You totally miss the point. You shouldn't have to move files around. They should just be there. Anywhere. Any device. That's where things are going. iWork is obviously going that way. iBooks too. iTunes is obviously neglected, and it sucks bad, but it's because Apple has all but abandoned it as they move away from it.
Apple clarified the rules. There is no prohibition on running interpreted code so long as the application isn't primarily composed of interpreted code.
The iPad works well as a business tool. Web, email, messaging, credit card processing, office suite, ssh, VNC, code editors, image editors, etc.. all there and gradually improving. So far the most annoying limitation I've noticed was actually from the US government and applies to all other apps, for any device, distributed in the US - stupid crypto rules that force every single app, even if using a standard protocol or code library, to get permission from the government to be released.
I've had the iPad for a couple months now and for the most part it's replaced my iTouch, netbook, laptop, and desktop. The main reason to use anything else is for when you want a larger screen or need more processing power but that really isn't that often and either problem can be addressed with a few upgrades to the iPad and iOS. You can hook a monitor up to it already but it'll be a while before we see the full benefit of that. I'd not be surprised to see a distributed computing library and possibly home/business servers made part of iOS - use the cloud or your local servers to boost the processing power when needed. Why carry it all around with you? For the rare times you NEED to encode that video right now while in the car 100 miles from civilization? I'd rather not have the bulk, heat, or weight.
The iPad is not perfect but I think it's the right direction. I don't know if Apple or someone else will be first to get everything right but it is a paradigm shift, combined with cloud computing, that I think will happen. It'll be at least as big as the invent of the web app. It'll take time to gradually shift users' expectations too which I think is part of why Apple doesn't move faster in shifting things. To sudden a change and people will be confused and resist. Also it's new for developers so it takes time to come up with the best solutions for the new way. I already did most my heavy lifting on my servers which probably has eased the transition for me. It's just a matter of time before it works that way for non-geeks too. Part of the tight control Apple is keeping is no doubt an effort to keep things moving the way they think it needs to go to keep the market from floundering the way the PC has. ie Printers, modems, graphic cards, etc suck because PC makers allow hardware manufacturers to do whatever the heck they want, without a real standard, with whatever crappy drivers they feel like tossing out. PC applications suck for similar reasons.
I can see Cisco having a niche market to Cisco customers as they can integrate everything nicely. It doesn't sound like a real iPad contender though. To me it sounds bulky, with fragile parts, and a clumsy interface with no price improvement. It suffers from the problem most iPad contenders will have - it fails to understand why the iPad is better than a laptop. Ruggedized is great but why build it as a default? Better it be internally rugged (no fragile/moving parts) and slim enough to fit into a selection of cases that can make it rugged as-needed.
The one win is the built-in camera although after a recent 4000 mile road trip with my iPad I would rather see a Bluetooth camera that can sit on top of the iPad and be moved freely. I'd have liked to have one sitting on my dashboard and integrated into my GPS program. The GPS app already posted updates to Facebook (via 3G) but it would have been awesome if it could have posted photo or even video updates.
What about fixing folders to be something that is actually usable. Talk about a kludge. It looks like the kind of crap you'd find on Android. You have to click to enter/exit a folder, each can hold only 12 apps, and they are crap ugly. I knew folders was a bad design idea when I heard about it but after seeing it I know it is way worse than I imagined. Why not allow home screens to be grouped by topic and scroll up/down between them similar to the existing left/right scrolling? Why not make them smart so apps can be in more than one and defined either manually or by user-created rules? Doh. Screw iPhone users. I paid $900 for an iPad with 64GB of storage and I can only have eleven pages of apps and folder feature, coming someday to iPad, is horrible.
Multitasking is fine. All the whining is that it isn't like a PC. Folders is a bad implementation because it is to much like a PC.
Or has spell check that seems to do whatever the hell it wants. Besides, nobody ever actually spoke English - they just hang out and bitch when other people mangle their choice limited subset of English.
Actually, as per another post I made earlier, I have been having a problem where I often need to close one eye when driving unless I take ADHD meds. I wonder if this could be related to my eyes? Never occurred to me as the meds have helped. Seems odd that such a problem would suddenly show up in my thirties when I did have a similar eye problem as a child.
I have a similar effect when I change from my glasses to my contacts or vice versatile. It's annoying but hardly critical. It's actually worse walking than driving as you worry a lot more about depth perception when walking I think.
