and Howard Stringer still have jobs shows what an oxymoron that word is.

  10. Novatone
    Megaphone

    Great Windows tablets are avaliable now!

    As I was reading this using my Windows 7 tablet it occurs to me that the people complaining that windows sucks on tablets haven’t used one lately. The problem with the early tablets was the touch screen and the reluctance to go all-in and lose the keyboard. The early touch screens made the screen hard to read and all the laptop bells and whistles made them too heavy.

    I’m writing this on an Acer Iconatab w500, I love it, a few tweaks to the configuration out of the box and it’s great. The best part is I can run all my normal software, office, java, flash even visual studio. It has no trouble lasting all day; I never turn it off or use hibernate.

    1. Graham O'Brien
      Pint

      ... and have been for a long time

      I have a 2005 Motion Computing tablet in daily use. With stylus: after all, I learned to write with a pencil and this is no different. Going to board meetings with all the papers on it is so convenient - the others have 1-2kg files. Also I have the papers from all the past meetings, with my annotations, to hand. My colleague who trialled a fondleslab could read only and went back to dead trees pretty quickly.

      To use it for content production is a breeze - I can pop it in its desk stand and use keyboard and mouse or remote desktop into it while it's an a drawer, or if I have to type on the move there's an on-screen handwriting converter thingy or small bluetooth keyboard that I can use. Like Novatone, I can do practically anything on it that I can do on the desktop (except Half-life, which I tried once!) including office apps, developing with Delphi, and 'desktop' mapping software that doubles as a handy satnav on a 12.1" display. Plus Winamp and VLC (12.1" screen, remember?) for long train/plane journeys

      It's also been in a rucksack twice when I've been dumped off my motorbike by tw*ts in cars and one corner is held together by sticky tape. But it still works, and still gives me 8 hours on a charge so I can work all day.

      Who needs fondleslabs? Some of us do real work.

  11. W. Anderson

    Microsoft & Tablets

    The one point missing from article and most commenters, is that no matter how much "vision" Microsoft and Bill Gates himself may have had about tablet technology and related 'innovation', the company did not and does not have great or even very good software to compete effectively - although they will probably always make hundreds of $$millions or even $$billions from the Microsoft (simple minded?) faithful.

    Anyone who 'really' knows the technical facts and lineage of Windows - any iteration or version - understands quite clearly that most all of it is based on legacy code and design, which will not adapt well - translate that as paste/glue onto modern, mobile Internet technologies.

    A perfect analogy related to me recently by a senior technical VP from one of the largest three [real innovative] technology companies in USA is: no matter what the features and specifications of a luxury sports car, e.g. Porsche 911 or Ferrari (equivalent to any hardware), it will never reach it's potential or be great if it only runs on 30 Octane gasoline - equivalent to Microsoft OS.

    Nuf said.

    W. Anderson

    wanderson@nac.net

    1. paulll

      Title

      That's not really a perfect analogy, is it? It is, in fact, a stinker. If it were petrol it'd have an RON of 30. lol.

      Oh, and anyone who 'really' knows the technical facts and lineage of English knows that most!=almost.

  12. Nya
    Facepalm

    HP dropped the ball.

    Actually the first UMPC's (as they were called) running Windows Tablet were very much like the fondleslap. Just go look at the HP TC1100, it is a fondleslab and 8 years before it! Then you have the Samsung Q1 (later the Q1+ but that was pretty dire really). But what was cool on the Samsung was MS's split thumb board...From lot's of warbling in the rumour mill it seems to be returning in Win8 Tablet's. It was a very good idea, onscreen keyboard which you use while having the tablet securely held in both hands, and still giving you a large display area to view while you type.

    While MS made the goof of just shipping normal Windows for these devices. The hardware makers also should take responsibility for ignoring the great designs of the first generation products which got ignored so they could just use normal notebook parts slapped together with a funky hinge. The other issue is, usually anyhow MS hasn't really wanted to ever be anything but a software seller. There is good and bad in this, but really MS hasn't ever wanted to be something it's not. I quiet like that though. We know who or what to expect from MS. Good or bad.

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Comically retro

    Of course these things failed. The only people who might think pen/handwriting-based tablets are cool are old men who never learned how to type. If you can type, why in god's name would you ever want to write anything by hand? These things are a complete throwback to 60s science fiction.

    Well, I suppose graphic designers like pen-based input for when they want to sketch something, but how many people are graphic designers.

    Of course the iPad is smaller/lighter/thinner/etc. and the battery lasts longer, but if the iPad relied on a stylus and handwriting recognition, it would be a failure too.

