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MSI Will Launch iPad Alternative
itwbennett writes "Underwhelmed by the iPad? Don't give up on tablets just yet, says blogger Peter Smith. MSI has a tablet coming in the second half of 2010 that measures up on price and size and addresses a lot of the iPad's most noted shortcomings. 'The iPad runs iPhone OS while the MSI runs Android,' writes Smith. 'That means the MSI will multitask of course, and Flash support in Android should be a given by launch time (though that isn't certain). It has a camera. It's running on an Nvidia Tegra2 chip which Ars Technica suggests puts it on par with the iPad's A4 as far as computing horsepower. And of course Android doesn't live in a walled garden.'" The post notes that the MSI device does not support multitouch in its built-in apps. Still, would an Android-powered iPad-alike tempt you?
Update: 01/29 17:58 GMT by KD : Dave Altavilla suggests Hot Hardware's coverage of Asus's recently announced tablet, also based on the Tegra2 chip.
Update: 01/29 17:58 GMT by KD : Dave Altavilla suggests Hot Hardware's coverage of Asus's recently announced tablet, also based on the Tegra2 chip.
While Apple may prove that it is indeed possible to put a better-than-TN LCD panel in a small (laptop-like) form factor, MSI would do well to follow the lead on quality.
That might provoke Lenovo to bring something back to their laptops that has been missing for a while.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
I've yet to see a compelling reason to pay more for a tablet. My Acer Aspire cost less than any tablet I've seen yet but does quite a bit more. The only thing it is missing is the touch component but I have yet to find an app that makes me care.
If someone comes out with a tablet that is prices competitively with notebooks and has the same level of features, I'd think about it more seriously.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
http://bonkel.wordpress.com/2008/05/28/windows-7-and-kde4-multitouch/ So, wait NOT.
Check out 1:12.
He is scrolling through the pics, he exits out, then tries to open the photos again. Instead of seeing the picture, he sees an error box stating
"There is not enough memory to load the photo".
Seems a bit... sad.
You make a valid point - Slashdot is not the market segment Apple is aiming at with the iPad. Rather, it's the woman in my class whom I overhead saying "I was thinking about getting a Kindle, but now I might get the iPad - it looks cooler and can do more stuff" or my buddy whom I saw last night saying "The iPad looks so cool, and it's CHEAP! [for an Apple product]"
Problem is, I pointed out to my friend that since the iPad lacks flash, he won't be able to watch Hulu on it. He was very disappointed to hear this. Unless, of course, Hulu releases an iPhone/iPad app. There was a rumor about that last year, but nothing solid so far. ATT complains that the iPhone is already killing their network, think they will really want to let Hulu on the iPhone? How will Apple feel about Hulu as a potential competitor to iTunes? Yeah, there are other streaming apps, but still.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Only the executable part of an Android application has to reside in the primary flash storage (still a ridiculous restriction to have designed in however).
A version of Android coming in the future will remove this restriction as well.
Doesn't negate the fact that comparing Android to iPhone OS 3.2 will be like night and day in terms of the software available and how it works in terms of ease of use. And I say that as an Android user. Multitasking is all very well, but having to open a task killer application to kill off background apps to free up memory is tiresome. All apps should quit when closed unless they need to run in the background, if they need to check periodically for tweets, email, etc, the underlying Linux has cron.
The iPad looks immensely compelling as a pick-up-and-use device that I don't have to think about, that does all of the things I want. There are even suggestions that it will support flash (farmville and mafia wars fans rejoice!), because the iPad videos contain web pages that have the flash operating (see 9to5 mac), but could be a fault with how the video was made (using desktop safari imagery).
How would you like it if this hypothetical tablet of yours came standard with a magnet that would let you stick it to your fridge while you cook?
The Always Innovating Touchbook does just that. The problem? They are hand assembled in batches after enough orders are in to cover the cost of materials. So you would be looking at a 3+ month wait to receive one at the moment.
If you want a real word processor or spreadsheet, then just bite the bullet and get N900 - it can actually run OpenOffice (UI not optimized for small screen, though... but still usable). So far as I know, this is unmatched by any competitor today, and none of them have plans to get anywhere even close in near future.