More of an issue is that recently I'm having what the doctor is calling ADHD, which I'm a bit doubtful about, where I can't process the visual information I'm receiving fast enough. If someone talks to me it blurs my vision and gives me headaches. It even helps to close one eye. Taking ADHD meds does help but I can't see why this kind of issue would suddenly just start in my thirties. I'm amazed at how much this problem is limiting me in other ways too - like I really can't read or think straight sometimes or even walk. I can understand why a kid with a learning disorder might really not be able to overcome by willpower alone.
I had this kind of issue when I was a kid and correcting it involved the difficult effort of playing video games wearing special glasses and laying on my back starring at a ball on a rope as it circled my head. Horrible thing to experience. Like having your eyes gouged out with a rusty spork. Or not..
I lived in Las Vegas for a while. I could never figure out what was entertaining about gambling and especially slots. You put your money in a machine that essentially just blinks and very cheerfully says you have given it your money. You don't really get to play a game or anything. I'd rather play skee ball where there is no illusion that what I'm doing will make me wealthy but actually requires some interaction beyond dropping coins in the slot.
With that kind of fail rate you're probably seeing the reason not to be cheap and not to try to keep reusing old parts. In my experience the technology moves fast enough that every three years I want to replace my systems anyway and the only thing worth saving is the hard disk which can be dumped as yet-another-drive into your backup units RAID. I kept trying to save the last really expensive graphic card I purchased for my new systems until I realized that the new $25 cards were more powerful - not worth the hassle.
Except for servers and power gamers building/upgrading is probably not worth it. I just grab another Macbook and iMac every couple years and call it good. My last Dell lasted less than a year under lit wear and tear so I hope the new one does better; if not I will probably just stop keeping any PCs around.
Sure you can offload GPU work so long as the entire process is handled by the server and just streaming the result to the client. I've seen this done over the Internet besides on a LAN. It'd be different if it were trying to use the client CPU and memory to drive the GPU.
They specifically were pointing out the benefit to having the GPU and CPU on the same chip which is quite a bit different than a mobo integrated solution. It probably isn't as powerful as a Xeon quad-core processor and a $500 video card but the question is how well it is setup to handle many different GPU tasks. I'd at least assume it's quite a bit faster for these types of tasks than a standard CPU and I wonder how well they can scale the technology for a better CPU and GPU.
I'm not sure I agree it's a niche market. I'd say more of a market poised to explode when the right products make it attainable. For virtualization it's more important that it can handle several unrelated tasks at a reasonable speed than that it can handle a single task at a high speed. If each CPU core also had a paired GPU it'd open up possibilities. Bulk, power consumption, and heat are often as big of issues for server farms as for laptops which is another reason why an interpreted GPU might be of interest.
Grid computing uses goes hand in hand with virtualization. Again coming down to how well these can work in parallel. Being able to fit a number of CPU and GPU cores on a single physical chip could be very beneficial I think.
I wonder how well it would work in a virtualization environment such as VMware, Xen, KVM, etc. I could really see a point to a server that could easily off-load GPU work from thinclients that are running virtual desktops without needing to manage a huge box full of GPU cards.
#1 "Real OS's" suck. They have a high learning curve, are fragile, aren't designed to be efficient to use, etc. #2 Laptops suck. You have a bulky device that is difficult to use unless you are sitting down. They are heavy. You're forced to haul around a keyboard and mouse you could usually do without and you don't get a touchscreen. The hardware is very variable and again the system as a whole is fragile from a technical point. Oh and they break easy - another type of fragile. #3 e-ink still sucks. Dual mode screens are promising but I've yet to see one that works well both as reflective and back-lit and has a high refresh rate. I do think eventually such dual mode screens are going to be where everything goes. If they could figure those points out AND figure out how to make the screen roll up or otherwise support fitting in the pocket but expanding to a large size then they'll have a winning product.
I can agree that I don't see much point in a giant hinged tablet running some ass backwards OS of it's own. The hinge and size gives it many of the problems of a laptop and I doubt the OS is as well designed as iPhone OS (but I do think a Linux-based OS could be as good or better than iPhone OS in the right hands). I could possibly see a use for a hinged paperback sized tablet thing as sometimes an iPhone is to small and an iPad to big but I don't think the market is ready for that yet. To many people are still wrapping their minds around the iPad form factor.
