Slashdot Mirror
5 Reasons Tablets Suck, and You Won't Buy One
Crazzaper writes "When the iPad was announced, a lot of people who didn't care about tablets came out to bash Apple's new device. These same people said 'I would have bought it if it had a full OS,' but in reality full OS tablets existed before the iPad rumors even started. This article gives an interesting perspective on why this happened, and argues that there's five big reasons why more powerful tablets exists but no one cares."
I agree with the article. Their reasons are pretty good.
I've owned a couple of tablets (bought from friends who grew tired of them), and worked on a few more. Generally, they do suck. Like it or not, you'll get to a point where you need to type something out, and voila, you wish you had a laptop. Most of the tablets could switch to laptop mode, but who wants to keep flipping their computer around just to be able to type. Eventually, the stylus is stuck in it's holder, and you now have a very expensive, and usually slower, laptop.
I'm working on a piece of embedded equipment right now, with a touch screen. The interface is absolutely perfect, as long as you're giving a selection of large buttons to push. We even have provisions in our interface for a full QWERTY keyboard for the portions that require that kind of input.
800x600 on a 8" screen is cute, and wonderful for a 10-key (0-9), but those fun and games go away if I switch away from the specific application. We have a keyboard and mouse attached too. The touch screen is all fun and games, unless you want to do something serious.
I tried out the PDA fad once upon a time too. You don't realize how much typing is required until you try to send a real email, or ssh to a server. No number of aliased commands made up it. Even from my crackberry, I may send a few paragraphs, since it has a qwerty keyboard, but writing something like this, I wait until I'm at a real computer.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Windows is not and never has been a tablet OS. a Tablet isn't a desktop, you can't use the two in the same fashion. the pointers are different(fingers/stylus, vs a mouse pointer) You can't just graph touch inputs into a desktop GUI, and expect everything to work right. MSFT has made one decent touch based app, That is why tablets have thus failed. Everyone tries to treat them as notebooks with touch screens, not as tablets with their own gui designs.
Apple with their sometimes annoying closed systems, are breaking MSFT out of their bad habits. It took 3-4 years but MSFT fianlly realized that putting a desktop Interface on their phones was a bad idea that limited usability. With the Ipad maybe in 5 years MSFT will make a real windows tablet OS, that ditches a wide bar that eats up valuable real estate and come up with a new way to work with tablets. I would say linux might get their first, but Linux devs while innovative seem to have no luck in advertising to manufacturers.
typing this on my mac, with my Iphone nearby i will say i won't get an ipad, my purpose of a small tablet will be primarily for browsing and unfortunately that will require flash. though someone finally taking a stand against flash is refreshing.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
The Swiss Army knife is an example of convergence: it has scissors, tweezers, knives, files, screwdrivers, etc. It does nothing perfectly and everything adequately. The iPhone is like that. But if someone got you a "Swiss Army" kitchen utensil, with a spatula and a ladle and tongs and a couple knives in a single sheath, you would think it was the stupidest thing in the world. "And that's why everyone hates the iPad."
The problem is, Mr. Schell is trying to apply rules but doesn't really understand them at the heart of the matter. It's not just things that fit in our pockets that we want to converge, but items we carry in our daily lives, when we have limited space. Cars and stereo systems don't fit in our pockets, but for some reason cars all have built in stereos. We could all just bring boom boxes with us in the car, but we don't because the benefit of having the stereo there all the time outweighs the duplication and the fact that car stereos are usually not as high of quality due to space and cost concerns.
Ask college students if they want all their textbooks to converge into a single device, if it can be done so without increasing cost or removing important features. Items like backpacks, luggage, sunglasses, clothing, personal transport, etc. are instances where convergence is desired by the general public. When was the last time you saw a student carrying a laptop case and a separate bag for their books? Those have pretty much converged at this point... but contrary to Mr. Schell's assertion you can't fit either in your pocket.
Now I don't plan on buying an iPad anytime soon, nor would I venture to guess how successful of a product it is going to be without trying one out. But this sort of overgeneralization as a method of prediction is weak tea.