    1. Ken Hagan Gold badge

      Re: Comically retro

      "If you can type, why in god's name would you ever want to write anything by hand?"

      Because I don't think in prose?

      When I'm brainstorming, I push my keyboard to one side and pick up a biro and a pile of scrap paper. I'll do quite a lot of scribbling before I have the ideas sufficiently clear in my head to start thinking (and writing) linearly. I'll quite often find myself redrawing a clean version of a previous sheet in order to start off in a new direction. An A4-sized tablet that tidied up my labels, straightened my lines, smoothed my curves and let me "branch" several versions of a diagram would be the perfect tool for that sort of work.

      And I'm a programmer, not a graphic designer. I'd hazard a guess that text entry is a fairly small part of the time spent using a computer for most people and a fair bit of *that* is free-form text where you are constantly switching between mouse and keyboard to position fragments of text. Even something like Excel would be easier (for some tasks) with a high-resolution pen input.

    2. Robert Carnegie Silver badge

      If you can't already type, why learn?

      The thing does speech recognition. Not well, I admit...

      And touchscreens are appearing on desktops now.

  14. M Gale
    Terminator

    "exploding market owned entirely by Apple."

    Nice troll.

    1. Ilgaz

      80% marketshare

      Apple has 80% market of tablets. I also hate tablets and Apple's walled garden but don't troll by calling people trolls.

  15. Ramazan
    Linux

    windows tablet

    sometimes to never be ready is the best kind of ready to be

  16. Ramazan
    Megaphone

    hardware can never be capable enough

    just some companies can have enough sense and courage to part with unnecessary features

  17. Ramazan
    Devil

    @Acer Iconia Tab W500

    Wow, what an ugliness! And surely it has this terribly annoying ssssshhhhh thing, how is it called? right, The Fan, isn't it?

  18. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    To be fair to Mr Gates?

    Wasn't he right all along?

    And as far as assembling hardware, optimising components, making it easy to access content, drawing or writing onscreen with write/character/word recognition, ... , identifying keyboard/keyboardless as design parameters, spawing/researching onscreen keyboard layouts, ...

    Surely these would not have happened without the earlier tablets in the Noughties?

    IT sorta evoles n'est pas?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Happy

      Alan Kay was right all along

      There, I fixed that for you

  19. Christian R. Conrad
    Devil

    One missing word makes meaning bass-ackwards

    "...I massively resented how the ThinkPad backlight was missing – even though the key sticker told me it was."

    Given ordinary English grammar, that truncated "it was" would mean the key sticker told you it was missing.

    What mr Orlowski actually _meant_, though, was of course "...even though the key sticker told me it was there."

    HTH!

  20. Marvin the Martian
    Windows

    Graveyard tech, uh?

    I've got this great Mio GPS/PDA I'm trying to get rid of since a while... interested? "A good runner" as similar car adverts say.

  21. Gil Grissum
    Pint

    Really?

    It's not that complex. All Apple did was take the iPod Touch, use the same OS as the iPhone and iPod touch, increase the screen size to 9.7" and you have the fondle slab. Not really that innovative. Hobble it a bit by not including a camera, USB ports, or expansion (SD Slot), and keep Flash off of it and with the Apple logo upon it, it sold like gang busters. Android tablets aren't moving because the stupid companies making them bungle their launch with half baked products that don't work as they should (Playbook. Xoom) and either charge more or the same price as Apple. That won't work. And hopefully Microsoft has learned it's lesson here and creates a tablet with a full day of battery life, has the good sense to keep SD Card slots on them, and recommends charging less than Apple. HP pretty much bungled the Touchpad launch. No one is standing in line to buy them. Apple won with the same principle that sells the iPhone- Keep It Simple, Stupid.

    1. Volker Hett

      What Apple did

      is what anybody else didn't.

      I was somewhat surprised when I found out, that this MP3 player was a pretty good organizer, and I wasn't surprised, that the oversized MP3 player was a pretty good organizer with a screen big enough to read webpages on it. Oh, and my old SciFi magazines I bought as PDF lately .

      So why didn't MS scale up Windows Mobile 6.5 but scrapped that for WP7?

      WinMo 5 was pretty lame and unstable, but 6.5 is really good.

    2. RichyS

      What was stopping MS then?

      So what was stopping MS doing exactly the same thing with all the various Win Mob/Win CE versions they've released over the years. At least 6 of them before the iPad was even released.

      Now, that strikes me as a lack of imagination.

      Remember, innovation isn't the act of inventing anything (I think we're all agreed that Apple didn't invent the tablet); it's the art of refining an invention in accordance with the technology, price, and usability constraints placed upon it. In that respect, Apple certainly innovated with the iPad.

