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Asus Joins Tablet PC Race
WrongSizeGlass writes "Reuters is reporting that netbook pioneer Asustek Computer Inc. has become the latest technology company to jump on the tablet PC bandwagon. The device will be called the Eee Pad, will run on Intel or ARM chips, and use Microsoft's Windows operating system. 'The Eee Pad can display Adobe Flash for the full web experience, has a USB port and a camera,' Asus Chairman Jonney Shih said. Asus did not release pricing details or a potential release date, and did not provide further details on the format or a launch date for the new app store."
I'm sure no one will stoop to the level of calling it a Pee Pad. Nope.
Is it just me or does it seem ridiculous that "our device X supports flash" is becoming a major selling point??
I made an app! Shoutium
And then whimper when they find out Asus has been making Apple products for years.
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1042363/asus-apple-building-tablet-pc
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
So, Intel or ARM is still not decided, but that it will run Windows is? Guess that must be WinCE? But why not put Android on it? To make a real alternative to those cheap/underpowered chinese android pads floating around, and give the WePad a run for it's money?
Neither model is expected to hit the market until Q1 2011, with prices tipped at between $399 and $499.
At which point the iPad will have been out for an entire year. Every one else that can will have jumped on the bandwagon. If I *wanted* a *Pad, I'd go and get an iPad. I'm not waiting until Q1 of next year for something.
Reminds me of what PCWorld said about the Windows 7 Phone:
"If this were two years ago, Windows Phone 7 might even be a cutting edge innovation that could set the smartphone world on fire."
Asus should remarket themselves as "Snapple", call the device the "iPud" and appoint a new CEO with glasses called "Steve Jibs".
I'm sure if Steve Jibs of Snapple Inc. post some viral videos of the iPud showing its Adobe support, multi-tasking and USB ports, thousands of rabid fanbois would queue up outside Snapple Stores to buy one and part with their hard-earned cash before they had calmed down enough to realise they had been duped, albeit with a device of better capabilities than their iPads.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Yes except then every existing windows application in the world would not run.
I was about to say "surprisingly", but then realized that it isn't really that surprising after all: The Eee Pad seems to use Opera as its browser.
Clever signature text goes here.
The stream just dried up...
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
By announce a simi-vapor product with no concrete release date or price..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
By the time this comes out, with how things are going Flash may be just a distant memory.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The problem with tablets running "full" operating systems is that Windows, OS X, etc are designed specifically for keyboard and mouse/trackpad interfaces and not touch. Having a multitude of windows on a touch screen where you simply substitute your finger / stylus for input and still requires keyboard input via the on screen keyboard is not an optimal solution. I've used the iPad and windows powered tablets, and while the iPad doesn't do all the things I'd like it to do, the interface is ideal for a touch screen, unlike regular windows 7. Unless Asus is going to invest in a really good touch interface to sit on top of windows, or use android or some other OS designed for touch, this will be a failure.
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
A Windows 7 tablet and a Windows CE tablet, both lousy software platforms for tablets. They should be shipping Android, ChromeOS, and MeeGo.
It's a tablet, not a desktop.
But I suspect people will still want to run applications on it.
The only reason to run Windows is to run Windows applications, so if Windows applications don't run, why would anyone choose it over Linux or iWhatever?
EEE Pad? Not even Linux based? **yawn**.... another "me too". Nothing innovative here. There have been many MS-Windows tablets for many years. There is no reason to think this is anything different.
You got it wrong. This time Linux runs circles around Windows. Though Windows losses it's selling point, as existing x86 binary applications don't run on this thing (if it is ARM), existing Linux apps can just be recompiled and run just fine on ARM.
You basically have the inverse situation here.
will run on Intel or ARM chips, and use Microsoft's Windows operating system.
Some manufacturers just don't get it and some do.
Expect epic fail, Asus. You've been warned.
These rubbish Windows OS based tablets have been around for years, they've sold poorly (even Bill Gates's predictions were completely wrong) and just have rubbish usability. Why will they sell now?
Why do you think Apple put iPhone OS on the iPad? simple, there is masses of touch screen compatible software for iPhone OS, the UI is great for a touch screen (it was built for one). Apple even redesigned and rebuilt their office tools for the touchscreen.
Microsoft couldn't do any of the above, there's just too many internal squabbles and underhanded tactics at Microsoft. The head of the Office software team refused to support tablets, so Office is painful to use. Windows itself only has a hack of a tablet layer on top of it to support tablets.
All these companies seem to be saying to themselves "Wow, Apple sold 2M units and their product doesn't even have a camera or a USB port, and can't play Flash. If we make sure our product has those, we'll be rich!"