1.0 Ghz processor versus 1.66 Ghz processor
128 MB of RAM (assumed like iPhone, not explicitly stated in specs) versus 1024 MB of RAM
16 GB of storage versus 160 GB of storage
No webcam versus a webcam
No keyboard versus a keyboard
No Flash veruss Flash
No multi-tasking versus multi-tasking
No Windows or Linux apps versus install whatever you want
$500 versus $300.
The iPad does have a touchscreen. Does that offset the $200 and all other disadvantages?
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Does your wife get into a car and complain that it doesn't drive itself? Or that back a few miles ago it didn't even bother steering around that poor pedestrian, just plowed right through?
Congratulations on b). Picking beauty over intelligence probably was a mistake. Which is why /. doesn't care about your wife.
There's a YouTube app. When you click on someone's YouTube link in Safari or something, surprise surprise, it opens the YouTube app and plays the video.
People who don't have one have a lot of notions about the limitations of an iPhone but a lot of it (missing flash, no multitasking, etc.) is a kind of semantic game: it does things in a new way, which means that the old terms don't quite apply. But then people assume that it's not capable, not just that it's not the same.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
1) Safari stays active in the background.
2) Use the Facebook app.
It amazes me that Windows and Linux have dumbed down peoples' expectations of what user interaction is to such a degree that most everyone on Slashdot celebrates shitty UI instead of condemning it.
So facebook and youtube have an app, do you need to load an app for every web site you plan on going to so it will work correctly with the iPhone? I'm sure someone will spin this as a positive thing.
You're seriously complaining about the price? It's $10 more than the Kindle DX and offers a LOT of additional features for that $10 difference.
The Tegra2 is pretty hot stuff... and cool... average power draw of 500mW. Seriously...
nVidia has done a very nice job on this. Consider that it can play back H.264 in 1080p without using much CPU.. the decoding engine was designed not only to offload the CPUs, but to do the decode using far, far less power than a CPU decode would. There's also a 1080p encoding engine on-chip, so any Tegra2 device with a video camera should be capable of realtime H.264 HD video capture.
The Cortex A9s are like the A8s, but with a slightly shorter pipeline and out-of-order execution of the two instruction streams. Some bets place it ahead of the recent Intel Atoms at the same clock speed (nVidia's doing 1GHz, but ARM does have a 2GHz core certified from TSMC's 40nm process).. regardless, it's pretty close.
In short, Apple's got problems trying to match nVidia's device here. Sure, they can license the same ARM cores anyone else can. They have the A9 in there... did they go multi-core? Is there anything for a multicore processor to do in an iPhone? I'll bet it's single core.
The rest of the Tegra isn't rocket science: ARM7 supervisor processor, audio DSP, etc. But nVidia really knows their graphics. Just about everyone else (even Intel, on the low-end) are using some version of the PowerVR core for their graphics. Nice, easy, licensed solution, but it's no nVidia. Apple's gone with the ARM MALI GPU, so presumably, they believe it's an improvement over the PowerVR they use in the iPhone 3GS. I haven't heard much of this, but it's hard to imagine it's much of a threat to nVidia... unless nVidia is slumming it on the Tegra2 (pretty unlikely... they're clearly looking at device computing as a monsterous future market, with their stuff at the high end).
And I'll also bet, given Apple's cash supply, that this is just a first step. They're licensing the ARM core, makes sense... Apple was already an ARM licensee, even before they bought PA Semi. But they do have a full chip design company there. They probably had an Implementation or Foundry license, but I would be really surprised if they haven't upgraded to an Architecture License. This would let Apple make significant changes/improvements to existing ARM cores, or even design their own from scratch.
Everyone thought Apple bought PA-Semi for the PowerPC they did, but I didn't buy it for a femtosecond. Apple just doesn't make enough Macs to justify anyone making a desktop-class CPU for it, custom. But look at how many frickin' ARMs they sell. Then consider that PA-Semi was founded by Dan Dobberpuhl, the chief architect not only of some of DEC's Alpha CPUs, but also their StrongARM chips (which became Intel's XScale, now owned by Marvell). The PA-Semi guys have to be chompin' at the bit to do their own super ARM. They're also wizards at low power.. that was one of the big selling points of their PPC. So the interesting part of this, in a big sense, had nothing to do with the silly iPad (not that Apple fanboys are smart enough to know when they're being snookered), and most it hasn't actually happened yet.
-Dave Haynie