If you really want a large $1000 dual iPad sized thing why not get two iPads and a case that holds both together on a hinge. They can connect by Bluetooth, Wifi, or dock so just make an API that lets apps communicate if they need to. All these iPad knockoffs are just proving that the geeks designing them don't understand their market. The only interesting concept I've seen was for the OLPC tablet and that was just a concept; if they get it to work at anything near the mentioned price and specs though it'll be awesome - especially if they take Android and make it kid friendly without reducing it to the level of garbage Sugar is.
The network is exactly what Apple and Google would want. If anything I'd suggest they sell off the rest, or just dump it as a dead business, if they bought a carrier. It really doesn't matter how much it costs to run if it's still either directly or indirectly profitable. By buying an existing company they get the existing equipment and staff that knows how it functions. AT&T has no real reason to want to improve their network because it doesn't really improve their business to do so - Apple and Google on the other hand will directly benefit from such improvements. If you have a high margin business and can sell a lot more units by spending a small amount of money then it's a good thing from a business perspective. The network is no longer something easy to sell but services and devices that use the network can be very profitable. Which is exactly why they will buy the network - Apple and Google need the network to be fast, cheap, reliable, and omnipresent but to phone carriers the actual network is just an expense.
It'd probably be enough to gain a controlling interest in a couple carriers. Then they could steer the carrier towards their needs without actually committing to the work involved.
I really wish they'd work together because each in their own way has a history of looking out for the consumer. Google does a fair job of not being evil with all that covers and Apple consistently offers solid well designed products. I'd really like to have both in one product.
I think if Google could find a leader of Steve Jobs vision and perfectionism Android could kick iPhone to the curb but so far it seems a bit geeky and random. Opensource works best around a strong leader.
To do it right is a lot more than a UI redesign. You have a lot of security issues and hardware decisions etc. iPhone and Android are both based on Unix where the security is much less of an issue. Hardware is a hard choice because you have to decide if you try to support everything Windows typically supports (printers, scanners, every random USB device, etc) or go the Apple way and try to create a new cleaner ecosystem which is better in the long run, if it works out, but can frustrate people in the short term. Android sort of leaves it up to the manufacturers of individual devices which hasn't been a huge problem yet but will become more of a problem, I think, as it moves from phones to tablets and almost-PCs. There is a lot more involved in doing it right than you might think at first and I lack confidence in Microsoft to REALLY take that effort. Steve Jobs is a pain in the ass because it's his way or the highway and everything needs to be perfect before it's added but Microsoft is a pain because they tend to throw a bunch of crap haphazardly together and market the hell out of it with the plan to fix it later.
On the other hand THIS is a point where Microsoft could really make a break the way Apple has and get away with it. They could say hey what would we make Windows if we didn't have to live up to legacy expectations. I'd love to see them really do that.
I'd like to see Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Palm really stand up and come up with standards for things that will effect all of them. Printing for example - printing is a mess in the PC world largely because printer manufacturers want it that way. What if Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Palm said this is the way we're going to communicate with printers - take it or leave it, no drivers. Expose the printer as a drive and we'll drop a PDF and a simple control file on that drive telling the printer what to print and how to print it. When done drop this response file in the temp directory on the drive telling us what happened. How about drives? Wouldn't it be nice if all physical or remote drives would just work without a bunch of complex settings? What if filesystems were designed for a cloud environment with cached copies on the users device as needed, support for copies stored in multiple locations (local servers and cloud), versioning support, easy but good security, db style of working with files instead of (or along with) hierarchical.
I guess in short I think this is a chance to reinvent the wheel and I hope these companies realize the opportunity they have and do things right. Of course we'll need to reinvent the wheel again in twenty years but we can make a lot of improvements now. It's like the move from command-line to graphical environments.
Because people have been educated, often by tax payer money, to expect safety from cars but not from computers. We need to better educate consumers so they'll demand the products they really want. Nobody really wants to lose data any more than they want to be hurt in a car accident.
And to some extent the SSD market is addressing the issues hard drives have but there is still no iron clad responsibility for the manufacturer to offer a product that actually works. EVERY product should be able to perform the advertised function to a reasonable level - basic consumer rights. You buy a car and it's expected to move you from point a to point b in safety. If you buy a house you can expect for the roof to not leak and the floors to not cave in. If you buy a hard drive you should be able to expect it to store and retrieve data reliably for the warrantied life of the product. Consumer electronics are the worst - it's the Walmart culture where everything is designed to be cheap and crappy and disposable. Features are listed on the box - expected life of the product isn't usually and products change constantly so it's difficult to make a good choice on quality.