Meanwhile, these vendors seem totally oblivious to the all the things Apple got exactly right with the iPad (form factor, battery life, consistent touch-optimized UI, integration with the existing iTunes ecosystem, revenue generation features for third-party developers built into the system, ability to draw on existing iPhone/Mac developer pool obsessed with user experience, etc.). The companies doing this are going to end up with buggy, slow, awkward devices that consumers won't touch, and they'll be scratching their head saying "But we have more features! It makes no sense!"
HP is pretty much the only company that seems to have a coherent response to the iPad. It's rather obvious what happened to their Windows 7 based Slate device. They were planning to ship that as their response to Apple, but then someone at HP actually used an iPad, and said, basically "Holy $h!t, we're not going to match this by taking a Windows 7 netbook and ripping the keyboard off". And fortunately for them, WebOS -- which has the potential to be a very credible tablet platform with a bit of reworking -- happened to be for sale.
Disregard any tablet running a desktop OS; they've been on the market for years and nobody wants them. And disregard attempts by companies that know nothing about platform-building to adapt current smartphone versions of Android (or desktop Linux distros) to tablet use. They'll do it badly, and hardly anyone will write apps with such monstrosities in mind.
Watch HP with WebOS. Watch Google, when they get around to doing a real tablet version of Android. Watch Apple (obviously). And watch Microsoft, when it eventually occurs to them that they need to do a tablet version of Windows Phone 7 rather than pushing desktop Windows 7 on tablets.
Everything else will prove to be an irrelevant sideshow.
This space unintentionally left unblank.
My hat goes off to you, you are a true slashdotter who takes the phrase "never let the facts get in the way of a good argument" to heart.
T91 multitouch demonstrated almost a year ago - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kdcpo3-XxI0 It has 32GB SSD not 16GB, and an Atom Z520, at 1.3GHz which is perfectly fine for webbrowsing, web video etc.
What, do you want a core i7 or something in a tablet ?
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
WebOS beats the pants off Windows Mobile. I'll hold out for Intel shipping a MeeGo tablet however. N900s are fucking awesome.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Tablet-like computing is the future, and although Microsoft's absolute fucking around stalled it for years and forfeited the market to Apple, the outcome is still inevitable. What I'm waiting for is a Tablet PC that finally eliminates the lag when you draw on the screen with a stylus. I want to get rid of the security, storage, and landfill problems inherent with drawing my designs in paper notebooks.
Plenty of those already exist. They're not very popular, though.
If Google is working on one, I hope they'll get it right and call it the GPadd (Personal Access Display Device
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
You know, I've been watching this story unwind for over a year now. Every time somebody comes out with a new Windows tablet the press comes out with accolades and then in all the comments hundreds of people rant about how they want a tablet - any tablet - as long as it doesn't have Windows. "We have MONEY! Take our MONEY!" Some want the iPad, some want the Tegra2 Android tablet. But manufacturers keep announcing Windows tablet designs that are already in the market that nobody is buying.
It's obvious when you think about it. These PC vendors don't have Internet. You guys are going to have to call them on the phone or send them a fax or maybe pay them a visit in person if you want to talk some sense into them.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
There are already tons of Windows tablets with both a digitizer based stylus and multitouch. Apple just cheaped out on their touch screen.
You make it sound like no one ever made any other software for PCs that have utilized other inputs.
For the most part, they have not. You can count meaningful PC tablet software on both hands, probably while eating a hotdog.
The iPad can run around 200k applications written specifically for touch input. Around 5k or so I believe, that target the iPad specifically.
To claim any tablet PC has even a reasonable collection of touch based software you can use out of the gate, is absurd.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Because there may be applications that are available there that are not available elsewhere (and no sufficiently good analogs exist)?
Then the consumer would probably be buying a device that already has said applications, not buying a device in the hopes some MIGHT be made. And software makers will be hesitant to make such software given that Windows tablets now have a strong decade long track record of utter failure, in the face of instance success from Apple. If Windows tablets were some new fresh thing I could see a number of companies taking a gamble on it but as things stand, most companies simply cannot program against those kinds of odds of success (without substantial subsidy from Microsoft, which we may yet see).
Again, depends on whether there is a touch-enabled analog in the first place. If there isn't, I'd rather have a mouse-driven app, which is clumsy but usable with touch, than no app at all.
Not me. I've tried that before, I'd rather just use a laptop to run applications that cannot be bothered to take touch entry seriously. If it's too frustrating to use, there really is no point in having the ability to do so. Bad software is bad software, and does not get used.
Why wouldn't it, if all it takes to reach a new audience (even if small) is a simple recompile?
See the point about badly running software above for what happens when you take a desktop windows app and change the target processor dropdown to ARM and call it a day.
Not to mention, you ignore the ENTIRE chain of development and delivery that takes place in real software. You know, testing, packaging, distribution, support, upgrades, etc. etc. etc?
