Posts by uhuznaa 366 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Nov 2007
The thing is that modern smartphones have totally moved away from being phones. They're internet and application and game platforms with a phone app somewhere on them. And it's very hard to just try to follow a trend and not to look as if you're just following a trend.
RIM has the problem of being good in a market segment that is eating the dust generated by another market segment taking off big style. There *are* people who want just a good phone with good business functionality, though. On the other hand, this is not a growing market even with business users. RIM is in a really awkward position right now.
Leaking pictures this way to keep things interesting, yes. But leaking a full device (even a prototype) into the hands of the media several months before Apple announces the thing... never.
Apple will totally hate this. If that is the real thing, there will be hardly anything left to announce later.
You might want to manage such an appliance, others just want to use the thing and not manage it.
Personally I very much like the iPad, but there are a few things that really suck about it. For me this is the fact that it still needs to be wired to a host computer (for syncing, updating, printing) and the totally crazy inability to get files on and off it without going through a nightmare of iTunes or individual apps with computer-side server apps and Internet based services, which still lead to every file you get being imprisoned in that very app. This isn't user-friendly, it's raving madness.
You use dropbox to get a file from your PC/Mac and then you want to upload it into a web form with Safari and you can't get at the fscking file which is on your device *and* out in the cloud! You feel like being served a tasty soup with one hand tied behind your back and a fork in the other hand. Smells good but how do you eat it? And there is no indication that this will change with OS 4.0 which will arrive in half a year on the iPad. No, thanks. I had some hope that with that giant datacenter and the shared folder support in the 3.2 betas all this would change but it didn't. No trace of shared folder support in 3.2 and 4.0 beta. Vaporized.
I think this is the first time I will *not* get an Apple device for the reason of it being user-unfriendly. As Einstein said: "Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler". This thing is just too simple.
I love the idea but hate the implementation.
And I still don't want to manage my appliances.
most Android apps are optimized for phone-sized screens and will look and feel rather lost on a huge screen. They will consist of lots of empty space with a toolbar in a corner. There won't be much support for keyboard shortcuts either.
I think Android is a good choice for not too large tablets with a touchscreen, but for netbooks and such it's a stretch.
Yeah, I know. I have had phone batteries fall flat in no time at all. But the battery in my MacBook and my iPod touch (which is three years old now) seem to be very carefully cared for by the charging electronics -- both still work as new. Especially the iPod battery does really impress me, since I use that thing every day and charge it accordingly often.
I know I may sound like a fanboi, but Apple is now talking about 1000 full cycles before the capacity is down to 80%. With the iPad (10 hours on a charge) this should be enough for about 6 years.
Most of you sound like boys of eleven being dismayed that your 14 years old friends aren't interested in your games anymore because they're after girls and other more grown-up things now and just can't be bothered. Shame on them! Suckers! Hey, let's play with our PCs a little bit more! Or smell a book! Maybe there're girls in one of them.
I don't know if I should laugh or cry when I see people reading and busily commenting on an article they read on a computer screen and then -- praising books and telling me that I can't possibly read on a LCD screen. I read 8 hours a day on a LCD screen and then I read a book for one hour or three on another LCD screen and I'm still not blind.
And let me tell you, I'm sick of PCs and computers. Give me something that lets me surf the web and read things and play games without even having to think about the OS and files and whatnot and I will gladly use it whenever I can. Which won't be all of the time but every minute not wasted with all too visible technology counts. It was interesting for the first ten or twenty years but all of this has been getting quite a bore for some time already.
I think the problems with existing tablet PCs were weight, battery, and an OS that was totally tailored towards a keyboard and a mouse.
Anyway, the notion that tablets will be forgotten next year seems a bit strange. Many people are already quite happy with smartphones for most of their computing/online needs and something like a smartphone or a PDA with a large screen makes a lot of sense to them. Having a full PC squeezed into a tablet with no keyboard may be the right thing for others but those just might be better off with a netbook indeed.
I think "real" tablets will either be simple ebook-readers or something like big smartphones running Android (or the iPhone OS). A tablet running Windows 7 is not much more than a netbook with no keyboard and has all the disadvantages of a PC with the added disadvantage of a missing keyboard.