I've worked for AT&T too. Talk about an ass backward company. Their big idea for increasing revenue was to raise the cost of text messages over and over. I'm the only person I know of that could actually correctly configure 'advanced' options like blocking text message usage.
You do realize that iPad plans have no voice plan right?
If you really want to. I dunno what it'll gain you. You can burn charcoal bricks in your bathtub for heat too but typically it's not a good idea just because it does something.
Funny how the Linux wannabes make the same pointless arguments about why their OS is better that Windows users did when we started pushing Linux. Something is different and doesn't have random program X so it sucks. Kids I was using a Linux desktop when you were in diapers and Unix before that so don't even try to sell me on your crap desktop environment. If anything the Linux desktop has been wandering in the desert all this time with no real idea where it is going.
Yeah because Ma Bell is way better for customers. Would hate to have a company that actually wanted to provide good service at a decent price when you can have a company that fails to innovate and so keeps in business by doubling the cost of text messages every year.
I wonder how long until Apple and Google get tired of screwing around with the phone carriers and just buy them out? Apple's market cap is higher than AT&T's and way higher than any of the other mobile carriers. Google already is experimenting with their own networks. They should form a joint venture to buy out and unify mobile carriers so they can package service with their devices. Trying to sell the actual data service is a dying business anyway but if it sells devices and other services it could be a worthwhile purchase. Sell off the parts they don't want and inside of a couple years they could be a serious player. AT&T would be plausible but a big fish but Verizon, T-Mobile, or Sprint would all be pretty easy.
The real market, besides the devices themselves, is the services related to the devices. It's only a matter of time before cloud storage, on-demand extra processing power, app sells, and even ads are all major sources of income for these mobile devices so throwing in cheap data plans is just a way to get people spending on the other goodies.
Anyone that thinks Apple or Google aren't pushing for cheaper data plans is just blind. Why do you think Apple was selling the $30/mo unlimited no contract data plan so much? I bet Jobs is pissed at AT&T.
From a developer perspective Android fragmentation isn't THAT bad - a minor pain usually. From a user it's entirely a different matter. Different hardware, UI, default settings, etc is a big deal. The fact that Google evidently doesn't understand this is disappointing in that it means they don't even plan to fix the situation. Without understanding the average consumer Android won't be anything better than just another clueless and geeky graphical environment.
Somebody needs to find the genius that made the Google search page a logo, a text box, and a button and fire the dimwits that think it's a good idea to layer in lots of clunky widgets and customizations. That crap isn't what made Google the verb of searching. It's not what will let Android kick the iPhone's butt.
Why would you want Windows on a tablet? Even if they somehow got the OS to work right with a tablet - which I can't imagine since it'd mean a total redesign of the OS and an actual understanding of usability (which no Microsoft product has ever shown) - then, either the apps would still have to be custom re-written to work correctly on a tablet or you'd just be using apps that don't function well at all. Either way the user would still have to learn to use a new system so where is the benefit over using iPhone OS or even Android or webOS? Why not just get one of the million existing Windows tablet PCs?
The only benefit I can see to a Windows tablet is that Windows developers that don't know C, C++, or Java, or are just to dim to learn a new platform in these languages, wouldn't have to learn to program. Well written C, C++, and Java apps can be pretty easily ported to either iPhone OS or Android anyway so it's really only a problem for poorly written apps and half baked developers. As a user I'd prefer to have fewer of these apps floating around causing trouble anyway; I don't need Flash using up 99% of my system resources to animate a button; I don't want to install half a dozen apps to find one that actually functions just to later learned that the others fscked up my registry; I don't need a virus, a worm, or spamware either.
And a stylus? WTF is wrong with you!;) No actually what I want is for them to make a good multi-touch screen that also plays well with a stylus. I've seen some styluses that track pressure themselves and communicate that data back over BT. I guess that's okay but I wonder about battery life and bulk.
Why? Manufacturers convince people that their cheap crappy drives are safe to store their data on - so it should be reasonable that the manufacturer provide recovery while the drive is under warranty. If a car design tends to fail, even because of customer error such as accidents, the manufacturer has some responsibility.
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You totally miss the point. You shouldn't have to move files around. They should just be there. Anywhere. Any device. That's where things are going. iWork is obviously going that way. iBooks too. iTunes is obviously neglected, and it sucks bad, but it's because Apple has all but abandoned it as they move away from it.
