Loren Littlejohn
Lover of all boobage.
This is way worse than the macbook air. But hey at least you could slide that inside a manila envelope!!!!
I would rather save some money and score an ipod touch or something.
Heard of this? Apple "iSlate"
- Thread starter SocialNumb
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This is way worse than the macbook air. But hey at least you could slide that inside a manila envelope!!!!
I would rather save some money and score an ipod touch or something.
Hostility was not the intention there, sorry if it came across that way - when you're bashing the things for being 'gimmicky' and turning around to point out, as your favorite, a tablet with more things that appear gimmicky (like the new solution to a docking problem that never actually existed and switching *operating systems* mid-use) than any other tablet I've seen hyped lately, it seems like you're trying to pigeonhole the platform into the exact same 'fringe toy' category that you're complaining about tablets being in. The slate-mode interface can easily be a step up from the usual offerings, but it's yet another toy that's trying to fill two different, already-existing roles in an incoherent way.
As for concerns about being in the same room with me... that's a concern only shared by people running off of limited interaction, like this. If you're going to assume that I think you're a total idiot, brace yourself... I was expecting you to see the gap in the combination of posts above (the one I responded to, and the one that you assumed I hadn't read) where you gave a gimmick as the best example of something you're accusing of being gimmicky.
Jeff
This is way worse than the macbook air. But hey at least you could slide that inside a manila envelope!!!!
I would rather save some money and score an ipod touch or something.
Jeff
Loren Littlejohn
Lover of all boobage.
Bwahahaha.
That nut Jobs would do it to "Look for teh old people so they can see and typ lyke really easy, plus they can be in with the hip people YAAYYY!!!!"
That nut Jobs would do it to "Look for teh old people so they can see and typ lyke really easy, plus they can be in with the hip people YAAYYY!!!!"
"They're not moving quickly anyway, what the fuck do they care about weight and portability? Oh, and make the default wallpaper a Ronald Reagan collage!"
Jeff
Jeff
Bekanor
Renegade Folk Hero
What impressed me about the hybrid is the thinking behind it (in a manner of speaking), identifying very clear unfavourable qualities of a wholly touch interface in a general purpose computer, something which not many others seem to be doing. I agree that their solution is heavy handed at best and will almost certainly create more irritation than it alleviates (I can't imagine hot swapping between the two operating systems being a smooth process) but as a conceptual example I think it represents a good way to go to make tablet PCs a viable choice over a laptop as a general use portable computer.
If you can combine the easier navigation tablets have over laptops (I'll take a touch screen over a trackball or one of those god awful glossy touch pads every laptop being made seems to have) with the more efficient data entry a traditional keyboard design has over a touch screen then you've bridged a very important gap and suddenly the idea of a portable, truly do-all electronic device becomes more and more a reality.
I suppose it is wrong of me to call them gimmicky, purpose ultimately defines that sort of thing. Strictly within the bounds of a general consumer gadget though they seem only to exist as extensions of existing technologies rather than a life of their own, for lack of a better term. I can see them serving purposes for the average consumer, portable computers, personal media players etc, but try as I might I can't think of an application for them in terms of general consumer use that isn't already being serviced by an existing technology, placing them in something of a technological grey area where you trade the inherent shortcomings of the device you are replacing with the tablet PC for the shortcomings inherent in the tablet PC.
At this point it's relevant to question the very concept of a do-all device, is it even possible to implement such a concept with uniform success or by definition will its various functions always be individually out-performed by purpose specific devices?
I think the first thing to fix would be the interfaces - away from Windows and I can set up interfaces much more appropriate for tablets and touch-screens, but Windows is still shoving the same tired idea that didn't even manage keyboards and mice well, and somehow Apple forgot that it wasn't the bloody 1970s.
With that hybrid... we already have plenty of decent slates that don't try to look like the designs Apple threw away years ago mixed with the clunkiness that leads to so many slate bases gathering dust. None of the 'innovations' seemed to be solving problems of any kind, or really doing anything but making arbitrary changes for their own sake. On the topic of do-all devices... the problem I have here is that we're looking at two dissimilar things hastily pasted together - combine a coffee grinder with a percolator and you have a decent hybrid, but this seems closer to a coffee grinder that doubles as a baby monitor in a hamster ball.
