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The Coming Onslaught of iPad Competitors

harrymcc writes "The iPad is selling as well as it is in part because no large manufacturer has had a direct rival out yet. But boy, is that going to change in the next few months. Over at Technologizer, I rounded up known information on 32 current and future tablet computing devices, from potentially worthy iPad competitors to wannabees to interesting specialty devices. By early 2011 these things are going to be everywhere, and it'll be fascinating to see how they fare." Related: the tablet-type device I've been watching most eagerly, Notion Ink's Adam, seems to finally have a realistic manufacturing prediction and price range (by November; up to $498 for the version with 3G and Pixel Qi screen).

2 of 497 comments (clear)

  1. Re:History repeats by DJRumpy · · Score: 3, Informative

    Very few Mac programs 'close' when you click the 'X'. If you want to 'quit' a program, you either use the keyboard shortcut (Command-Q for every app on the Mac), or you click the app menu and select quit. It is consistent to such a degree that you will find the same options on every Mac program out there. In additional, there are almost no apps that 'quit' when you click the 'X'. The ones that do actually quit are limited to a few system utilities. The rest just stay resident in the background as needed. It makes launching them again much faster, and has no negative impact on performance since the memory management is so well done (Wired, Active, Inactive, and Free). The same is true for iOS4. It's all to common I will find 20 to 30 apps just sitting there in the background on my iPhone. They have no impact on performance, even when working with 512 MB.

    The UI probably doesn't make sense to you, because your were raised on Windows or Linux. The OS X UI however, makes sense to someone who's never sat in front of a computer. They click the plus symbol to maximize the window to fit the doc. Why would it instead fill the entire screen when the doc only takes a portion of that? Just as uninstalling a program is more intuitive to just drop it in the trash. I can't say how many times I would try to stop family members from deleting folders on a Windows box to try to uninstall an app.

    As to your comment about 'trashing' drives to eject them, they could just right click and select Eject, or click the 'eject' button in finder which shows up next to any media that can be ejected, or they could click Eject in Disk Utility. Additionally, they still support throwing it in the trash as well, although it's hardly the only way to eject a drive.

    Just because you've always done something a particular way doesn't make that way particularly good. If we always did things the same way, we'd probably all still be using command lines, mice would be eating your cheese, and icons would only be for music.

  2. Re:Useless review by hairyfeet · · Score: 5, Informative

    You would really want to deal with all that BS and headaches? On the page you linked to it says that plugging in a keyboard will cause Xorg to crash, the micro touchpad AND the left buttons don't work, no 3D acceleration, it just seems like a really bad hack to me and a whole lot of bullshit to go through simply to have a half crippled device at the end.

    While I've always respected the FOSS "run it on anything" philosophy, having so many devices not working and functioning incorrectly sounds less like a new OS and more like a broken one. I mean if all you cared about was speed you could probably jam Win98 on there and be just as fast and just as broken. Why would you want to spend the money on a new device just to cripple it with software that doesn't run correctly?

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    ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.