Apple clarified the rules. There is no prohibition on running interpreted code so long as the application isn't primarily composed of interpreted code.
The iPad works well as a business tool. Web, email, messaging, credit card processing, office suite, ssh, VNC, code editors, image editors, etc.. all there and gradually improving. So far the most annoying limitation I've noticed was actually from the US government and applies to all other apps, for any device, distributed in the US - stupid crypto rules that force every single app, even if using a standard protocol or code library, to get permission from the government to be released.
I've had the iPad for a couple months now and for the most part it's replaced my iTouch, netbook, laptop, and desktop. The main reason to use anything else is for when you want a larger screen or need more processing power but that really isn't that often and either problem can be addressed with a few upgrades to the iPad and iOS. You can hook a monitor up to it already but it'll be a while before we see the full benefit of that. I'd not be surprised to see a distributed computing library and possibly home/business servers made part of iOS - use the cloud or your local servers to boost the processing power when needed. Why carry it all around with you? For the rare times you NEED to encode that video right now while in the car 100 miles from civilization? I'd rather not have the bulk, heat, or weight.
The iPad is not perfect but I think it's the right direction. I don't know if Apple or someone else will be first to get everything right but it is a paradigm shift, combined with cloud computing, that I think will happen. It'll be at least as big as the invent of the web app. It'll take time to gradually shift users' expectations too which I think is part of why Apple doesn't move faster in shifting things. To sudden a change and people will be confused and resist. Also it's new for developers so it takes time to come up with the best solutions for the new way. I already did most my heavy lifting on my servers which probably has eased the transition for me. It's just a matter of time before it works that way for non-geeks too. Part of the tight control Apple is keeping is no doubt an effort to keep things moving the way they think it needs to go to keep the market from floundering the way the PC has. ie Printers, modems, graphic cards, etc suck because PC makers allow hardware manufacturers to do whatever the heck they want, without a real standard, with whatever crappy drivers they feel like tossing out. PC applications suck for similar reasons.
I can see Cisco having a niche market to Cisco customers as they can integrate everything nicely. It doesn't sound like a real iPad contender though. To me it sounds bulky, with fragile parts, and a clumsy interface with no price improvement. It suffers from the problem most iPad contenders will have - it fails to understand why the iPad is better than a laptop. Ruggedized is great but why build it as a default? Better it be internally rugged (no fragile/moving parts) and slim enough to fit into a selection of cases that can make it rugged as-needed.
The one win is the built-in camera although after a recent 4000 mile road trip with my iPad I would rather see a Bluetooth camera that can sit on top of the iPad and be moved freely. I'd have liked to have one sitting on my dashboard and integrated into my GPS program. The GPS app already posted updates to Facebook (via 3G) but it would have been awesome if it could have posted photo or even video updates.
Tried http://www.safelivingtechnologies.ca/rf/Products_RF_Shielding_Paint_HSF54.htm RF Shielding paint? I always wondered if such paint would help. Of course it might kill your cell reception. If so, might be fun to paint your apartment in it before you move or maybe your bosses office when he is away.
What about fixing folders to be something that is actually usable. Talk about a kludge. It looks like the kind of crap you'd find on Android. You have to click to enter/exit a folder, each can hold only 12 apps, and they are crap ugly. I knew folders was a bad design idea when I heard about it but after seeing it I know it is way worse than I imagined. Why not allow home screens to be grouped by topic and scroll up/down between them similar to the existing left/right scrolling? Why not make them smart so apps can be in more than one and defined either manually or by user-created rules? Doh. Screw iPhone users. I paid $900 for an iPad with 64GB of storage and I can only have eleven pages of apps and folder feature, coming someday to iPad, is horrible.
Multitasking is fine. All the whining is that it isn't like a PC. Folders is a bad implementation because it is to much like a PC.
Or has spell check that seems to do whatever the hell it wants. Besides, nobody ever actually spoke English - they just hang out and bitch when other people mangle their choice limited subset of English.
Actually, as per another post I made earlier, I have been having a problem where I often need to close one eye when driving unless I take ADHD meds. I wonder if this could be related to my eyes? Never occurred to me as the meds have helped. Seems odd that such a problem would suddenly show up in my thirties when I did have a similar eye problem as a child.
I have a similar effect when I change from my glasses to my contacts or vice versatile. It's annoying but hardly critical. It's actually worse walking than driving as you worry a lot more about depth perception when walking I think.