There are lots of uses where a keyboard and mouse aren't necessary or don't make much sense... a few of them have popped up. Another is media control and similar things (unless you're constantly obsessing over which Anal Cunt track comes up next, fatigue from extended use isn't a problem), where our UI designs have been moving farther away from keyboard control for some time. We're already seeing various entries there - the iCan'tCallThisAPhoneAnymore and relatives and a Linux touchscreen-equipped netbook that should be shipping soon - and there's still the awkward straddle between 'Hey, I'm an unusually heavy, delicate, and expensive lapt- no, no, don't go away, I'm also everything you hated about an Etch-A-Sketch but now with drivers issues - but that's okay because my screen spins halfway around! Whee!" Since putting a keyboard on the screen might not work too well, and handwriting recognition is (and always will be) abysmal, maybe the best idea is to find more uses that *aren't* already done better by other devices. If cell phones, all-in-one email/internet/office/bumscratching suites, or... well, any modern technology had been as bloated as ours when it was first introduced, nothing would have taken off and we'd be laughing at warehouses full of IBM PC Jr. Computing, Toasting, and Hardware Storage Solutions on the way to buy stamps and make change for pay phones.
The phenomenon doesn't seem to be unique to tablets... whenever anything new comes out people always jump to the uses that don't make sense. (How often are we hearing people complaining about netbooks being underpowered, despite the clear fact that *nobody* with a clue could expect high-end desktop performance? Hint... if you want to do heavy processing, *secure shell to a powerful machine* - I'm sorry to hear about your severe allergy to the obvious, but if you took the same bitchiness to car talk we'd hear complaints about how tailpipes should be self-lubricating. An entire class of products with their own benefits are being derided for no good reason for not living up to standards that don't make any sense.) It may be hard to get anything done until we kill that.
Jeff
With that hybrid... we already have plenty of decent slates that don't try to look like the designs Apple threw away years ago mixed with the clunkiness that leads to so many slate bases gathering dust. None of the 'innovations' seemed to be solving problems of any kind, or really doing anything but making arbitrary changes for their own sake. On the topic of do-all devices... the problem I have here is that we're looking at two dissimilar things hastily pasted together - combine a coffee grinder with a percolator and you have a decent hybrid, but this seems closer to a coffee grinder that doubles as a baby monitor in a hamster ball.
There are lots of uses where a keyboard and mouse aren't necessary or don't make much sense... a few of them have popped up. Another is media control and similar things (unless you're constantly obsessing over which Anal Cunt track comes up next, fatigue from extended use isn't a problem), where our UI designs have been moving farther away from keyboard control for some time. We're already seeing various entries there - the iCan'tCallThisAPhoneAnymore and relatives and a Linux touchscreen-equipped netbook that should be shipping soon - and there's still the awkward straddle between 'Hey, I'm an unusually heavy, delicate, and expensive lapt- no, no, don't go away, I'm also everything you hated about an Etch-A-Sketch but now with drivers issues - but that's okay because my screen spins halfway around! Whee!" Since putting a keyboard on the screen might not work too well, and handwriting recognition is (and always will be) abysmal, maybe the best idea is to find more uses that *aren't* already done better by other devices. If cell phones, all-in-one email/internet/office/bumscratching suites, or... well, any modern technology had been as bloated as ours when it was first introduced, nothing would have taken off and we'd be laughing at warehouses full of IBM PC Jr. Computing, Toasting, and Hardware Storage Solutions on the way to buy stamps and make change for pay phones.
The phenomenon doesn't seem to be unique to tablets... whenever anything new comes out people always jump to the uses that don't make sense. (How often are we hearing people complaining about netbooks being underpowered, despite the clear fact that *nobody* with a clue could expect high-end desktop performance? Hint... if you want to do heavy processing, *secure shell to a powerful machine* - I'm sorry to hear about your severe allergy to the obvious, but if you took the same bitchiness to car talk we'd hear complaints about how tailpipes should be self-lubricating. An entire class of products with their own benefits are being derided for no good reason for not living up to standards that don't make any sense.) It may be hard to get anything done until we kill that.
Jeff
Bekanor
Renegade Folk Hero
I guess that's where I'm having trouble here, trying to get my head around what paradigm the tablet will sit in in terms of the general consumer. I guess it's enough to just be a choice in portable computing but the kind of numbers they seem to be expecting (at least going off the fact that every major manufacturer is cramming a tablet onto the market) would suggest some kind of technological revolution that I've missed somewhere.
look Bekanor, jeff is practically an icon here on the Sneap forum... you can bounce in here and try to play the iconoclast if you want, but don't expect too much support, because by and large the rest of us all expect and enjoy his unique way with words, even when we don't agree with him. deal with it however you like, but cut the name-calling.