Has anyone noticed yet that Apple is having trouble to find out how to do this right? There has been no such ecosystem before. The market for PC apps is and ever has been a jungle with all the good and the bad things around. Apple tries to come up with something more friendly and civilized and it's just clear that they're making things up as they go.
There are no clear rules because Apple doesn't know which rules work and which do not work. Noone does. Porn is a huge market and a shady one, too. There's good and often also very easy money in it. They have to do something here or there will be a flood of such apps, pissing customers off. They're experimenting. Give them some time or just ignore them or whatever.
As long as Apple doesn't start to censor the websites you view with Safari or the pictures and movies you sync to it, complaining about "censorship" is just absurd.
I could fully understand any company that comes up with a web-only phone or tablet now. Then you get not only "clean" apps, you get no apps at all and nobody can complain. Problem solved.
This was found in the third beta version of the iPad SDK and was obviously not there in this form in the first and second beta. I can't imagine Apple adding things to the OS and SDK at this stage which may be needed only in some later version of the hardware. My guess is that either the 3G version of the iPad will have a camera or all iPads will have one when delivered. Or there will be some kind of support for external webcams.
I think you could add a simple case to the iPad and a stylus that works with the capacitive screen and would have something that works totally fine in a hospital or industrial environment. And would still be lighter, smaller and cheaper than most specialized slates.
This thing certainly is a consumer device, but it will still hit the vertical markets like a bomb, believe me. Even the dreaded app store is actually something many specialized companies are eying with envy, since it could eliminate a huge part of the installation, licensing and update nightmares you have to deal with in such settings.
The problem of course is that then you had to port your software to it and since nobody in their right mind even thinks of that you'll have newcomers to the market who will leave many established companies shivering.
Say about the one-app-at-a-time-no-multitasking philosophy of the iPhone/iPad what you will but that picture says it all.
I want something that just turns totally into what the current app makes it into. If I want to read a book, I want to hold a book in my hand and not a device running an OS displaying a desktop containing windows one of which displays controls and content areas in which I can read a book. For two hours. After booting it. On the train. Thanks, no.
When these things are down to $99 ask me again. And I think ebooks also won't really take off as long as they cost as much as paper books.
I currently use an iPod touch for reading and while I think the screen could be a bit larger I have no problems with the screen being no e-ink. And the thing is (relatively) dirt-cheap AND it can do so much more. I have no doubt that the iPad will hit the ebook-market like nothing before.
Not the same, really. MS did something very similar with their Courier video. It surely looked impressive (much more than that Google thing actually) but when you looked closer it clearly was MADE to impress and nothing else. It was full of gestures and hidden features nobody would find without studying a manual, every gesture was doing something different in every app and it totally relied on perfect handwriting recognition all over the place.
Making things look great in a video is not the same as making things that are great to use. When I saw that video I instantly knew that MS is lightyears away from actually delivering anything in this realm. I don't know about Google. Making a tablet that runs an OS that runs nothing but a browser is easy but to make it do something useful may be not so easy.
I think a case like that from Apple makes sense here, especially when you can also use it as a stand.
Apart from that: I've been using an iPod touch (1G) for more than two years now, with no case or any protection at all, and the screen is like new. I daily throw it into pockets or bags without even thinking of it and the glass is just fine, there's not a single scratch. I suppose it may be different with plastic screens, though.
I know that such a tiny device like the touch may be a bit different from a real (larger) tablet but it surely has managed to just vaporise most reservations I might have had back then. About the only things I kept missing were a larger screen and a bit more speed. What I surely was NOT missing is doing everything with web apps in a browser (*shudder*).
Hmm, I don't understand that article. First the 3G models have no simlock, so you can buy and use any plan you like. Then, the announced prices for data plans weren't at all shabby for the US, especially as they are prepaid with no contract. They're dirt-cheap, actually.
In fact I think that Apple is actually really screwing with the providers here. They will *hate* that thing.
Multitasking: Well. If the thing is fast enough and all apps save their state and you use the home screen as a kind of task switcher, where is the difference? Yes, you can't have apps of your choice running in the background, but in reality for 95% of apps this is useless anyway. If the apps run fullscreen and restore their state what do you care about them running or not? You can see and use only one app at a time anyway. The battery and RAM though *will* care. If Apple can get some framework up to allow things (not necessarily full apps) running in the background for selected things, this might be not that a bad way to use the available resources. I think resisting the urge to go the seemingly easy way and do it as all others do it is something only Apple has the balls to.