More of an issue is that recently I'm having what the doctor is calling ADHD, which I'm a bit doubtful about, where I can't process the visual information I'm receiving fast enough. If someone talks to me it blurs my vision and gives me headaches. It even helps to close one eye. Taking ADHD meds does help but I can't see why this kind of issue would suddenly just start in my thirties. I'm amazed at how much this problem is limiting me in other ways too - like I really can't read or think straight sometimes or even walk. I can understand why a kid with a learning disorder might really not be able to overcome by willpower alone.
I had this kind of issue when I was a kid and correcting it involved the difficult effort of playing video games wearing special glasses and laying on my back starring at a ball on a rope as it circled my head. Horrible thing to experience. Like having your eyes gouged out with a rusty spork. Or not..
I keep requesting games like Skies of Arcadia and Crazy Taxi be ported to iPad. I will buy them. There were lots of good DC games.
I lived in Las Vegas for a while. I could never figure out what was entertaining about gambling and especially slots. You put your money in a machine that essentially just blinks and very cheerfully says you have given it your money. You don't really get to play a game or anything. I'd rather play skee ball where there is no illusion that what I'm doing will make me wealthy but actually requires some interaction beyond dropping coins in the slot.
With that kind of fail rate you're probably seeing the reason not to be cheap and not to try to keep reusing old parts. In my experience the technology moves fast enough that every three years I want to replace my systems anyway and the only thing worth saving is the hard disk which can be dumped as yet-another-drive into your backup units RAID. I kept trying to save the last really expensive graphic card I purchased for my new systems until I realized that the new $25 cards were more powerful - not worth the hassle.
Except for servers and power gamers building/upgrading is probably not worth it. I just grab another Macbook and iMac every couple years and call it good. My last Dell lasted less than a year under lit wear and tear so I hope the new one does better; if not I will probably just stop keeping any PCs around.
Sure you can offload GPU work so long as the entire process is handled by the server and just streaming the result to the client. I've seen this done over the Internet besides on a LAN. It'd be different if it were trying to use the client CPU and memory to drive the GPU.
They specifically were pointing out the benefit to having the GPU and CPU on the same chip which is quite a bit different than a mobo integrated solution. It probably isn't as powerful as a Xeon quad-core processor and a $500 video card but the question is how well it is setup to handle many different GPU tasks. I'd at least assume it's quite a bit faster for these types of tasks than a standard CPU and I wonder how well they can scale the technology for a better CPU and GPU.
I'm not sure I agree it's a niche market. I'd say more of a market poised to explode when the right products make it attainable. For virtualization it's more important that it can handle several unrelated tasks at a reasonable speed than that it can handle a single task at a high speed. If each CPU core also had a paired GPU it'd open up possibilities. Bulk, power consumption, and heat are often as big of issues for server farms as for laptops which is another reason why an interpreted GPU might be of interest.
Grid computing uses goes hand in hand with virtualization. Again coming down to how well these can work in parallel. Being able to fit a number of CPU and GPU cores on a single physical chip could be very beneficial I think.
I wonder how well it would work in a virtualization environment such as VMware, Xen, KVM, etc. I could really see a point to a server that could easily off-load GPU work from thinclients that are running virtual desktops without needing to manage a huge box full of GPU cards.
#1 "Real OS's" suck. They have a high learning curve, are fragile, aren't designed to be efficient to use, etc.
#2 Laptops suck. You have a bulky device that is difficult to use unless you are sitting down. They are heavy. You're forced to haul around a keyboard and mouse you could usually do without and you don't get a touchscreen. The hardware is very variable and again the system as a whole is fragile from a technical point. Oh and they break easy - another type of fragile.
#3 e-ink still sucks. Dual mode screens are promising but I've yet to see one that works well both as reflective and back-lit and has a high refresh rate. I do think eventually such dual mode screens are going to be where everything goes. If they could figure those points out AND figure out how to make the screen roll up or otherwise support fitting in the pocket but expanding to a large size then they'll have a winning product.
I can agree that I don't see much point in a giant hinged tablet running some ass backwards OS of it's own. The hinge and size gives it many of the problems of a laptop and I doubt the OS is as well designed as iPhone OS (but I do think a Linux-based OS could be as good or better than iPhone OS in the right hands). I could possibly see a use for a hinged paperback sized tablet thing as sometimes an iPhone is to small and an iPad to big but I don't think the market is ready for that yet. To many people are still wrapping their minds around the iPad form factor.
