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Gaming Is the Most Popular Use For Tablets
The Guardian's Games blog reports on a survey from Google's Admob, which found that more people use tablets for gaming than for any other purpose, even viewing news or email. Quoting:
"According to the survey (PDF), 84% of tablet owners play games, ahead of even searching for information (78%), emailing (74%) and reading the news (61%). 56% of tablet owners use social networking services on their device, while 51% consume music and/or videos, and 46% read ebooks. ... The survey found that 38% of respondents spend more than two hours a day using their tablets, while another 30% spend 1-2 hours. It appears that tablets are predominantly domestic devices, with 82% of people primarily using their tablets at home, versus 11% who say they are used primarily on the go, and 7% who said at work. 28% of respondents say their tablet is now their primary computer, while 43% say they spend more time using their tablet than they do their desktop or laptop computer."
Step 1: make some affordable accessories to comfortably set up a tablet as if it were a PC monitor; keyboard, speakers, etc.
Step 2: start marketing parts instead of finished products only so it isn't an entire industry of iMacs. Let people build their own.
Step 3: open things up and give people more control over what they do with their devices; if you buy it you get to decide how it's used.
Boom, tablets are the new PCs. Not a replacement, simply an evolution out of the old form. Until all this happens they'll still just be a gimmicky toy that some people happen to spend a lot of time on. Make these things happen and you'll see business tablets as well.
Some people use their hands to perform surgery. Some use them to play the violin. Some use them to flip burgers. Nearly all, however, use their hands to brush their teeth.
Thus, tooth-brushing is the most popular use for hands.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Do people play with toys more often than they play with tools? Tonight, we investigate.
I am sure most people use their systems for email, tweeting and facebook. So the 71% doesn't surprise me the least bit. What does seem strange is that people use it for games, but I haven't heard of any games that are playable for more than an hour.
I thought that the main use for tablets would be programming, blogging and writting books.
and for my Android Phone (T-Mobile G2 with Google by HTC). Much to the dismay of my battery...
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
As someone who is about to add a third monitor I might be a "power user" but when I use my iPad I realize that here is the future baby. For most people the choice of a small handheld device will become more and more obvious. Thinking through my family I can't count many who need a anything much beyond a tablet/smartphone to meet their computing needs.
This might actually bode well for us users of many monitors and powerful desktops as these "old school" computers will be more aimed at us instead of the youtube webmail crowd. There will always be a demand from engineers, artists, programmers, accounts, etc for a big screen general purpose computer.
I read about people dismissing tablets as juvenile and that they won't adopt one until they can program in RANDOM_LANGUAGE on it in their favorite IDE and for us this will remain true for a while. But what won't be juvenile is the massive numbers of tablet users that are going to have these, along with a smart phone, as their sole general purpose computing device.
I could go for an iPad 2, easily. All it would take is a full fledged awesome MMO (or the ability to do everything in EVE-Online - except battles - that I can do in the real game). Even better, release some completely, no-holds-barred RPGs. Long, involved, deep RPG that I could spend the entire year exploring and playing. I don't care for these half-assed mini-sim games or FPS-ish games. If they started to offer that, the complexity that I could build on and explore a bit at a time for countless hours or weeks or months would compel me to part with my moolah.
Step 1: make some affordable accessories to comfortably set up a tablet as if it were a PC monitor; keyboard, speakers, etc.
With the iPad2 I can mirror to any monitor, or use a keyboard stand that Apple makes, or use any bluetooth keyboard, or buy any number of speaker docs.
Step 2: start marketing parts instead of finished products only so it isn't an entire industry of iMacs. Let people build their own.
And how is that different with the entire iPad ecosystem today, where people are doing just that with a huge range of third party accessories? Otherwise you aren't seriously arguing that people surface-mount components in a homebrew tablet right? Because that is what you'd be doing to keep the size and weight anywhere near current tablet standards.
Step 3: open things up and give people more control over what they do with their devices; if you buy it you get to decide how it's used.
99% of iPad buyers have all the control they can use, they use the web and buy a huge range of tablet specific apps and that is enough.
The other 1% can jailbreak. And that is in fact better for the technical user than using any other device because of how much easier it is to hack ObjectiveC apps to tweak the system and individual apps instead of having to write whole applications from scratch. A huge part of the Cydia app store is not just superficial customization like the home page, but about customization to add features to existing apps (like Mail.app).