Apple's tablet is different from other tablets so far:
1. it does not have a user interface that follows the desktop metaphor, which is not appropriate for a tablet.
2. it has a multitouch interface, unlike other tablets.
3. it has quite a low price.
4. it boots way faster than other devices.
5. it is lighter than other devices.
For me, the only reason not considering an iPad is lack of Flash support and lack of openness. I think it's on the right path, and if these two are solved, I'll consider buying one.
Let me start by saying that the only Apple device I own right now is an Ipod touch. I'm typing this on a Windows notebook and my big machine is a Windows desktop. I don't have any love for Apple or their policies - they do some things right and some things very, very wrong.
That said, there's some changes in "books" coming. We've had Kindle and Sony reader for a while and now others are jumping on the bandwagon. As limited as those devices are, they're selling in very large numbers. Kindle is Amazon's number one selling product - that says something, right? As the number of e-readers becomes larger and larger there's more incentive for the publishing houses to make their books available electronically. Between that and the large public domain book libraries available online there's a strong case for electronic books.
But sitting in a chair at a desktop computer to read books online is awkward - and trying to do it on a notebook is even worse. The Ipod touch is a little better but the screen is too darned small. We like to be able to hold the book and sit / slouch / lay wherever so a tablet-like e-reader is probably the best solution. Unfortunately, the attempts at tablet machines up to this point have been ill-conceived botches. Windows isn't made to be a tablet operating system - its touchscreen support is primitive and incomplete. This and the need of designers to add just one more feature has resulted in fragile yet heavy machines with short battery life - not worth their price.
Some say that the Ipad is limited - but if what I do is read email, browse the web and play an occasional game or two then it does 99.9% of what I need. Add in music and videos and that slick multi-touch interface and it meets my needs very well. Yes, I know - and when I need to do some serious typing, write some code, etc. I'll sit down at that Windows desktop and go to work. Apple did one more very nice thing - they made a case for the Ipad that opens like a book. This allows you to hold it like a book; same approximate size and weight, just like you're used to.
I've been watching this electronic book stuff for a while now - and I feel it's time for me to jump. I'll give away / donate my home library (thousands of dusty books) and replace them with an Ipad. Even if it did nothing else it'd be worth the price for just this one function.
You won't get an argument from me - a laptop will definitely do "more."
The iPad isn't built to do more. In fact, it's almost explicitly designed to do less. I predict it will be a big hit for the people that don't need to do more, but rather do the same thing every day with their computer: read their e-mail, check a few webpages, maybe look at some pictures or watch a movie. About the only thing I can think of that the iPad would do better than a laptop is for reading books.
Truth is, most people don't need their computers to do more. They just want it to do the things they understand, which is often a very limited subset of tasks.
Yes, but look at consoles... What could a typical console from 1990 do? It could play games. What can an XBox or a PS3 do? It can play games, browse the net, play movies from disks, act as a storage server for your games and movies, play TV over the internet... In fact, one could call a typical games console these days the convergence of a old-word console, a DVD player, a TV receiver, a simple computer for browsing amongst probably many other functions that I don't use daily.
You're right, most people *don't* use their PC for watching TV, but I would bet that in 10 years time most people *will* use their PC to watch TV. That's because that particular convergence is still in the process of happening.
The bottom line is that devices both converge and diverge, to suggest that one dominates the other is idiotic, what's ultimately happening is that devices are *evolving* to provide more functionality in less complexity and more usability.
The iPad will succeed because it does this – it makes a substantial group of tasks possible, and another group significantly easier than previous devices made them.
Your phone probably has more compute power than the cluster of computers that saw men to the moon. Display now really is the problem because processor watts have been beaten by ARM, and storage watts have been beaten by SSD. All that's left is the watts that drive the display. Roughly a billion people need a platform that's online and delivers the ability to participate in the digital economy. The iPad delivers it, at admittedly too high a price for them - but it's a start. We're on our way to welcoming the slumdogs into the online discourse. I, for one, can't wait to hear what they have to say.
Help stamp out iliturcy.