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If that really is the price, they'll have a tough time competing with anything... I mean, the iPad is not badly priced for an Apple device, and the iPod Touch, whilst obviously being smaller and not having 3G, is still considerably cheaper.

Also, Archos have a few new Android devices out soon, one of which is sub-£100 (£99.99 I think!), which is probably more on a par with the iPod Touch (not the new 4th-Gen model, but the previous ones) in terms of spec, so not as good as the Galaxy Tab, but it's *FAR* cheaper.

The main down-side is that I _believe_ that Google only allow access to the Android App-store for phone type devices, so the Galaxy Tab would qualify where the Archos does not. I might be wrong about this though!!

Maybe if they fastened the laptop onto a Roomba or something that would have helped.

There are companies that offer such things. Probably impractical for the OP though.

Huh? I can't work out if you're serious or not. I wouldn't know how to shoe a horse, I'd take him to someone specially trained, and I completely disagree that the workings of software and hardware are becoming less clouded - if anything we're piling on layers of abstraction that remove the user from the underlying workings (a Facebook user doesn't need to know how the internet works, an internet user doesn't need to know how a browser works, a browser user doesn't care about the desktop, etc). Previously if you wanted to do anything reasonably complicated with a computer you either hired someone who knew their stuff or you got your hands dirty and figured it out yourself. Now we have users who believe they know what they're doing because they've been told they're the net generation getting confused because a site shows a picture of the Google search and they want to know why they can't use it to log in to Facebook. Does that sound like users are becoming more technically aware?

That's what I said when they wanted to add sound to pictures! Heresy, I say, heresy!

Heh. But sound and colour both caught on rapidly as soon as the techniques were discovered.

3D, on the other hand, has been around for 60 years without really taking off: They had 3D films (proper, polarised light ones too, not crappy red/green) at the Festival of Britain in 1951. There's a revival every 10 years or so since, but its always flash-in-the-pan.

So maybe, just maybe, there are good reasons for the skepticism, like the fact that only one person in the cinema is sitting in the right place to get the correct experience (and its migraine time for everybody else) the problem of clipping 3D objects to the screen (more migraine) and all of the "cinematographic language" using depth of field and focal length that has evolved over 100 years but which just doesn't make physical sense with 3D.

I suppose that the only difference this time round is that now home TV is seriously threatening cinema in terms of picture and sound quality (and the cinema chains are doing a good job of fucking up the social advantages) so the cinema is desperate for a gimmick, because we'll never have 3D on our home TVs (Oh, wait...)

I've often thought that the problem with OEMs selling Linux is that they try to sell it cheaper than Windows. I can't help thinking that Dell would be better shipping Ubuntu on their nicer looking hardware (e.g. Dell Vostro V13 which isn't expensive and it looks quite nice) and then charge a premium for it -- explain it isn't Windows, and explain it is a robust OS which is perfect for most home users. Because it is!

I mean... basically, this is what Apple does and it seems to be working well for them. Instead, pretty much all the OEMs see their margins getting squeezed and yet none seem to be able to think of any new ideas. Dell's best idea is to charge for customised covers for their machines... which isn't a bad idea, but really it isn't gone to save the company. And where Sony produce nice looking hardware, when netbooks started to take off, one of their execs stated that he thought it was the start of a "race to the bottom" because all he could see was a price war I guess.

And before anyone says... but then people would buy a Windows machine and install Ubuntu on it themselves... who cares? Dell would still profit either way and most users aren't smart enough to do that.