If you really want a large $1000 dual iPad sized thing why not get two iPads and a case that holds both together on a hinge. They can connect by Bluetooth, Wifi, or dock so just make an API that lets apps communicate if they need to. All these iPad knockoffs are just proving that the geeks designing them don't understand their market. The only interesting concept I've seen was for the OLPC tablet and that was just a concept; if they get it to work at anything near the mentioned price and specs though it'll be awesome - especially if they take Android and make it kid friendly without reducing it to the level of garbage Sugar is.
The network is exactly what Apple and Google would want. If anything I'd suggest they sell off the rest, or just dump it as a dead business, if they bought a carrier. It really doesn't matter how much it costs to run if it's still either directly or indirectly profitable. By buying an existing company they get the existing equipment and staff that knows how it functions. AT&T has no real reason to want to improve their network because it doesn't really improve their business to do so - Apple and Google on the other hand will directly benefit from such improvements. If you have a high margin business and can sell a lot more units by spending a small amount of money then it's a good thing from a business perspective. The network is no longer something easy to sell but services and devices that use the network can be very profitable. Which is exactly why they will buy the network - Apple and Google need the network to be fast, cheap, reliable, and omnipresent but to phone carriers the actual network is just an expense.
It'd probably be enough to gain a controlling interest in a couple carriers. Then they could steer the carrier towards their needs without actually committing to the work involved.
I really wish they'd work together because each in their own way has a history of looking out for the consumer. Google does a fair job of not being evil with all that covers and Apple consistently offers solid well designed products. I'd really like to have both in one product.
I think if Google could find a leader of Steve Jobs vision and perfectionism Android could kick iPhone to the curb but so far it seems a bit geeky and random. Opensource works best around a strong leader.
To do it right is a lot more than a UI redesign. You have a lot of security issues and hardware decisions etc. iPhone and Android are both based on Unix where the security is much less of an issue. Hardware is a hard choice because you have to decide if you try to support everything Windows typically supports (printers, scanners, every random USB device, etc) or go the Apple way and try to create a new cleaner ecosystem which is better in the long run, if it works out, but can frustrate people in the short term. Android sort of leaves it up to the manufacturers of individual devices which hasn't been a huge problem yet but will become more of a problem, I think, as it moves from phones to tablets and almost-PCs. There is a lot more involved in doing it right than you might think at first and I lack confidence in Microsoft to REALLY take that effort. Steve Jobs is a pain in the ass because it's his way or the highway and everything needs to be perfect before it's added but Microsoft is a pain because they tend to throw a bunch of crap haphazardly together and market the hell out of it with the plan to fix it later.
On the other hand THIS is a point where Microsoft could really make a break the way Apple has and get away with it. They could say hey what would we make Windows if we didn't have to live up to legacy expectations. I'd love to see them really do that.
I'd like to see Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Palm really stand up and come up with standards for things that will effect all of them. Printing for example - printing is a mess in the PC world largely because printer manufacturers want it that way. What if Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Palm said this is the way we're going to communicate with printers - take it or leave it, no drivers. Expose the printer as a drive and we'll drop a PDF and a simple control file on that drive telling the printer what to print and how to print it. When done drop this response file in the temp directory on the drive telling us what happened. How about drives? Wouldn't it be nice if all physical or remote drives would just work without a bunch of complex settings? What if filesystems were designed for a cloud environment with cached copies on the users device as needed, support for copies stored in multiple locations (local servers and cloud), versioning support, easy but good security, db style of working with files instead of (or along with) hierarchical.
I guess in short I think this is a chance to reinvent the wheel and I hope these companies realize the opportunity they have and do things right. Of course we'll need to reinvent the wheel again in twenty years but we can make a lot of improvements now. It's like the move from command-line to graphical environments.
Because people have been educated, often by tax payer money, to expect safety from cars but not from computers. We need to better educate consumers so they'll demand the products they really want. Nobody really wants to lose data any more than they want to be hurt in a car accident.
And to some extent the SSD market is addressing the issues hard drives have but there is still no iron clad responsibility for the manufacturer to offer a product that actually works. EVERY product should be able to perform the advertised function to a reasonable level - basic consumer rights. You buy a car and it's expected to move you from point a to point b in safety. If you buy a house you can expect for the roof to not leak and the floors to not cave in. If you buy a hard drive you should be able to expect it to store and retrieve data reliably for the warrantied life of the product. Consumer electronics are the worst - it's the Walmart culture where everything is designed to be cheap and crappy and disposable. Features are listed on the box - expected life of the product isn't usually and products change constantly so it's difficult to make a good choice on quality.