  22. lemon

    ipad

    Well, I would go for an iPad!

    And now there are rumors that iPad 3 scheduled for October Release

    http://www.ifunia.com/news/report-iphone-5-and-ipad-3-scheduled-for-october-release/

  23. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Microsoft was too obsessed with corps

    Tablet type devices have been around for ages. And I've spent years waiting for someone to wake up to the need for the right type of device.

    Microsoft's problem was it saw the tablet as selling to corporates, and everytime you spoke to corporate IT, they wanted Office to work on it and talked about productivity and so basically took the nice tablet idea and hamstrung it into the wrong part of the market for the wrong uses at a premium price. Still now there are comments from corporatey-type people who don't see how you can work on a tablet. Duh. The whole point of a tablet is not that it's a productivity device, but that it's an access device, almost pure and simple. Sit down, turn on, browse, read.

    For me the price point is still too high for the branded versions. This is something that people will have 2-3 in their house (or more) if you keep the quality up and get the price down. It's like a trophy device with a good brand that you leave on the coffee-table for your neighbour to glance at.

  24. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    A database in Windows?

    > The Windows Tablet was one of two Big Ideas that Bill Gates spawned in Microsoft's world domination era, from the mid 90s on. The great Bill idea was to put a database in Windows and build the file system on top ..

    They tried and failed to built a database file system, WinFS, which was curious considering that there was already such a file system available in BeOS and Microsoft had partnered with the Tron consortium, after failing to get it shutdown in America :)

    A BeOS type file system running on top of a real time OS like Tron would have been decades in front of the competition. Why the Tablet failed was lack of vision by the chief software visionary.

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/02/20/be_inc_sues_microsoft/

    http://www.birdhouse.org/beos/byte/29-10000ft/

    http://tronweb.super-nova.co.jp/msvshistfact.html

    http://www.redorbit.com/news/technology/12868/microsoft_teams_up_with_japanese_group_that_promotes_archrival_tron/

  25. Doug Glass
    Go

    "Early Adopter = ...

    ... reverse paid Beta tester."

  26. Anonymous Coward
    Facepalm

    Microsoft failed where apple prosper !

    I have a feeling that Mr Jobs seen the original Microsoft tablet and knew how to make it happen, and the Iphone was all part of the marketing plan for a tablet pc...

    the problem with a tablet pc or any new bit of kit is "WHY" as in why should I buy this? what will it do for me? and there was nothing that anyone could come up with that made a tablet a compelling purchase. I

    It wasn't that long ago, while carrying around a mp3 player, phone and PDA and a hand held games console that i thought that combining all four items together would be an awesome idea. By combining the 4 pieces of hardware and introducing a shop to buy software from was perfect compelling platform.

    It wasn't too long after the iphone appeared that the whispers of "wouldn't it be cool if this was bigger...." started and then the ipad was introduced...

    I cant help but think that the iphone was a stepping stone to the ipad and the concept of the ipad came first.

    face/palm because if only i had patented the idea of combining a phone/pda/mp3/games console.........

    1. TuckerJJ

      It did

      "I cant help but think that the iphone was a stepping stone to the ipad and the concept of the ipad came first."

      http://allthingsd.com/20100601/d8-video-steve-jobs-on-the-origins-of-the-ipad/

  27. Matt_payne666
    FAIL

    yawn... predictable

    even if you exclude the the new rage of tablets from RIM, Samsung, Asus, Apple, HTC, etc

    You can still buy a windows Tablet from off the top of my head, Panasonic, Dell, General Dynamics, Toshiba, Lenovo, HP, Acer and fujitsu

    Im not sure how many more you need to make them common? most tier one/vertical suppliers will sell you a tablet. its only the consumer dross from PC world and the like that doesnt include a tablet in thier lineup....

    1. RichyS
      FAIL

      Point

      Isn't that the point, though?

      While all these tier one suppliers will sell you a Windows tablet, hardly anyone is buying.

  28. Chris 171

    Ecosystem

    It is a buypad, apple just got there first, good/evil/brainwashing/koolade marketing gets card numbers. Put your customers on tenderhooks from he moment they join & the results are plain to see.

  29. Mike Flugennock

    seems like MS actually kinda had the right idea...

    ...at least regarding a tablet computer not needing a new custom OS.

    I can remember all that time the rumors were flying around about Apple's upcoming tablet computer, and I was thinking "hot damn, at last, a tablet with a letter-size live area which runs OSX, where I can fire up Photoshop, open a full letter-size window and sketch and doodle on it with a stylus the same way I do with a pencil or marker on my dead-tree sketch pad! Alright!" Of course, I probably wouldn't have been able to afford one right away as money's a bit tight these days, but still, knowing that one was available would've been ultra-cool.