And iWork together with the keyboard-dock (and the ability to connect BT-keyboards) really goes a long way to make this more than just a toy. You can at least work a bit on documents, spreadsheets and presentations while travelling somewhere and don't have to lug a laptop. And there is a VGA adapter (1024x768), too. I bet there will be many people finding that between all this their need for a laptop may be not so urgent at all.
I'm really surprised about all this sneering. This is a clever device and nothing less than useless. Yes, being locked into the appstore isn't great, but being locked into the Intel MS world isn't much better and I have the feeling that exactly this (doesn't run Windows apps -> useless) is exactly what many people hate about it.
The comments, I mean: "It's just for retard consumers and girls! Stupid end users! You can't do real work on it!! And it has no Flash, so I will never buy it!!!
Delicious.
By the way: There is a rather cool keyboard-dock for it and you can also use BT keyboards. And there will be iWork for it. I think for the average home or casual user (or a geek in casual mode) this is quite a perfect thing to have. Especially since there will (judging from the iPhone and the iPod touch) be exactly zero effort required to keep the thing running and happy and configured. And it seems to run on a charge for 10 hours and keeps up in standby for a month.
I really can't see what's wrong with that. Even the name reminds me much more of the IBM Thinkpad than of female items. But probably all the "geeks" here have never heard about a "Thinkpad".
Well done, Apple.
I have never understood what's so great about nursing along your tools all day long. I work with and at computers and software 10 to 12 hours a day and I'm rather happy when I can just use something for a change. But that's just me, probably.
If it's good enough for IBM ("Thinkpad") it should be good enough for Apple...
And I have no doubt that Apple will come with something really great that is lightyears ahead of the competition. And I also have no doubt that all the Apple haters will come out of the woodwork and tell the world that tap-water is totally fine to drink and no one needs that new thing "tea", which is basically just water anyway and much too expensive and will be an epic fail.
I'm totally sick of the fact that in 2010 in the Word Wide Web still the majority of publications doesn't care for the fact that there are, like, time-zones and not all readers sit in the same one as you. Come on, is it that hard to have a tiny piece of code you throw a exact time specification and which returns dynamically a time delta instead? As in "in five hours from now"?
This is one of these things that show that all that fine technology is wasted if you don't use it in a way that makes things simpler instead of more complex. I mean, hardly any page in the web now is created as static HTML and having a function to use that adds a relative time count to such things shouldn't be harder than writing one line of code.
The 70% number is not picked at random. Statistics for most countries are a few years old, but most come up with about two thirds of the population using a computer at home. In Germany it was 70% in 2007, three years ago. It's not geeks and professionals shaping this anymore. It's consumers and casual users who care not at all about "computers". But you're right, almost nobody in the industry understands this. As I always say, they don't even understand the problem.
Then, yes, people *have* to type now and then, if they like it or not. But a 10" virtual keyboard is not the same as an iPhone and there is also room enough for an office type application. And you might be able to attach an BT or USB keyboard anyway. Or just use a PC for that if you have to.
Another number: In the US alone people send 4 billion text messages each day. From cellphones. With number pads (most of them). Do you really think people need PC keyboards for writing?
I think you're just a victim of selection bias. Most people don't write much and don't enjoy it. And most people even don't like to have several windows on the screen, they find it confusing and, well, ugly. They want to see what they're looking at and nothing else. They don't enjoy to stare at complex technology. Again, if I say "most people" I don't mean "most professional IT workers" or "most secretaries" or "most programmers". I mean "most of the about 70% of the population that uses computers at home".
People care a fuck about "computers". They want the Internet, music, movies, porn, games and straight, inexpensive, single-purpose apps that are fun to use.
