VisiCalc's Dan Bricklin On the Tablet Revolution

snydeq writes "Dan Bricklin, the co-creator of the PC revolution's killer app, weighs in on the opportunities and oversights of the tablet revolution. 'In some sense, for tablets the browser is a killer app. Maps is a killer app to some extent. Being able to share the screen with other people — that it's a social device — also might fit the bill. I think that for tablets, there isn't and won't be one killer app for everyone. It's more that there are apps that are killers for individual people. It's the sum of all those that is the killer app. This has been true since the original Palm Pilot.'"

Comments

Re:No, its still an expensive toy.

[Gilmoure]

VMWare View, RDP Lite, and iSSH apps lets you handle a real machines through a tablet but then that's just remote computing. There's also an iPad app that lets you use your iPad as an additional screen of a desktop system. I'm not sure I've seen anything that will let you work with local files on a tablet but do the crunching on a desktop system.

What I'd like to see is a tablet dock that includes GPU's, external monitors, full range of peripherals, and storage, but is still based on the tablet OS; not just sync'ing. That'd be cool.

Re:5 years later

[lightknight]

*shrugs*

Voice / tablet interfaces are useful, but far less efficient for entering a large amount of information over short period of time.

Voice interfaces, for dictation or programming, need a tremendous amount of work. Command-voice interfaces, like Siri, have been around forever, and we already know they work.

Re:No, its still an expensive toy.

[PhillC]

I need to preface my comments with the face that I only have an Asus Transformer Android tablet. I don't have an iPad and haven't used one, therefore the following comment may be incorrect.

The problem with using my tablet for any serious content creation, like writing a thesis, is that the applications provided are, in my opinion, shit. My Asus Transformer has the keyboard and I use a bluetooth mouse. However, trying to use something like Documents to Go is a total pain in the ring. The spreadsheet side of things isn't any better than the word processer. Tried using the Google Docs App on an Android tablet? Also shit.

And browsers, which are meant for consuming content, also largely shit. I have Dolphin, Opera and Firefox Beta all installed. I have to use all three at different times to effectively load various sites. Then they will frequently crash, which is shit. They're also slow when compared to my desktop browser.

I use a product called Hootsuite to manage multiple social network presences, for work. In a browser this is a brilliant service. The App on Android is shit.

The best thing about my Android browser is the default mail client and its ability to connect to an Exchange server, which I am yet to master with Thunderbird. Skype also works better than Skype for Linux.

Overall, my tablet experience has been pretty poor, and I'm not convinced by the whole App mindset. My Transformer gathers dust most of the time, and may end up on eBay soon.