Now you may start to understand why Apple calls the tablet the "post-PC", the only missing component is off-pC backup. Hmm, I wonder what Apple is doing with a huge new datacenter?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Here i thought the tablets computers main use was a substitute for toilet paper, or some sort of laxative. I really could not figure out what the main use was.
Stop torturing her with the chinese-app-drip and just buy her an iPad to give her the freedom she deserves to be able to work the device yourself without your help.
It's readable out in the sun. Closing the cover to turn it off and on makes it foolproof (might want to buy a sturdier surrounding case if it's going out in the garden, most now have adopted the magnets that turn it off). Just come over once a week or month to back it up for her but otherwise she can just do everything on the device herself.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If gaming is their primary use, then tablet is doomed because the general purpose computers, game consoles and portable game consoles are all much, much better for playing games. It's not a good sign if the device's primary use involves a function it sucks at.
The tablets failed to take off in the past and I think they'll fail again. They just don't fill a credible niche. They're largely useless. Maybe doctors and nurses will use them in hospitals to keep the patient notes, or maybe tablets can fill some other super-specialized industrial niche like that. But tablets suck as general purpose devices, and they suck as gaming devices as well.
There are actually quite a lot of good games for the iPad (and lets be honest what tablets the people being surveyed really owned).
But one I know for sure can easily be played for longer than an hour, is the aptly named Infinity Blade. It's the really well done kind of RPG with a quick cycle but a ton of different upgrades to earn/buy.
Something like the omni-present Angry Birds or Plants vs. Zombies, can easily be good for several hours.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Gaming is the most popular use for most computers outside of servers.
I love my Android phone - I'd much rather have a good Android tablet than an iPad. But right now, Android on tablet sucks (3.1 please?) and the Android tablet gaming ecosystem is abysmal. One session of Infinity Blade and then browsing the iTunes App Store for iPad only apps is enough to confirm that unless you're stupidly partisan.
So if gaming is the primary use, there's no reason whatsoever for people to buy a XOOM over an iPad 2. Hell, I wouldn't either right now.
This may change in the future. I sure hope so.
You can't upgrade an iPad. You can't install more RAM, or a new processor, or even (IIRC) a new battery. Even the XBox is more moddable. That's different than peripherals.
Well in that case you're no worse off than any other tablet made today or the foreseeable future.
And you are still substantially better off because as I noted the iPad has a huge world of accessories targeting it, which are the only components mentioned in the original post that the user would change or replace or add.
But to make what you want, a tablet where you can change out the processor or even battery - there you have to go back to MY point about people surface-mounting components at home, in order to have anything even close to as small and light as a modern tablet is.
The aspect you are missing in this new world? How much of the traditionally larger data sets can and will be held off-device. It doesn't matter if your MPS library is 400GB is as much as you need is cached locally or streamed, same goes for movies or TV shows. That takes care of storage, And applications that are targeting substantially smaller internal memory footprints means that adding memory really only helps keep a few more apps open when multitasking is all.
Most people simply do not update PC's or laptops today. So why should (or would!) they in the future with the "post-PC"?
As another poster noted elsewhere, it's not like real PC's are going away. Web designers, programmers, scientists are all going to need real PC's where you can do all the things you desire. But tablets are a truly different computing space, and we should not be trying to shove all of the baggage we've been hauling around for years with the PC without a ton of thought.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Tablets are potentially a great portable gaming device. They won't replace PC's anytime soon for many practical reasons but that doesn't mean that a tablet can't be a great portable gaming device. For instance, The Asus EEE EP121 http://www.asus.com/product.aspx?P_ID=QhWKR7Fmv4jDLbBY This is a pretty powerful tablet. Heavier than the Ipad or Ipad 2 but incredibly potent. If they come out with a variant that includes a sandy bridge processor, then we are getting into a realm where gaming on a tablet is very real. Gabe Newell of Valve/Steam referred to Sandy Bridge as a processor that makes a console experience possible on a PC or Mac. This is what they should focus on. A tablet that runs the same OS as the main system. Capable graphics that can run new generation games at scaled back settings. This way you could for instance have steam on your tablet and your PC. Play the same game on either, just with a different quality experience but portable.
- manage a firewall as powerful as iptables/pf
You can try using pfctl on a jailbroken iPad today.