One thing that professionals and geeks will never understand is this: The majority of people now use computers mainly to consume anyway. They hate PCs, they hate keyboards, lids and trackpads, they can't touch-type, they hate buttons, they hate complex operating systems, GUIs and software and they are perfectly willing to use crappy keypads on mobile phones to type billions of text messages each day. Between all this they will LOVE tablets. Anyone doubting this is part of a small minority. Anyone even bothering to write comments on articles in the web is part of that minority. The majority does not think that writing coherent paragraphs of text is fun. That's hard work to them and they like to avoid it and to have an excuse to fire off a short half-sentence instead.
People want to consume music, videos and the web, and they want to play games and use simple apps. They buy PCs because there is no other option, not because they like anything about these PCs. In fact they hate most of what makes up a PC, both in hard- and software. As a personal or home computer tablets will be what comes after the desktop PC and the laptop. The keyboard will go the way of the floppy and the contemporary UI with overlapping windows will go the way of the textmode interface. The very same people who always use the mouse to click the OK button instead of hitting return will be happy to do away with the mouse and tap the OK button with their finger instead. And they also will be happy to not have to click the maximize button on every window anymore, since every app will use the full screen anyway.
And there is nothing wrong with that.
I agree that publishers aren't useless and they do quite a bit to make a book out of some text. But still this is just a service and not something that should earn them a larger part of the profits than the author gets. The major thing that a publisher does is to get the thing onto the shelves of the bookstores and while this is also just a kind of service this is one you can hardly get elsewhere. Self-publishing a book is lots of work, but possible. Selling it is almost impossible.
The thing is that in fact books are just products for a certain market and the publishers treat the authors as suppliers of a minor service to these products they (the publishers) produce. And it is this market that starts shaking right now. Authors won't go away and readers won't go away but nobody can say who will be between them in the future.
What's really needed is some shop that takes the publishers out of the equation and instead connects authors and readers. If you (as an author) dare to publish an ebook wrapped in an app in the Apple AppStore, *you* get 70%. Go through a publisher and you (as an author) get about 5%.
I hereby foresay that there is a *huge* market for articles, short stories and books written and published by indy authors, using the net and ebook-readers and tablets as a platform. What this needs of course is something replacing the filter function of publishers (most people who think they can write can't) but there may be solutions for that.
E-ink screens are bloody awful for any kind of application that does more than displaying static things to look at and page through. The kindle has only very limited controls, too. And 100kb a month is nothing. I'm sure there are a few interesting things you can do with this platform but for the mass market there won't be many of them. Well, sometimes tight limitations are good for coming up with clever ideas...
Whatever Apple comes up with will *not* brag with "20 hours runtime in standby" like other tablets (which is a joke when you need to shut down the thing over night because otherwise the battery will be half empty in the morning). Booting sucks even with notebooks and a tablet should need to reboot only when you update the OS. Click on, use, click off. Instant-on is one thing that really needs to be there with these things and I really doubt Apple would bother with a tablet if they hadn't solved this. And they're really good at power management anyway.
I may sound like a fanboi but I really expect something really thin, really great and with a battery life that blows the other tablets out of the water. Otherwise it may be just a big iPhone with some twist to it, I don't care.
This thing looks awfully slow. And the fact that the e-ink display has no way to show any animation or visual feedback but just changes the display one or two seconds after you touched the screen somewhere makes me think that it is prone to drive the user up the wall. E-ink is just wrong for complex user interfaces and especially for touchscreens. Having to wait a few seconds to see what happens (if anything) after you did something is not the way to make touchscreens work in a useful way.
Otherwise a good idea, of course.
Every now and then someone comes and says "These things are totally useless for real work and will fail!". Now, who speaks of work? These things are for CONSUMERS. Right now about two thirds of the population uses computers at home and all of them are using computers that are designed for work and for offices. And what are these things used for? Not for work, believe me. There's a huge market out there that just waits for something. And this is not keyboardless netbooks running Windows 7.
There are indeed lots of companies that sell services to developers for exactly that. You can rely on the fact that lots (if not most) of the more professional apps are sending usage patterns and even location data to some central servers. I'd agree with you that this is somewhat unnerving.
On the other hand, every device and every software that uses "the cloud" does that to a certain degree. And this is not exactly new, every webserver and every mailserver knows when and with what software you access it. As long as this data isn't personalized this is something you'll just have to live with.
