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2011, Year of the Tablet?
frontwave writes "After the huge success of the iPad, with over 4 million units sold since its introduction, all major hardware vendors of PCs and mobile devices are coming out with new tablets in the next few months, including Apple with a smaller version of the popular product. Analysts estimate the market for tablet devices (over 6" screen size) to be around 25 million units for 2011."
Is my 2 year old nephew a geek? My friend's 7 year old daughter? My 69 year old mother, who was a French teacher? My friend's 38 year old wife, who works for a daycare? The appeal of these devices is that they are easy to use - even if you're not a geek.
I know you like to trot out this ridiculous "people only buy it because it's trendy" meme every time Apple comes up, we've had this same discussion in various forms in other articles. Your father is an anecdote, not a data point. Your youtube link, while cute, is not a study into the purchasing habits of Americans. What you are doing is assuming that you know why people would buy these devices, and then searching out people who confirm that hypothesis for you. If your dad and an internet cartoon is the best you can come up with, well... try harder.
The funny thing is, I bet your 67 year old technically backwards dad could figure out how to send or respond to a text message *really quickly* on an iPhone. Your argument reads like this: "Dad, you can't figure out how to text on a shitty device with 9 buttons. How are you going to figure out how to text on a device with a full keyboard and well-designed app for texting?" This is a ludicrous position to take.
A boner like the iPhone 4? What exactly was wrong with it that makes it so terrible a design again? You're referring to the antenna, right? Pray tell, how many people do you know who would buy (and keep) a phone which does not work? I'd put that number at, oh... zero. So this leads me to conclude that the antenna problem is either: very rare, and the people who had the issue have returned the phone and found a phone they like better; or the impact isn't as much as all the purple prose led us to believe here, and on other tech sites.
More like, what you are selling matters quite a bit, and Apple has been the best at figuring out what it is that *people are willing to pay for* in recent years. I've raised this point previously, and nobody's ever been able to explain it.
If Apple's business model is - as you've implied - solely based on gulling idiots into purchasing products that don't work, how do you explain:
1) Their *very* high customer satisfaction ratings;
2) The fact that many people continue buying additional devices after they purchase the first;
You can't explain those to facts with the whole "they just hoodwink the sheeple into buying a bunch of crap that doesn't work," argument. Clearly the devices DO work, and clearly people are generally VERY pleased with them. So please, do explain how you reconcile this with your world view?
That's the point. A tablet shouldn't run a regular OS. It's been proven with the success of Windows 3.1 for Pen Tablets, Windows XP Tablet Edition, Origami, Tablet PCs, and so on.
Touch UIs are different, period. Sure it's nice if you could run Windows 7 on it, or Linux, or what have you, but you're contending with the limited interaction available with a touch screen. That's why despite running a cut-down version of OS X, Apple didn't port the OS X UI libraries to iOS, they invented a new UI API. Touch interaction is different enough that a developer needs to spend time and think how the interactions have to work.
An example - there is no "right click" with a touch UI. Try to get through your day by using your keyboard and only the left button of your mouse. It'll be a fairly long day. With full OSes, we've had to emulate this with stuff like active digitizers and buttons on the stylus, or tap-and-hold (which works because most apps don't use left-click-and-hold as a valid input response).
Another example - dragging on a touch screen is hard, the further you go, the more likely it is somewhere along the line you'll end up with a pen up detection. If you have a stylus, you can probably press hard during the drag (risking scratching the screen) to help minimize this.
MOre things to be concerned about with a touch interface - double-tapping is hard, some UI elements may be too hard to hit reliably etc. OTOH, things like gestures and "flicking" is easy, so you want to design your UI based on the ability for a finger to flick through easily. Flicking with a mouse is hard, though - can be done, but it's not likely to be any good (which is why we have the mouse wheel).
The things really available to a touch screen are simple taps, and small gestures. And the targets ought to be nice and big with spacing between targets to allow for misses.
Running a full OS On a tablet is cool. But then the UI limitations get old, quick, and the workarounds get annoying. Then you come up with some brilliant guy who uses a spinner control where the up/down button fits on a 1-line high textbox. Hitting it precisely can be really difficult and you'll probably hit the wrong arrow a good portion of the time.