But isn't it better that a system have zero open ports by default and not NEED iPtables until you start doing things that require it? Remember running any app can only corrupt the dataspace for that app.
- have full control over encryption on all filesystems
The whole filesystem is hardware encrypted, and has been since the 3Gs I believe.
- write an interpreter aka scripting environment
Did you even READ the part where I said the 1% of people who need something more technical can jailbreak? Then you can run local python, perl, bash shells, or whatever.
Or if you don't like to jailbreak for some odd reason you can simply use whatever scripting language pleases you after you buy a $99/year developer license and write any scripting you like into your own apps which you deploy to your own device. But that was what you said you wanted.
So I guess it's time for you to start re-thinking your assumptions.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I have a Flash video game, I wrote over the past year(about 800+ hours worth of work by me, maybe 4,000 man hours across the project). I think it just might run on Tablets easy. I'm going to drive to Best Buy and run a version of it on their store product because I don't actually own a tablet myself. So thank you Slashdot. I get to get out tomorrow.
Now here is a question, if you write a hit game on Android and sell it for $0.99 in their ap store, what would you make in profits?
God spoke to me.
Putting Windows on a tablet computer. Why didn't someone think of this earlier?
Oh yeah they did! Every year for the past 10+ years and they have all failed.
I'm going to be replacing my laptop with an iPad 2 as soon as I can get the purchase 'cleared' by the SO (or find enough things to sell). The technology has reached a point where most anything can be done, it is simply another form or computing. For example, PhotoShop appears to be coming to iOS. There is enough computing power there to do just about anything other than the really heavy stuff like CGI rendering or re-encoding video, etc. Not that it couldn't do this, but just wouldn't be very fast at it. The big difference is the UI. There are going to be some kind of tasks which are better suited for a tablet, and some which are better suited to the typical mouse-driven GUI we're familiar with. But, the kinds of apps and things which can be done on either, with the exception of power use, is going to quickly disappear.
No offense dude, but it sounds like a classic case of putting the lipstick on a pig. if you need all those accessories to use the thing? Then perhaps a tablet ain't the right tool for your particular job. And tablets as a "gaming platform"? if you call Angry Birds and Farmvillve games instead of time wasters then MAYBE.
I think this is just another case of everybody and their dog jumping on the new fad and thinking its the second coming. Remember when netbooks were the new hotness? Hell I saw "gaming netbooks" pushed then as well, anything to separate your offering from the pack. What happened to those? oh yeah people found out that cheap and little only got you so far and the bottom fell out, same as what will happen to tablets.
Do I think tablets are toast? Nope same as I doubt netbooks will ever truly go away, as both have their uses. For netbooks it is those like my dad who I picked up a nice AMD dual netbook for, it was only $430 and is small enough he can just throw it in his briefcase and if he needs to shoot out an invoice or check on a part on the job site he can just flip it on and BAM, its done. It also gives him an easy way to watch videos and check his mail while waiting on a contractor. But even my oldest who I thought being in college would appreciate the form factor ended up going with a full laptop (I found him a nice deal on a Turion cheap) because he found the form factor too small and limiting (it probably didn't help that he and his buddies frag fest to kill time between classes either).
Same thing with tablets, in that while the average Joe will probably quickly get bored and look for the next new hotness for the medical and warehouse trades the tablet is like a Godsend. All the doctor's offices and hospitals in my area are switching to tablets, which lets the doc have any and all data at his fingertips, lets the nurses update charts, etc, while in the warehouse business several of my customers are using tablets now for inventory management and just love the things to death.
So in the end I think the same thing that happened to netbooks will happen to tablets, we just haven't reached the saturation point yet. it is still too new and many are still in the new hotness stage, once it has been out for a little while and folks see that it isn't the second coming most will get dumped, just like how my Craigslist is plumb full of netbooks ATM. Gaming is simply better done with some buttons or a controller and the tablet FF? Not really made for that.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
if you call Angry Birds and Farmvillve games instead of time wasters then MAYBE.
Farmville, I totally agree. It's rather aptly name in that the ONLY thing you are doing is literally farming, in the classic MMORPG sense.
The thing that takes it away from being a "game" in my mind, is that a lack of skill does zero to hurt you, or even really help you that much. All you have to do is exist.
But Angry Birds is very much a game in any sense, and not a "time waster". At the start anyone can easily complete levels but after some progression it takes real skill, intelligence and manual dexterity to complete a level.