You may not believe it but my impression with "normal" people is that almost everyone knows about the iPhone but hardly anyone knows about the iPod touch being very much the same thing just with no phone (and no monthly costs). I had to explain this uncounted times and everyone got extremely curious then. They usually think "iPod" and then "music" and then "well, got a player already". When you show them that you can browse the web and check your email and play games and read books on the thing, you practically see gears starting to move in their heads and hear things clicking into place.
If you wouldn't belong to the 7% internet users who actually *do* something (like writing comments) but to the remaining 93% who just *consume* and hardly ever type anything else than a search string for Google or maybe a once-sentence email you'd immediately see what a tablet is about.
People hate keyboards, they hate buttons, they hate overlapping windows and multitasking and they *dread* settings screens and options and licence numbers. They want a shiny, buttonless device they can look at and where they can tap at things to have a closer look and they want a simple one-stop shop to buy cheap things that just work then. And each day, when my work is done, I want one too. I want technology that looks like magic, because all technology that doesn't is just bad technology. God, it's nearly 2010 and what most companies are trying to sell us is just 20th century stuff with a fresh coat of paint. Without Apple and their loyal iSheep-army smartphones today would have 102 keys on the keypad and would come with a floppy drive.
I mean, yes, I get it. Weeks of use without charging. But do I need that? A rather basic TFT display with some low-power CPU and graphics chip can easily be made to run 8 hours or so on a single charge. And it is cheaper, much faster and more capable. I don't read more than a few hours in a row and I have to charge other gadgets, too. I'm familiar with that. I'm not used to unusable menu-systems, a second for a screen refresh and hardly any feedback on the screen.
I've read more than 120 books now on my iPod touch (using Stanza) and I'm quite happy with it (obviously, because I wouldn't read so much with it otherwise). The screen could be a bit larger, but otherwise I wouldn't even think of buying a device that can just read books and is slow and awkward and then not even cheap.
I think these things either need to get much cheaper very soon or they will go down as a footnote to IT history very soon. Pure book lovers are few and far between, most people like their glossy magazines and colourful pictures and maybe even something moving on the screen now and then.
I think the ebook market will come in two variants: Either very cheap and basic, so the readers can be given away almost for nothing or not so cheap but really good and book-like: With books having a real layout and nice fonts and a cover and pictures. The current readers are expensive, basic and boring. Books are more than just bytes and if you reduce them to just that better make sure they're really cheap.
I always think it's endlessly amusing that some say nobody is interested in an Apple tablet, but there're nearly daily new articles discussing it in detail (with no details available) and these articles draw comments like no others.
In case you haven't noticed: Apple is building the hype right now and you're part of it. When (if) this thing is finally announced, worlds will crumble, companies will struggle to be part of it and people will buy the thing like crazy.
And while I share the concerns of all critics of DRM-infested content the fact remains that print publishers are really desperate right now. They're catching at every straw and if there's a straw that's actually an Apple branded log... I don't think there's a shortage of print publishers who would give an arm and a leg to be in the same position as the music industry with regards to the iTunes store.
There is no need to scale things up for more resolution. You can just get more room on the screen with more pixels, with same (or slightly larger) sized controls and more room for content. Vector based graphics have nothing to do with that.
And I think you're totally mistaken if you think that people really want "full functionality tablets". Most people hate the complexity of regular computers, Operating Systems and applications. The want to get things done and have fun, with the technology and software not getting in the way. They certainly don't want to get the "full PC experience" in a mobile device. Even the thought of "getting the full PC experience" while sitting on a train and viewing a movie or reading a book makes most people shudder with disgust.
I know that many experts and not-so experts will never understand it, but exactly this is the problem. Most people don't like PCs and notebooks, they just use them because they have no choice. Give them something more simple and elegant to do their things and they will happily embrace it. Make it fun and sleek looking and a joy to use and they will love it. Give them an easy to use app-store instead of multi-page installation wizards and registration numbers and they even may start to buy software and games for it.
I do not know which OS will run on that tablet, if that tablet will come. But Apple has always warned developers to *not* rely on the iPhone screen resolution and in fact the SDK is quite agnostic in this regard. There's no reason to assume that iPhone apps will look "pixelated". Many will have to be adapted to make use of more pixels, but basically they should just offer more room for documents and lists and so on with less room occupied by UI elements. They won't be the same apps, but it should be rather easy to port existing iPhone apps to a larger screen with more pixels if the OS and SDK is basically the same.