Bekanor
Renegade Folk Hero
Not much related, but this week Gates announced that he will donate over $10 billion for vaccine research on diseases that affects poor countries. Those overlooked by the big drug laboratories because the population can´t afford to buy the medicine. Or ridiculous iPads.
Gates > Jobs.
Gates > Jobs.
Bekanor
Renegade Folk Hero
Bekanor
Renegade Folk Hero
I guess that's where I'm having trouble here, trying to get my head around what paradigm the tablet will sit in in terms of the general consumer. I guess it's enough to just be a choice in portable computing but the kind of numbers they seem to be expecting (at least going off the fact that every major manufacturer is cramming a tablet onto the market) would suggest some kind of technological revolution that I've missed somewhere.
One thing to note is that touch-screen things have already been in wide use for longer than tablets as we see them today - I'm really wondering if we'll go away from the 'one-device-fits-all' mentality, because every big unification seems to see at least a few splinters along with it and even the most technically impressive unifications (like the 'smartphones') don't see as much adoption as one who expected unification would predict.
The next places that I think tablets, in their current form and without any completely new and mind-blowing programs, could take over are schools and offices - when the price goes farther down (far enough that losing a little unused power isn't a dealbreaker for institutions that would be deploying computers anyway) and more kinks are worked out of the bazillions of ways we're trying to automate filesharing and collaboration, you've cut out the need to spend an hour in an 'office productivity' (*cringe*) suite when a few paragraphs and a reasonable graph could be hand-drawn and distributed in minutes.
Journal software isn't where it could be, but even a handful of changes from idiotic default behavior could make a difference - in the last Windows journal offering that I used, for example, the default behavior prevented basic things like the 'lassoing' selection to work because someone decided that converting squiggles to text seemed like a higher priority. I could go on for far too long on this boneheaded move, but it suffices to say that *these are devices with keyboards* and the mindset that seems to be behind such nonsense is stopping a lot of things from changing because they're just expecting to have another thing that wants to be a different input device and fails.
Finally, as anyone with half a head could predict, price drops will really help - I tend to get several-year-old tablets for about $200 instead of spending ten times as much, but for people who aren't prepared to take their 'new' computer apart and swap half of the parts out that's not always an option. They've been falling, and will continue to do so - but when the tablet functionality itself is a common option priced low enough that 'average consumers' (whatever those are) are strongly tempted to think "Oh, hell with it, I'm spending a gazillion dollars on this thing anyway, why not go for the extra $SLIGHTCHANGEINLASTTWODIGITSOFPRICE and give it a shot?", instead of having to actively seek the option out and pay a three-digit markup, I expect to see some kind of snowball effect.
Jeff
I got your problem right here, tough guy...
... it turns out you have tail cancer. The cheese sandwich probably won't help too much. However, you do have about three days left, so you could probably make a hell of a lot of cheese sandwiches and hope that the shotgun approach works...
Jeff
Bekanor
Renegade Folk Hero
With that example it would seem like the do-all device will forever be a pipe dream, either due to limitations of technologies involved or simply good old fashioned market apathy. Having said that, it wasn't long before features unique to smart phones started appearing in mid-level models, which would suggest that people don't really want a do-all device, just the bits and pieces from one that best suit their needs.
Even something like the Kindle could be an awesome conference tool, essentially replacing all hard copy media for any given presentation. I would say that a tablet PC would be a bit of an overkill for that purpose but the symbiotic nature of technology and purpose could see conferences changing fundamentally with the implementation of tablets and go beyond the standard issue powerpoint slideshow and paper handouts format that bores everybody to hell.
I used to work in a cell phone store doing product demonstrations and boy did my life suck when somebody wanted to check out the handwriting recognition software on HTC touch phones. I wasn't actually allowed to say anything negative about any phone or any aspect of any phone and the technology was quite obviously piss poor. So there I am smiling and trying to dance around their very legitimate concerns regarding this over-hyped, inept feature. Good times.
I'm guessing it won't take long for price drops to occur as manufacturers face a very oversaturated market supply wise and run out of ideas to otherwise compete.
