Slashdot Mirror
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.
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?
Highly doubt the Tegra 2 is on par with the A4, unless the A4 has a dual-core Cortex A9... Info suggests the A4 is only a single core Cortex A9 which would make the Tegra2 at least 2x more powerful. Not to mention Nvidia vs ARM based graphics core.
It's not about "do more things," it's about "do very few things better."
That's why Apple wins.
My wife asked about the iPad last night (she owns a netbook right now) and now she's drooling over one. Why? It doesn't have "files." It doesn't have "windows." She won't have to worry about "flash drives." And so on. She was so excited about all the things it didn't have (and that she therefore didn't have to worry about) that she was disappointed when I told her they weren't in the Apple Store in Manhattan yet.
Meanwhile, the geeks are running around blasting Apple products for all the things they "don't have" and recommending complex alternatives.
That's why Apple is making $$$ these days. Because they're removing 60 percent of the features and making the remaining 40 percent configuration free and so polished they make your eyes hurt.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Touch interfaces are nice. And multi touch is nicer.
I had to go back from a touchscreen TomTom satnav to a non-touchscreen Garmin -- it just felt unwieldy.
Once I'd used an iPod Touch for a while, I kept wanting to pinch-zoom the map on the TomTom.
There are certain things that just feel nice with mult-touch, and it also saves space by doing away with a trackpad.
As a frivolous example - a game like Crayon Physics will be tremendously more satisfying on a touch tablet, than when played with a mouse. But things like photo browsers, drawing apps, etc. will also benefit.
They need to solve the problem of so many things needing text entry, though. Decent handwriting recognition is surely the answer.
If you don't know the meaning of a common semi-technical phrase, it's probably better to just look it up, than to loudly proclaim what you don't know.
people.
"I can either outfit you with Gentoo on an 64-way 128GB NUMA server with a 16TB ZFS RAID that you access via ssh over gigabit ethernet... or with your basic hunk of steel... if the 64-way Linux box is too complicated for you. No, you don't want that iPad. All it does it access the web, your email, Facebook, YouTube, and iTunes with the touch of a finger, but only over a wireless network so unspecial you'll find it anywhere in the world, and it doesn't do anything beyond that, really. Oh, and it won't force you to learn anything while you're at it. Naw, either stick to the Gentoo server or the hunk of steel, those are your two best bets, depending on what sort of person you are."
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
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
with my wife hating multitasking. She never closes a thing (tab, application, etc.) and invariably runs out of memory. Often, there are dozens of background processes. Her hard drive starts to thrash. Things grind to a halt. I get called.
I've tried to explain about things taking up memory, the problem of lots of background applications, the problem of never closing applications. She doesn't want to know what memory even IS. "Why is the computer so stupid," she wants to know, "that it can't figure out that I only care about what I'm working on RIGHT NOW?"
Say what you want, but a) she's my wife, b) she's rather beautiful, c) it's absolutely impossible to even try to say "okay, let me explain to you why..." and d) Apple's gonna continue to make bank selling devices to people just like her.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
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.
Yet here you are on /.
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.
Sure, it's "her own fucking problem" and it looks like iPad is how she's going to solve it, judging by her excitement at watching the YouTube videos and my answers to her questions about it last night. I'm sure you don't care.
Maybe you think she's an idiot. Maybe I'm really bad at explaining. Both of those things have little to do with my suggestion that geeks will likely continue to wonder until the end of time why not everyone wants a bare/caseless single board computer that fits inside a coffee cup, runs embedded Linux, and is hackable for umpteen million projects.
I'm just ruminating on all the Slashdot anti-Apple posting and the apparent geek frustration at the success of Apple.
A: "Apple sucks!"
B: "Regular people like Apple!"
A: "But Apple isn't a hackable Linux embedded device with hooks for 23 language APIs!"
B: "Regular people don't want that!"
A: "Then regular people are really stupid and deserve to be dominated and reamed!"
B: "?!!?"
A: "By the way, why don't people like us, and why can't I get a girlfriend?"
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Of course I would not expect you tell your wife that.
Really, your wife is really really ignorant or just really good at selling you on her buying a new toy.
I know lots of people who are bad with computers, I certainly do my best to make sure they don't touch one
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Every iPhone app I have (yes, that's the iPhone famous for "not multitasking") stores complete state information when it exits.
Safari comes back with all the same tabs and windows open. It doesn't have to reload them. It is scrolled to exactly the same place I was at. Partially filled out forms are still partially filled out.
The document I was working on in DocsToGo is exactly the way it looked (with the cursor in exactly the same place).
It's COMPLETELY state-stable and FAST, there's no "saving state" when you switch applications, because they store their state continuously as it evolves.
I am a power Linux user. I HAVE a home-built hardware RAID sitting here on my desktop, along with a triple-head display.
I run from the updates-testing repos on Fedora. I have patched my own radeon_drv.so Xorg module to fix the infamous compositing corruption bug (for those who care, when doing copy-from-screen, first do a test to see if the bitmap being copied is smaller than 32 pixels; if it is, don't copy-from, because the bitmap hasn't made it into the buffer yet to be copied back from).
I'm the sort you'd think would be bugged as hell with "no multitasking."
Only I'm totally not. As far as I'm concerned, for an interface on a tiny screen (where you're unlikely to have multiple windows onscreen at once), perfect stateful information is damn close to multitasking.
The only thing that can't be approximated is background processes (i.e. start it and let it compute while I work on something else), but it's not like I'm going to do a 20-day render on my iPhone, is it? Nor on my iPad.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
A strange game. The only winning move is not to post.
Shit.