Computex 2010 Tablet PC Round-Up With Video

MojoKid writes "At Computex 2010, devices like the Eee Pad and Eee Tablet were all the rage. Of course the bulk of these were Intel Atom-based systems, but there were a number of NVIDIA Tegra 2-based models in the mix as well. What is glaringly apparent on all of these tablets — and absent on the iPad — are the multitude of connectivity options built into them, like USB ports, flash card readers, and video output ports. Obviously, from a hardware perspective, the iPad is a sexy device; but Apple's true mastery is that of the user interface. The first big player that steps up with something competitive to Apple in that regard will have the pole position in 2010's race for the hot re-emergent tablet market." Reader Raikus adds an opinionated summary of winners and losers at "Tabletpalooza," i.e. Computex 2010.

Comments

Interesting quote from the summary

[DJRumpy]

I think it would be more accurate to say that Apple already has the pole position (no pun intended), and that any new competitors would be the runner up until proven otherwise.

"The first big player that steps up with something competitive to Apple in that regard will have the pole position in 2010's race for the hot re-emergent tablet market."

Re:Interesting quote from the summary

[MarkvW]

That's a ridiculously argumentative question based on a false dichotomy.

I don't buy Windows because it's technically the best AND I don't buy it because it has the best marketing team. I buy Windows because it runs Adobe CS5 and Ableton, and because I am familiar with the Windows interface. Doubtless, other people buy Windows for different reasons.

If your false dichotomy truly represented the only two reasons why people purchase Windows, open source systems would have no trouble displacing Windows.

Fanboi is a modern synonym for eunuch.

Re:Interesting quote from the summary

[FuckingNickName]

or the introduction of the iPad which again went from 0 to todays 2 million in a matter of weeks.

That's the best evidence of good marketing I've come across. It's an unproven device which few people had even seen, let alone had the chance to try out, yet preorders and early orders came in by the hundreds of thousands.

People want to conform to a majority brand: the Apple brand offers social interoperability. No-one does real work on an Apple iDevice - they're for the guy in Starbucks always writing his first bestseller, taken mainstream. If you think you're the exception, you're on the spaceship with the management consultants (how I miss '70s and '80s Apple..).

Re:Interesting quote from the summary

[hairyfeet]

The iPod sold because the other PMPs at the time sucked ass or blew chunk, your choice. One thing I'll give old Steve credit for, he may be an asshole, but that man knows how to get a good UI designed. The players at the time had craploads of buttons, usually menus upon submenus, nothing at all was intuitive or was where you would expect it to be, frankly they all sucked.

As for the other iDevices, never underestimate herd mentality. Sure they work great, nothing wrong with them that I know of, but when my 67 year old dad, who is about as clueless as they come and is about as "cutting edge" as a stone age hammer, says he is thinking about an iPhone cause some of his friends have them and they "look spiffy"? yeah, don't underestimate herd mentality or keeping up with the Joneses. On a positive note, I've been getting all his tech fad hand me downs since he got a Trash 80 when they were all over the TV, so if he wants to play with a new shiny, who am I to stop him? ;-)

Maybe so

[osgeek]

The first big player that steps up with something competitive to Apple in that regard

Haven't prognosticators been saying this exact same thing for years about the iPod and the iTunes store?

The song goes something like this: "We've got hardware! It's got MIPS and ports and pixels and gigabytes! All we need now is easy to use software. See that word 'easy'? That must mean it's EASY to build."

As a geek, I'm not interested in an iPad because it's missing hardware options, but to the regular consumer the shiny, easy, hip user experience is everything.

Re:iPhad; hardware is sexy?

[PIPBoy3000]

For the majority of consumers, the biggest thing you can do with a tablet form factor is to drop the price.

USB Ports on Tablets

[billstewart]

You must have one of those special iPads, then - the ones Steve Jobs is selling have a Dock Connector Port, though you can hang a cable with a USB connector off of that, or plug into a dock. It's not part of the tablet itself, it's an external device, so it's annoying at best if you're trying to connect things to a tablet as opposed to a desktop-mounted thing. Also, I can't tell from the documentation how many of those things you can use simultaneously - obviously you can't use the Dock-to-VGA cable and the Dock-to-USB cable at the same time, but if you've got the Dock or Keyboard Dock, can you use both the VGA and the USB at once? It doesn't look like it.