The only time a "simple recompile" is an acceptable answer is when it's the end user doing the recompiling, and even then it's usually a bit beyond a "simple recompile" even on seemingly similar UNIX systems... it will not fly for commercial software
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Sorry, why would I buy a *restricted* device only to *unrestrict* it and more than likely invalidate the warranty in the process?
Besides which, even if I wanted to, the cheapest iPad is $499 without sales tax - and because I'm in the UK, I'd have to add sales tax and shipping on top of that if buying from the US, or pay £429 (= $620) for one in the UK. Either way, it's more than the $500 limit I'd pay for such a device.
Finally, I'm a shell/PERL/Python scripter, not a fully-fledged programmer - so the main criteria would have to be the ability to run already available software, not write new stuff; if it ran Linux, then I could just get the source code and compile it, if it ran Windows then it would probably have pre-compiled binaries of all the software I needed.
And even if I *did* write my own stuff, who's to say Apple would allowed it to be sold in their store?
The iPad is a total non-starter for me...
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Meanwhile, these vendors seem totally oblivious to the all the things Apple got exactly right with the iPad (form factor, battery life, consistent touch-optimized UI, integration with the existing iTunes ecosystem, revenue generation features for third-party developers built into the system, ability to draw on existing iPhone/Mac developer pool obsessed with user experience, etc.). The companies doing this are going to end up with buggy, slow, awkward devices that consumers won't touch, and they'll be scratching their head saying "But we have more features! It makes no sense!"
You mean like it happened with Android?
To paraphrase the words of the Apple loyalists... maybe it's just you're not in the target market for these tablets.
Disregard any tablet running a desktop OS; they've been on the market for years and nobody wants them.
Nobody wants them for $1500, this one is gonna be $500. If you ask people around on whether they'd like a Tablet PC or not, the most common response you'd have gotten was "no, they're too expensive", not "no, they're running the same OS as my computer". This one addresses that issue, it remains to be seen whether it'll be enough or not, but I don't think you're justified in dismissing it outright.
Now, I'm not in the market for this product either as I find the idea of Windows on a tablet to be dumb as bricks, but I hate this idea circulating around, that unless you don't copy Apple's designs 100% you can't succeed in today's market when reality has proven that wrong again and again for the last quarter of a century.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
Well, I don't know about the guy you're replying to, but I do want a tablet--I just recognize that freedom isn't free, and I won't buy a jailed tablet because I refuse to support lockdown.
I think of that as a perfectly valid reason to not buy an iPad or an iPhone. I think a lot of times this is really what people mean, but instead they make up invalid technical excuses why they will not buy the product. They should just state the real reason but people seem reluctant to divulge core motives. Stating a device cannot do X or Y when actually it technically can, is not a good reason.
I totally see your point in not buying the devices, it's just that I see Apple supporting open technologies (like HTML5, Webkit, Zeroconf, etc) in addition to the proprietary ones, and like to support one of the few companies that really makes contributions to open source (not that Google is not ALSO such a company). I buy Apple not wholly to support the closed model, but to support a company that works hand in hand with many other open standards in a way Microsoft never did or did only begrudgingly at best.
I complain about Apple because I think that in the long run, the jail will doom the iPad and iPhone to niche status, and once iPhone market share dips below 5% you'll see the same sort of developer exodus you did from the Mac platform in the 90s.
That is possible but very, very unlikely at this point. What happened to Apple in the 90s was really bad mismanagement and bungling of a good position. But it was also a singular position to mismanage, that of consumer computers.
Apple now is firing on all cylinders in Music, Video (to a lesser extent but still very widely used), Mobile, and Laptop development. Furthermore they are the only ones that have a mobile platform spanning a really wide gamut of devices - iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad. Yes Android will have some devices covering the iPad area soon, but that will take some time to ramp up to really work as well for consumers as the iPad - I mean, no Android store to start with? And some devices not arriving until next year! With that many segments of the market working well for them, any one or two can slump but it's hard to see a decline across the board.
You also make a vital mistake in your forecast. You think that Apple will have a jailed app environment forever. I'm sure they intend to, but if in fact access to alternate download of material is so vital to consumers, all Apple has to do to keep marketshare is simply remove that restriction, with yet another wave of positive press for them. My personal thought on that is that Apple is tolerant of jailbreaking (they could easily block it if they chose to) exactly because it provides that outlet for technical users that desire it, while maintaining a very real extra level of secure for less technical consumers who do not chose to jailbreak. There's not even the concept of an Anti-virus app on the iPhone for a reason.
The failures in the 90s were design failures, but future failures you forsee could easily be overcome by simple easing of restrictions - which Apple has been doing with the platform all along (the latest example being lifting the restriction against multitasking). So any restrictions with consumer demand to remove WILL be removed. It's just that right now, there's no real consumer demand to remove the limitations in place - it remains to be seen with the rise of Android if consumers will decide that freedom is one that is important to them.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley