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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.
tablets build muscles by requiring you to hold the tablet out in front of you and to hold your arms up to the screen when doing any interacting with the device. So it burns calories and is good for you. Something a laptop or netbook won't do because they sit on your lap, desk, or coffee table and you rest your hands on them when using them.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
I'd mod you up if I could.
I have an MSI Wind (a hackintosh) that I love but it is not the same thing as a tablet. Too many people view a tablet as "a computer that is just the screen." Apple has gambled (and I am increasingly thinking they're right on target) that a tablet is not a computer - it's a computing device. If you want a computer, you'll use a laptop or desktop. Those already exist and there are hundreds of choices available. A tablet, however, is an ultra-mobile device capable of very specific computing tasks.
In short, I agree - it's about doing few things better. That's why I think the iPad (hate that name) is going to do pretty well as it differentiates itself from the deluge of "computer in tablet form" offerings from other companies. It's not a computer in tablet form - it's a tablet.
While I agree with your analysis as to why the Apple iDevices sell so well, I have to state that "the geeks" aren't interested simply in buying from the company that has the best business model... we just want something that works the way we want. We couldn't care less if our purchase includes us in part of a smug team of iTards or anti-Mac... we just want to know if this tablet has the features we require. Example:
I don't need a camera.
I need multi-tasking.
I prefer to have a modable interface to save CPU/Battery power (less is more)
I want an SD or USB port
I need 3G
I need a text and email program.
I need it to be less than $600.
I don't care what anyone else wants nor how successful the company will be (or if it "wins" in the tablet arena)
etc...
Meanwhile, the geeks are running around blasting Apple products for all the things they "don't have" and recommending complex alternatives.
Wait, so multitasking is a "complex alternative"? Please.
Yes, Apple's tablet is meant to be a computing appliance. But ffs, no fucking user-level multitasking? Christ, people bitched and complained about PalmOS and it's lack of multitasking, and now you're cheering it on like it's some kind of feature. It's fucking baffling.
That and the fact that the iPad is a completely closed off system puts it off my list. No, I don't believe a tablet must be a general purpose computer. But I do believe that I should at least be able to install what I want on it from whatever source I like, and I should be able to run more than one fucking application at the same damn time.
"most likely has", "is most likely several times that", "power consumption is also claimed to be several times lower than"
Oh! the facts!
Fact is: no official info has been given about the internals of the A4, only rumors. And yet you come to the conclussion that the Tegra 2 is faster both GPU and CPU wise, and yet
consumes less power. And you criticize sites of being affected by a RTD -did you mean RDF-? maybe you are also in some kind of RDF yourself, of another kind.
When a Tegra 2 tablet is released you will be able to compare the systems. Until them saying one is better than the other is just speculation. Well, in fact it is quite easy to compare
them right now: they have the same performance and the same power consumption: 0, as you can not get either one.
Yet here you are on /.
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.