The same goes with many other games on the iPad today, sure you have Farmville's but you have a lot of other stuff that is really a game by any traditional sense, just with a touch-based control scheme (though even there some games are starting to branch out, allowing a second screen to present the game while the main screen is the controller, or supporting third-party alternative controls).
So in the end I think the same thing that happened to netbooks will happen to tablets, we just haven't reached the saturation point yet. it is still too new and many are still in the new hotness stage, once it has been out for a little while and folks see that it isn't the second coming most will get dumped, just like how my Craigslist is plumb full of netbooks ATM.
Netbooks were dumped because in the end the were a really badly specced computer. But they were still a computer. I don't think you'll see that happen with the iPad because the original iPad will be able to do a huge number of things for many years, out to whatever the hardware lifespan of the device might be.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I have a Fujitsu P1610, a tablet PC more powerful than an iPad, and have owned it for years. It's nothing new. And guess what? Gaming on it sucks, and it has little to do with the framerate -- though it's getting dated now my chief complaint with gaming on it was never the framerate, it was the interface.
That's largely true of the iPad as well, because very few games are suited for touch input (Angry Birds etc). If you want portable gaming, get a DS or PSP. The controller is king.
And yeah, I've paired Bluetooth pads and keyboards with my Droid X, and tried running emulators. Awkward.
Even my Macbook Pro which has a beautiful screen, fast GPU/CPU, kickass touchpad, etc is not fun to game on.
Portable gaming has little to do with hardware power. Even an old GBA is a better experience than machines many orders of magnitude more powerful.
using the same methodology, sample and tools to investigate the current uses of netbooks (or laptops)? I'd like to see the impact of the form factor on people's patterns of device use.
Personally, I have some pet theories regarding tablet use:
1. Games & apps for tablets seem to be a LOT cheaper than their netbook/laptop/desktop equivalents. (I have in mind a Photoshop plugin called Athentech Perfectly Clear, used to enhance pictures. The PC version is $199, while the iPad version is $5.99!). This means that people who wouldn't normally risk purchasing a PC game at say $70 are more likely to purchase 10 tablet games at $3. So, having downloaded more tablet games it's inevitable that people will spend more time to explore them and enjoy them e.g. on the sofa, in the kitchen, in bed or in the WC.
2. Another factor is the psychological one: Subconsciously we tend to associate our laptop/netbook (not to mention our desktop PCs) mainly with doing work and therefore we feel a certain kind of guilt when playing games or procrastinating on them. The tablet helps transfer the feeling of guilt onto a new device, which gradually becomes associated more and more with recreational activities rather than work-like activities.
3. Either way, the tablet is becoming the vehicle (or the substitute) of the dream about the future of our society: less work, more free time. I remember several articles/books of the past decades predicting that in the future (meaning the 21st century), technology will change the way we work, resulting in e.g. a 3 hours per day work, leaving the the rest of the day free for recreation/family/self fulfillment. Thus, the tablet presently materializes The Imaginary function of technology according to Lacan's point of view - living in a future, better, merrier world now and not later (this after all is the Desire driving all early adopters).
What do you think?
If gaming is their primary use, then tablet is doomed because the general purpose computers, game consoles and portable game consoles are all much, much better for playing games.
If by doomed you mean selling 15 million units within 9 months since release (Apples iPad 1), then count me in on the 'doomed' thing. ...
And please don't forget that gaming also was the main reason PCs took of back in the day.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
It doesn't matter if your MPS library is 400GB is as much as you need is cached locally or streamed
But when will U.S. carriers start to offer enough data transfer to get things in and out of that cache at a non-prohibitive price? It's no good to have 400 GB if you can only stream 5 GB every month. Or are you talking about waiting until in range of an open Wi-Fi and then swapping things in and out of the local cache?
it's not like real PC's are going away.
That's not always true. The idea of a home computer connected to a television has gone away; it was common in the early 1980s but is nearly unheard of now in favor of locked-down devices. (I can provide 7 citations if you wish.) And how will people do tasks that need a real PC once economies of scale disappear from the PC market and PCs become several times more expensive?
For people that want that, they can buy a... PC!
The tablet is for people that don't actually want a PC
So once the market shifts such that the "people that don't actually want a PC" so greatly outnumber the people that do want a PC, and the economies of scale of making PCs have dried up, what should people that do want a PC do?