    So, you can imagine my disappointment -- and slight disgust -- when what Apple gave us was a locked-down tablet running a funky custom OS with a walled-garden App Store subject to capricious censorship by His Steveness, and all the other bullshit that comes with owning an (spit) iPhone... and ludicrously expensive, at that. Mind you, if someone gave me one as a gift, I wouldn't turn it down, but I sure as hell wouldn't break my neck getting down to the shops to buy one.

    Just noticing, too, the photo in the link to the Lenovo ThinkPad X220T that Orlowski is reviewing -- wow, a laptop with a screen that pivots, and with stylus input, what a slick idea! Of course, there's the issue of the screen's single attachment point -- or, as some would likely call it, the single attachment point of failure -- where the screen pivots and which likely will see a lot of use and run the chance of breakage, but, still... what a cool-ass idea. As I'm a longtime old Mac freak, I'm not really in the market for a Lenovo -- or any new gear at all right now, sadly -- but I'm still keen to jump over there and read the review just to check it out and see what Orlowski thinks of it.

    .

    an Anonymous Coward sez on 07.02.11 @18:51gmt:

    "It wasn't too long after the iphone appeared that the whispers of "wouldn't it be cool if this was bigger...." started and then the ipad was introduced...

    I cant help but think that the iphone was a stepping stone to the ipad and the concept of the ipad came first."

    I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people said that about their iPhones early on. You may also be right about the iPhone being a proof-of-concept -- or a "technology demonstrator" as they say in the aerospace biz -- for the iPad. That said, I'm still royally pissed off about there not being an Apple tablet that runs OSX and normal OSX applications with stylus input. If they'd put that out instead of the frickin' iPad, -- and if I had the couple of thousand bucks to spare -- I'd actually be lined up outside the Apple Store at 4am along with the rest of those crazy-assed people.

  30. Christian Berger

    Main Problem: To expensive to start progress

    The problem is that such a hardware needs lots of minds to develop software. Great minds usually don't work for companies.

    Now if a tablet would have cost the same price a laptop cost, there would have been lots of people trying to find out how to actually do stuff on it.

    Todays tables are mostly popular since they are about the same price as a cheap laptop, not twice as expensive as an average one.

  31. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The Newton Lesson

    I think Apple has done so well in the fondle slab arena because it learned a lot of lessons from Newton, the most important being:

    - Not to release software until the hardware is ready (Apple would never dream of selling you a device that runs slow with software they've pre-installed)

    - Not to release a device until the infrastructure is there (GSM was new, maximum mobile data speeds were 9600bps and WiFi didn't exist when the Newton came out and consequently, there was not a lot you could do with your expensive new device).

    Of course, Apple did get one thing right with the Newton, as it always does: The UI! And this is an area where Microsoft has tended to struggle whenever trying to shift Windows away from the PC paradigm (though Windows Phone 7 does look quite good to me).

    Anyway, fast forward to today and we find processors, far removed in performance from what we had in the 90s running devices that would have been works of science fiction back then (and with more solid state memory than we had hard disk space "in the old days") and constantly connected to an information infrastructure that constantly increases the usefulness of these devices (whether it be on the app model or the cloud model).

  32. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    Flame

    "pads" have been around since the early 90's

    As has "PenWindows." It was *never* designed to actually *run* applications.

    It was designed to create enough FUD that killed the likes of Pen Softwares PenPoint, an OS designed from the group up to support tablets (on a 286 to boot).

    Job done.

    Fast forward 20 years.

    Laptops still tend to have s**t battery lives and are Windows pads *any* better?

    Not really. The design philosophy remains "Make it run Windows whatever on an x86 and hope the battery tech improves/MS lower the power consumption a bit."

    But hey if laptop/table Windows were heavily tweaked then *gasp* it would not *be* Windows.

    Bit like embedded Windows, only with more compatability.

    Perhaps the answer is a me-net of keyboard, mouse, pro-upable touch display and processor brick (with 8hr battery) which can be left on the floor out of site

    Clumsier than a laptop (to move) but looks a bit better when it's laid out.

    I know what a dynabook is. I know how far *any* of these are from it.

  33. John Fielder
    Headmaster

    where do i fit in?

    i still using a Palm, I am typing this a netbook running ubuntu 11.04 (I quite like Unity on a netbook). I think Apples attitude to its customers make Microsoft look progressive. I like Windows because I can plug just about anything into it (can't get my scanner to work on Linux)

    So, new adopter, old hardware adopter. Don't think Apple is a religion. Maybe I'm reading the wrong webpages.

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