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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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
And then when she says "Why can't my stupid email program stay open while I'm browsing the web on this thing", your answer will be "well, you said you hated multitasking... now lie in the bed you made".
I can tell you've never used an iPhone. If I'm composing a message in the Mail app, and move to something else, when I return to Mail, the application state is preserved perfectly. The partially composed message is still there with all of its text, the cursor is in the same place, and the keyboard is still up. The same is true of every Apple app and every good third party app I've ever used. And start-up time on these apps is close enough to instant that I don't notice them starting up. From a usability standpoint, this approach is identical to multitasking. From a technical standpoint, I would argue that it's *superior* to multitasking, because the Mail app (and everything else you're using) isn't perpetually running in the background, using memory and precious mobile battery life to do nothing but preserve its state.
The only really compelling reason I've ever seen anyone give for exposing the multitasking capabilities of the OS to third party applications is that it would make it possible to listen to music from a source other than the iPod app (which can already run in the background) while doing something else. That would be cool. But you have to recognize that there's a design trade off here that goes beyond "Apple is evil". If background process abilities were exposed to third party apps, than for every one that used it to accomplish something desirable that couldn't be accomplished any other way, there would be a thousand written by lazy developers that would sit in the background for no reason, killing memory and battery life. And many people who don't know any better (people who are, let's face it, the majority of the market for any mobile device that's had a non-trivial amount of sales) would blame Apple for the iPhone's cruddy performance.
I honestly prefer Apple's approach as an end-user. Luckily android and probably Palm aren't going anywhere, so luckily there is a reasonably healthy market for different approaches to be evaluated. Get a Nexus (or whatever) and let me know if battery life/memory consumption with a large number of third party apps isn't as bad as I suspect.