I've worked for AT&T too. Talk about an ass backward company. Their big idea for increasing revenue was to raise the cost of text messages over and over. I'm the only person I know of that could actually correctly configure 'advanced' options like blocking text message usage.
You do realize that iPad plans have no voice plan right?
If you really want to. I dunno what it'll gain you. You can burn charcoal bricks in your bathtub for heat too but typically it's not a good idea just because it does something.
Funny how the Linux wannabes make the same pointless arguments about why their OS is better that Windows users did when we started pushing Linux. Something is different and doesn't have random program X so it sucks. Kids I was using a Linux desktop when you were in diapers and Unix before that so don't even try to sell me on your crap desktop environment. If anything the Linux desktop has been wandering in the desert all this time with no real idea where it is going.
Yeah because Ma Bell is way better for customers. Would hate to have a company that actually wanted to provide good service at a decent price when you can have a company that fails to innovate and so keeps in business by doubling the cost of text messages every year.
I wonder how long until Apple and Google get tired of screwing around with the phone carriers and just buy them out? Apple's market cap is higher than AT&T's and way higher than any of the other mobile carriers. Google already is experimenting with their own networks. They should form a joint venture to buy out and unify mobile carriers so they can package service with their devices. Trying to sell the actual data service is a dying business anyway but if it sells devices and other services it could be a worthwhile purchase. Sell off the parts they don't want and inside of a couple years they could be a serious player. AT&T would be plausible but a big fish but Verizon, T-Mobile, or Sprint would all be pretty easy.
The real market, besides the devices themselves, is the services related to the devices. It's only a matter of time before cloud storage, on-demand extra processing power, app sells, and even ads are all major sources of income for these mobile devices so throwing in cheap data plans is just a way to get people spending on the other goodies.
Anyone that thinks Apple or Google aren't pushing for cheaper data plans is just blind. Why do you think Apple was selling the $30/mo unlimited no contract data plan so much? I bet Jobs is pissed at AT&T.
From a developer perspective Android fragmentation isn't THAT bad - a minor pain usually. From a user it's entirely a different matter. Different hardware, UI, default settings, etc is a big deal. The fact that Google evidently doesn't understand this is disappointing in that it means they don't even plan to fix the situation. Without understanding the average consumer Android won't be anything better than just another clueless and geeky graphical environment.
Somebody needs to find the genius that made the Google search page a logo, a text box, and a button and fire the dimwits that think it's a good idea to layer in lots of clunky widgets and customizations. That crap isn't what made Google the verb of searching. It's not what will let Android kick the iPhone's butt.
Why would you want Windows on a tablet? Even if they somehow got the OS to work right with a tablet - which I can't imagine since it'd mean a total redesign of the OS and an actual understanding of usability (which no Microsoft product has ever shown) - then, either the apps would still have to be custom re-written to work correctly on a tablet or you'd just be using apps that don't function well at all. Either way the user would still have to learn to use a new system so where is the benefit over using iPhone OS or even Android or webOS? Why not just get one of the million existing Windows tablet PCs?
;) No actually what I want is for them to make a good multi-touch screen that also plays well with a stylus. I've seen some styluses that track pressure themselves and communicate that data back over BT. I guess that's okay but I wonder about battery life and bulk.
The only benefit I can see to a Windows tablet is that Windows developers that don't know C, C++, or Java, or are just to dim to learn a new platform in these languages, wouldn't have to learn to program. Well written C, C++, and Java apps can be pretty easily ported to either iPhone OS or Android anyway so it's really only a problem for poorly written apps and half baked developers. As a user I'd prefer to have fewer of these apps floating around causing trouble anyway; I don't need Flash using up 99% of my system resources to animate a button; I don't want to install half a dozen apps to find one that actually functions just to later learned that the others fscked up my registry; I don't need a virus, a worm, or spamware either.
And a stylus? WTF is wrong with you!
Why? Manufacturers convince people that their cheap crappy drives are safe to store their data on - so it should be reasonable that the manufacturer provide recovery while the drive is under warranty. If a car design tends to fail, even because of customer error such as accidents, the manufacturer has some responsibility.