Gaming is the most popular use for over priced toys?
I'm truly shocked!!!
Of course more people probably use them more for work, but they want to use them for games, so its more popular.
And in other news minesweeper and Solitaire top the 'most often used PC applications' list
Tablets do not work for an FPS game, or a button bashing one. But they are suitable for mouse type games like Civilization or puzzle games.
True, a handheld or a laptop with a gamepad is better for platformers and the like, and a tablet could be better for RTS games such as Starcraft or Total Annihilation. But not all puzzle games are better with a tablet. Bejeweled wants a tablet, but Tetris wants a gamepad or an arcade joystick. How would this be done on a tablet?
That one's easy, click and drag to zoom in on the selected region
Which as I understand it would require each application to be individually modified to support this mode of interaction. One couldn't take an existing app that requires multitouch and use it with a mouse. Dragging would just scroll the map. Or what am I missing in the Android API that abstracts over the difference between mouse and touch control?
or use the scroll wheel to zoom in and out similar to the way Google maps does it
Does Google Maps for Android do it this way when a standard USB mouse is plugged into a device through a USB host cable? Or would it too need to be modified to recognize a mouse?
I don't really see how different multi-touch is from CTRL-click.
Applications that expect a multitouch movement event would misinterpret a Ctrl+tap event as a tap event.
Or say I'm playing one of those games that puts a virtual gamepad on the bottom corners of the screen. It expects two touch points: one on the directional pad at the bottom left and one on one of the buttons at the bottom right. How would a keyboard and mouse automatically emulate that?
Programmers are really dropping the ball on Android for some reason, choosing to support outdated versions despite some vast majority of the population running 2.2 or higher.
It might have something to do with the fact that a lot of people buy cheaper Android-powered devices that lack a cellular radio because they're priced for up-front purchase rather than for being subsidized by a monthly wireless data bill. A lot of these manufacturers don't support their products with operating system upgrades as long as Apple does. Many of these "Wi-Fi only" devices can't officially be upgraded past 1.6, past 2.1, or past 2.2.
I'm thinking they only failed because at the time they (tablets with windows) cost a lot (over $2000)
Big reason to have an Android tablet - portable cam-girls. God bless'em.
also let them have user maps and mods
They failed because they were groaning slow, fragile, and cost over $2000. However, I feel it's going to take a few more years of development before tablets are fast enough to run Windows + security at acceptable speeds.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I think you're missing the point, a touch screen is just a way of pointing and clicking and requires no extra work to support clicking on a screen with your finger or with a mouse, all of that is handled by the OS.
A left click corresponds to a single-fingertip tap. A left-drag corresponds to a single-fingertip slide. Every other gesture differs between mouse and touch, and an application that uses any other gesture will have to be coded specifically to work with both mouse and touch.
they'd have to go out of their way to make an app that doesn't work with a mouse though since touching a spot on a touch screen is the exact same call as clicking a spot on the screen with your mouse.
Which goes back to my earlier point: touching two spots is the exact same call as what? Imagine an app that requires the pinch-zoom gesture and doesn't bother to bind any other gesture to zoom. How are you going to use that without multitouch? You'd have to figure out how to use the application while never zooming.
See subject-line above, & these "prime examples" below via links to the originals of WHY hairyfeet shouldn't have gone to "ITT Tech", in his TECHNICAL BLUNDERS, & more (regarding HOSTS files):
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Static vs. Dynamic Adbanner addressing (lol, "according to hairyfeet"):
(Which even BestBuy Techs know!)
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2061048&cid=35681060
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DNS Client Cache turn off for HOSTS, a TECHNICAL Blunder by Hairyfeet:
(Which even BestBuy Techs know also (just like the one above!))
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2061048&cid=35686054
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Hairyfeet's single solutions SECURITY FAILURES? See inside:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2064694&cid=35690260
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Your sources on "security" vs. mine (actual security people) (AND myself, a source on it):
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2064694&cid=35690328
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Lastly, as to your LIBEL of myself (w/ arstech):
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2061048&cid=35668740
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The defeat of hairyfeet by APK (video analogy - hilarious, BUT, apt):
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2064694&cid=35690536
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They say it all, & usually vs. hairyfeet's own words quoted! I wouldn't pay him too much heed, especially after you read the above b.s., lies, changing figures, & even LIBEL of others that hairyfeet likes to do. After all - he's from "ITT Tech" (student)...