With USB, if the device only has one port (boring), you can hang a powered hub off it to support keyboard, mouse, Ethernet adapter, etc, but AFAIK there's no equivalent fanout for Dock ports. So your iPad battery had better be charged up before you use it with an external screen, and you'd better have a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse and Wifi.

It's one thing for Apple to try to use proprietary connectors to keep you locked in to Apple's world. But it's another thing entirely to be Not User Friendly as a result, or to be Ugly and Klunky instead of Insanely Cool-Looking.

Re:iPhad; hardware is sexy?

[Concerned Onlooker]

No, people CAN handle choices. And they're choosing the iPad.

Re:iPhad; hardware is sexy?

[suomynonAyletamitlU]

Wow, a blatant troll at +3 insightful. Well, I suppose it only takes a handful of mods.

1. There is nothing sexy about a crippled CPU with no connectivity.

There is something intriguing, and perhaps sexy from the right viewpoint, about a device that responds instantly and smoothly to your input, and which has consumer-level (finished) applications that look gorgeous. A device that was nothing but "shiny" would have no, or few, practical applications, and any consumer level app is or can be considered a "practical application"--it's something you would pay money to do, use, or have. Or, well, not any, I guess, but I think the size of the market supposes pretty clearly, if only by sheer virtue of statistics, that there are in fact practical applications for it.

2. People can't handle choices. If you give them a device with only a few buttons, then it's like a microwave and they're happy.

I disagree with your oversimplification. A platform like Windows or Linux allows anyone who develops applications to say, "You need to be this geeky to install and use this application." This is by far one of the most straightforward, and yet it is somehow one of the most hotly debated, reversals of the iOS: they do not allow you to jump through hoops in order to get extra functionality, which means that the programmers either have to begrudgingly improve their GUI skills or limit functionality altogether.

The reason is simple--the people they're marketing to will go cross-eyed if you talk to them about a topic they would need to study for months or years to understand at the same level you would, and believe it or not, computers and programming are such a topic. If your life is already computer-centric, understanding computers is no big deal. If your life is centered around construction work, business deals, hair salons, clothing design, or any of the other (completely fucking legitimate) career paths out there, saying "You have to spend months learning computers before this $500 tablet and this particular $2 application become useful to you" is going to lose you customers.

If instead you tell those same customers, "We promise we won't let the programmers do anything that's going to confuse the crap out of you, for instance, try this $2 app that you can start using right away! And there are more that are just as easy!" you now have a customer, and probably more on the way

I mean, in some ways I feel you. I've been a computer user literally longer than I can remember, and the idea of having a tablet that can also have cron jobs and shell scripts running in the background is delicious. But no, dude, don't yell at the Norms for being Normal. Give it a year or two and there will be some kind of really excellent Linux tablet that does everything a geek could ever want. You don't have to try to turn this one into that miracle product. Just let it be.

Really?

[N0Man74]

I'm probably going to get modded down by fan boys for my blasphemy, but...

Lack of USB ports, card readers, and video outputs and the like are features? Seriously!?

You do realize that the reason that there are compatibility issues that exist within the PC world is not simply because of hardware options, but because of the fact that every single piece of the system is customizable. Every piece of hardware, every piece of software, and even the OS can be picked by a user. The more variables there are, the more possibility that there can be unexpected interactions.

However, if you have a locked down platform where you control the OS and the hardware that is present, then the chances of random compatibilities goes down incredibly. That's without even taking into account having control of the software too.

My XBox 360 has more hardware features than my Wii does, and amazingly I haven't had a single compatibility problem with it. My friend has no issues with his DSi, even though it has more hardware features than his old DS. I'm going to take a stab in the dark and guess that if Apple had added additional hardware features to their iPad, then the chances are they'd work without compatibility issues.

I think that one could argue legitimate reasons for exclusion of certain hardware exclusions. I might disagree, but reasonable arguments could be made. However this one just seems silly. I might have a lot of criticisms for Apple, but they seem to do well in quality control; I have faith that they could pull off hardware features that work.

Re:iPhad; hardware is sexy?

[jedidiah]

> There must be something sexy about the iPad hardware since all the tablet computers shown on the page linked to in the summary look pretty much identical to one.

There's plenty you could do to bring a tablet into the 21st century and still leave it looking pretty similar to an iPad.

1) USB port
2) SD card port
3) HDMI port

4) Decent CPU

5) Respectable GPU

6) Correct screen geometry for video

7) Some means of accomodating an external hard drive.

8) An internal hard drive.

9) non-crippled OS

10) Allow for multiple "app" vendors.