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The iPad vs. Microsoft's "Jupiter" Devices
harrymcc writes "A dozen years ago, Microsoft convinced major manufacturers to put Windows CE inside devices that looked like undersized touchscreen personal computers. The platform was code-named 'Jupiter' and shipped as Handheld PC Pro, and it flopped — it turned out that people wanted full-strength notebooks. But in retrospect, it was a clear antecedent of what Apple is doing — much more successfully — with the iPad."
It's actually quite funny to see how similar and in some aspects even better it is (and for a product 12 years ago!). Apart from the obvious (larger price and more weight), the older product actually has 12-16 hour life compared to iPad's 8 hour life. There's also dial-up modem (remember how bulky those were?), more apps, syncing software, and multitasking. 640x480 resolution and touch display.
Pretty awesome for a product in the 1998, considering it even beats iPad at some aspects. Oh and Windows CE also let you install any app you wanted (there was a lot of freeware apps too), not just something Apple didn't block from AppStore or where you have to pay for every app you want, no matter how simple task it does. And you also could program your own apps to it.
But what comes to current generation tablets, I'm waiting to see what happens with Courier. The two touch-screen booklike sure is something a tablet should look like. I mean, you're supposed to hold these with your hands and on top you, while laying on sofa or bed. It's a lot more natural to hold them like a book, either for browsing the internet while having a game or IM window on the other screen or just to read an ebook. The non-book feel of tablets has turn me off. I have a bad feeling they will want to go the Apple route and have only App Store-approved apps like with Windows Mobile 7, but I still hope for the best. The ability to have what applications you want or code your own is a really importantant one.
Modern systems like the Ipad(and various replicas using linux & windows) face entirely different issues. Older systems were incapable of most productive features at the time. PC's were used to do "power hungry" things like run excel and word. There was almost no way an older system could run those in anywhere near the same level.
Now even my G1 can read and let me edit spreadsheets. My blackberry as well. Also we live in the age of web 2.0 and cloud computing, most of the crap people do on the internet is pretty processor friendly.
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
It's similar in some respects, but not in several that really matter. One, don't take 3G/WiFi for granted, because that feature (obviously nothing unique to iPad) is a game-changer compared to wired networking. Two, 1024x768 is another game-changer, compared to 640x480, as anybody who is old enough to witness that transition should remember. Three, the content that you can consume, starting from music and video to the Internet itself, has also changed dramatically since 1998. Not to mention that the PV-5000 is also more than twice as heavy, twice as thick, and twice (more if you consider inflation) as expensive.
Geeks have a tendency to look at specs and see quantitative differences, but often it is more important to see if the quantitative difference is big enough to become a qualitative difference. For example, a laptop is not just a lighter all-in-one desktop with a battery.
I was actually very surprised that Apple is even making a keyboard dock, as it makes it look more like a laptop.
You may have just explained why the keyboard dock forces the iPad into portrait mode instead of landscape, and why the "Pages" word processor only exposes all of its features if you're using it in portrait mode. When the thing is actually attached to its dock, standing there with a screen that's taller than it is wide, and an extreme mismatch between the width of the display and the width of the keyboard, you cannot mistake it for a laptop.
Well, the base charge for developer license and a Macintosh system limits freeware authors. They also need to submit it to Apple, pay their fee and hope it gets approved. If Apple rejects their app they have no way to give it to users. Is that the kind of closed computer systems you want to live with?
The argument is that Apple wants control over the user experience. As so many have pointed out the hardware of the iPhone and iPad is hardly revolutionary but the way you interact with these devices is, it is the distinguishing characteristic. So they want native apps developed with the platform in mind, not programmed for common denominator meta-platforms like Flash or Java.
And they certainly don't want to get into the position where they can't change or deprecate APIs because some third party layer would break and a whole host of applications would stop working especially in this stage where they are still working out where they're going with this touch thing. It's been claimed (read that article it's quite good) that Apple has been forced to alter their plans for OSX in the past because vendors had them over a barrel :
"This isn’t some perceived risk, I can think of incidents where Apple reverted OS changes, dumped new APIs, or was forced to committing massive engineering resources to something it did not want to do because a Must Not Break app vendor told them to."
Clearly Apple is bitter over some past goings on and is planning some insurance that won't happen again now they're still top dog.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.