Worst part of ALL, here?
Hairyfeet just clearly doesn't even understand how HOSTS files benefit you for:
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1.) ADDED Reliability (vs. DNS going down, or being 'poisoned', & even DNSBL (DNS Block Lists))
2.) ADDED "layered" Security online (vs. known bad sites &/or servers (botnet C&C) + maliciously scripted adbannners by BLOCKING them out)
3.) ADDED Speed (not loading adbanners, and hardcoding your fav. sites into it)
4.) Even more ADDED 'anonymity' online (vs. DNS request logs)
(Even server admins might NOT mind having the load on their DNS servers lightened up also, bonus!)
---
APK
P.S.=> Personally though - because hairyfeet is only a "techie"? I suspect he doesn't want people to know about HOSTS files' added LAYERED SECURITY benefits to the end-user: Why?? Because if users stop getting so much "malware-in-general" which layered security (and HOSTS) give you added layered protection against, he's out money...apk
According to the survey (PDF), 84% of tablet owners play games, ahead of even searching for information (78%), emailing (74%) and
So, if I get this right, 236% of table owners play games, search and e-mail... Also 150% of my salary goes to charity. The portion above 100%. I think it's high time journalists understood that in a statistical distribution of this kind it's imperative to total 100% to make the story even remotely credible or realistic. No matter how I turn this it can't make sense.
Having that said, if the article was trying to point out that tablets are primarily used to: play games, web search, e-mail and news, social networking, consume media and read, all I can say is: Yes, we knew that, those are the primarily intended uses of tablets. This is a perfect example of an "I ran out of news" article. Just state the obvious and trow some hokum statistical numbers over it. I tend to suspect this is coming from the new and flourishing field of bellyology (scientific argument originating in the belly) which can easily provide strong arguments in any field.
In either case, I won't expect journalists to have an understanding that the 136% of the people counted in just the first three categories don't exist.
Are you worried that PCs (or notebooks or whatever) won't be available anymore, or are you worried that you will start being the weird one who still carries around a notebook after everyone else has moved on?
I'm worried that I won't be able to replace the one I have once it wears out.
I'm also worried that my skills will become irrelevant if none of my audience has a PC on which to use the PC software that I produce. As I understand it, developing for a video game console, iPad, or handheld device is noticeably more expensive than developing for a PC.
Also, data plans are much less than $60/month.
It must have come down fairly recently, and it's still $50 per month according to Verizon's page. Or did you mean a data plan designed for phones that allows no tethering and is bundled with a $40/mo voice plan that comes with far more minutes than I'll use in the foreseeable future? I pay $5/mo for voice on my current dumbphone.
And if you can't afford it, you can always forego the data plan and use wifi.
I could go with a tablet, an external keyboard, and Wi-Fi, but then I wouldn't be able to use remote desktop in order to work around the iPad's inability to run applications that Apple doesn't like.
you will still be able to fire up a VM in your contact lens computer and run Linux until your eyes dry up if you want.
Not if the manufacturer of contact lens computers bans such a VM and enforces this ban with verification of digital signatures. It'd be like when Apple pulled a Commodore 64 game from the App Store solely because the emulator it ran in allowed the user to reset into BASIC (see previous Slashdot article).
They don't want FTP, NAS, USB host devices, etc., etc. They just want to turn it on and use it.
But once a tablet is turned on and they are using it, what do people expect to happen once they fill up the internal storage with contacts, e-mails, documents, photos, music, videos, etc.? Or if they lose or break it, how do they expect to get their contacts, e-mails, documents, photos, music, videos, etc. back? Then they'll start to want FTP, NAS, USB host devices, etc., etc. Or what am I still missing?
For those in the minority, like you, there will always be options with more flexible capabilities.
Affordable for individuals, or cost prohibitive?
Those that do need to can buy a car with manual transmission.
Until a stick becomes far more expensive than an automatic.
It's not the device or the OS, it's the user.
If they can't fend for themselves with WinDOS or Linux or MacOS, giving them the magical tablet isn't going to help.
That is totally false.
Even OS X is much harder to really fully grasp that iOS for day to day use, because files generally stay with an app and you never have to worry about all of the small technical glitches and hangups and configurations that are all key in the systems you listed but no present in an iOS device.
I've always said the only computer I'd give my mother is a Mac, because I value my time and hers.