Good old OS X isn't really suited for a touch screen. There's too much going on, UI elements are too small to be used with fingers and it is quite deeply married to keyboard shortcuts and a mouse. I would rather expect an OS very like the iPhone OS, with many things borrowed from Snow Leopard and adapted to a touchscreen. I wouldn't even be surprised if the whole Snow Leopard thing is part of a larger and long-term plan involving portable touchscreen devices. And while I don't know if MS has such a thing as a long-term plan, I'm pretty bloody sure that Apple has one.
I'm convinced since years that the future of personal computing will be in pads or tablets with a touchscreen and that in not too many years the physical keyboard will be something that only clerks and writers and programmers will use. Apple seems to look at this in very much the same way. We will see. If the tablet indeed will come next month, Apple will have a clean headstart here and all the others will eat the dust...
I mean, really. How many people apart from office-workers, professional writers and programmers can touch-type to any usable degree? How many of all those people having read this article bothered to write a comment? (I've read not long ago that about 7% of all internet users are "active" users actually doing things instead of just consuming). How much do "normal" people actually *write* on their netbooks? At least 90% of computer time is *consuming* stuff or doing things which involve moving a tiny arrow around on a screen and clicking the mouse. A touchscreen in a tablet is not only totally fine here, it's even vastly better. And getting rid of the lid and the nasty form-factor of the classic opened laptop will be a relief for most people, even if they don't know it yet.
One gets the impression that Apple is the only one actually bothering with looking at the statistics while others just don't care and do as they always did, even if it has long ago stopped to make any sense. How else could even the latest and most modern netbooks still come with the inmortal SysRq key? There was a time when computer users where office clerks or scientists or programmers. These times are long over now, but the manufacturers just haven't noticed. Or if they have noticed they think offering a model with a pink lid is all that's needed. It isn't.
Do you know about the indian monkey trap? You hollow out a coconut, cut a small hole into it, put some food into it and fasten the device to a tree. The monkey will wriggle in its hand, grab the food -- and can't get its hand out anymore. The more it panics, the less it sees the obvious thing to do. The PC-manufacturers are like this monkey. They always need someone to show them the obvious thing to do. If Apple comes with a tablet, six months later netbooks with a keyboard won't be the rule anymore, they will be the exception.
I'm not a fanboi and Apple surely is not a company of holy men. But they seem to have the expertise and confidence to sit back and stare hard and long at a problem and try to come up with well done products even if they take years to develop. This is so rare nowadays that you just have to admire them a bit. Everyone else just looks at what the others do and tries to do more of the same as quick as possible.
At least since all these netbook platforms became common dozens of manufacturers could have just stripped the keyboard, include a touchscreen and sell tablets. The platform and the hardware is there since years and it's cheap.
That netbooks are mostly used for consuming things (video, music, photos, browsing/reading, email, simple games) is nothing you need a Steve Jobs to realise. That a touchscreen even with a basic on-screen keyboard is enough to type in passwords, credit card numbers, search strings or short text snippets is also evident. But what did all the manfacturers of all this netbooks do? They sat on their hands and waited until Apple just does what Apple always does: Do the obvious and do it good. I can just see even now that the Apple tablet will hit them out of the blue sky and they will start whining and then copying. As if nobody could have seen it coming. It's just pathetic.
Asus, Acer, Dell and so on could have had dirt-cheap netbook-based tablets out for at least a year. You can buy literally hundreds of slightly different netbook models but not *one* that is a tablet. You can see users of these things sitting in trains and in pubs and elsewhere fighting with tiny trackpads and hardly ever using the keyboards, but still every single one of these silly things has a crappy tiny trackpad, crappy hinges and lids and a crappy keyboard that most people only use to hit return instead of having to navigate the cursor to the "OK" button with that bloody trackpad. Or to use the cursor keys for scrolling instead of navigating to the scroll bar.
I'm pretty sure that Apple was praying for Asus, Acer, Dell and others not seeing the obvious in the last two years. Well, they never see the obvious, it's almost as if they have a blind spot in that place.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