Well now I'm saying the only computer I'd give my grandmother is an iPad, because I know someone that advanced in age could make great use of one (and we have already seen a wave of videos showing this to be true).
In the end it has always been the "user", the very fact the industry calls them this degrading term is all the evidence you need as to the level of respect they have enjoyed from the traditional computing industry.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Wait, what are my choices here? Hack ObjectiveC or write whole applications from scratch. I think you might be leaving one or two other choices out.
Am I? Please list them.
The reason I left that in is because for Slashdot readers it's actually the single most pertinent point to be made. Lots of people don't mind doing some research and making small tweaks to existing systems, who would never consider writing something from scratch.
With Objective-C I can get a class and method dump of any app and add my own custom code into the middle of things, a really clean system-supported technique of code injection.
Well how would you do that in other systems? With Java or plain C the results are far, far more hacky, they can be done but with a far greater degree of difficulty.
The truth is there is nothing in the Android space (that I have found) aimed at adding custom code and features to existing Android apps the way you get with a number of Cydia extensions, the other system that's even as close to amenable thanks to Java.
There's no way to legitimately spin the 'advantages' of having to circumvent the design of a device.
Just to present it as possible is inherently more positive a message than one that pretends the ability does not exists. I am also not "spinning" things so much as I am simply trying to explain to REAL GEEKS (who still I think read Slashdot) what some unstated benefits are of using an Apple ecosystem that others have proclaimed as closed and un-useful for hacking when the exact opposite is true. People like that deserve the full extent of information possible, not the general disinformation campaign that has been so prevalent on Slashdot as of late.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
what's wrong with waiting for WiFi spots to do the heavy lifting?
One of the things that I most commonly do with my netbook is something that Apple expressly prohibits in the iPhone and iPad developer agreement: write and test code. In order to use an iPad for such things, one must use a remote desktop tool. Those don't work while traveling to a Wi-Fi spot.
Given the number of people who have Mac mini systems and various other Linux systems attached to TV'
What kind of number is that? I can cite comments from other Slashdot users (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7) stating that only a negligible number of people want to connect a PC to a TV. I'd appreciate any more reliable sources showing otherwise.
The high end systems will remain about the same price, it's the cheap crappy systems that would decline.
Once entry-level PCs disappear from store shelves, what systems are high school and college students supposed to use to perform tasks that require a PC? Currently they use "the cheap crappy systems" that they can afford, often initially settling for a used PC. For example, "introduction to programming" is one common course for high school seniors and college freshmen whose required software will never run on an iPad, unless your professor is a Dijkstra-type who opposes testing homework exercises on computers at all.
The only way that will become completely true is via legislation.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (and other countries' copyright legislation implementing the WIPO Copyright Treaty of 1996) was the start of that legislation.
You can write a VM in javascript, and although it would be too slow today, just let Moore's Law do its thing.
Moore's law relates to transistor density, not necessarily to speed. Speed increases used to go hand in hand with process shrinks until CPU frequencies topped out at roughly 3 GHz. Nowadays, process shrinks only add more cores so that more threads can run at once and more cache so that the threads don't block on accessing main memory. But adding thread capacity fails on tasks that can't easily be parallelized. In addition, each layer of emulation involves roughly a factor of ten speed hit: the CPU when emulating JavaScript, and the JavaScript when emulating the other CPU. You say JIT? I say OS limitations against JIT compilation of offline apps.
But you can even write a proper VM. You can pay $99/year
Even if I were to pay $99 per year and write a proper VM, each user would also have to pay $99 per year. Or what am I missing?
or jailbreak.
As I understand it, jailbreaks come from buffer overflows and other violations of type safety. So as iOS matures, watch this become less and less possible. By the time we have invented "contact lens computers", we're also likely to have invented stronger ways to prove a program's type safety. For example, look at Google Native Client, which uses plug-ins that have been compiled to a verifiably safe subset of x86 instructions, ARM instructions, or soon LLVM bitcode.
In order to program them, in order to design them, in order to emulate them, there will have to be unlocked computers.
In order to make new games for video game consoles, there have to be unlocked consoles. But only licensed and bonded video game development companies legitimately have unlocked consoles.
Not many good games on android.
I would have put my money on pr0n being the number one use. I guess that remains a title only a desktop can hold.
if you call Angry Birds "gaming"