It wouldn't be "zero to near zero", because the last guy will have been thinking the same as you. What you'd be hoping for is "near zero" moving to "slightly less near zero".
Although to be fair, you can do all of those things with the latest Android tablets too. And I fear answering the question "which tablet should I get for my elderly relative" with "any of the best selling tablets" might be less helpful.
I wonder idly at the OPs "not too expensive" comment. An iPad is far from cheap (and all the other high-end tablets are no better). I mean you can get a Dell Streak or BlackBerry Playbook for not very much, but I doubt anyone would recommend it.
I tend to agree with you though; I've seen them "in the wild" occasionally; a couple of iPads, a few more assorted Android tablets. But on the whole, in the year or two since the iPad hit the scene, they're still a rare novelty. I guess a lot of people must keep them at home, but I see far more conventional laptops (and orders of magnitude more high-end smartphones) out there on display.
I think tablets will remain a bit of a luxury niche. Ironically, I think the thing that will hold tablets back is the smartphone, not the conventional laptops/desktops. I mean, if you're already carrying a £400, 4.3 inch touch screen device in your pocket at all times, why would you want to buy an additional 7 inch touch screen device that does pretty much exactly the same thing, and nothing more?
Yes, it does. I have a HP Pavilion laptop right here on my desk (sold with Windows XP) that now has 2GB of RAM (RAM being cheap), but still can't boot from USB. It is currently running Edubuntu; I tried Unity on it and it worked smoothly enough, although now it's running XFCE.
When my parents got married, back in the halcyon days of affordable housing, their marital home was still 3 times their combined annual earnings. It would have taken them literally a decade or more to put together the cash to pay upfront (with money being frittered away on rent in the meantime). Instead, they took a mortgage out and had it paid for within 20 years of small payments.
If you can buy a house cash-in-hand, you're either a) living somewhere with a young housing market that has yet to grow to dastardly, expensive maturity, or 2) earning far more money than most people.
"Credit Union" is pretty much a synonym for "Building Society" in the UK. You only need to look at how many of those demutualised as soon as they had the chance. And at how many of the demutualized Societies survived (hint- pretty much none).
That's pretty universal, not just Nationwide. If you get a chequebook with your bank account, that's a book of uncleared cheques- when you hand it over to someone, there's no guarantee on the part of the issuing bank (your bank) that any money will actually be paid (for example, if you've written a cheque that you can't afford, or you unexpectedly close your account). When you get a cheque over the counter, it's a completely different thing- it's a cleared cheque, your account is debited immediately and the money is moved into escrow, and the recipient is 100% guaranteed payment. Almost all banks and building societies charge for this service, in comparison to the usually free conventional cheques. Even if you had opted to have a chequebook, they would still have charged you for a banker's draft cheque.
The morale of the story is to pick a bank account with all the features you actually need. If you need cheques, you should pick an account that offers cheques.
(Incidentally, I'm surprised you did need a cheque to pay a mortgage. Most institutions will accept payment by debit card these days, and if not there's always electronic transfers (which aren't ideal for personal transactions, but are absolutely designed for paying money from one bank account to another)).
I don't use CDs much any more, but there are still lots of good reasons.
1) CDs are cheaper than DVDs, and massively cheaper than USB drives. They're cheap enough to be "throw away" (and definitely "give away" to anyone who wants one). 2) Not all computers can boot from USB (I have some not-that-old hardware which is prime Linux material that can't). 3) Almost every computer I've seen in more than a decade has had a CD drive, while DVD drives were still only taking off just a few short years ago. 4) DVD drives seem to stop reading DVDs long before their CD functionality craps out. 5) CDs burn quicker than DVDs and quicker than UNetbootin preps a USB drive. 6) If it fits on a CD, it fits on everything bigger than a CD too. It means you can use it with whatever comes to hand. Make it bigger and you're just cutting back on options.
For the sake of 50MB of applications, it doesn't seem worth it. It'd be different if they needed 1GB of space, and trimming it down by 300MB would stand in the way of their grand ideas, but for 50 measly MB they might as well stick with the most versatile medium.
BT is a very large ISP and phone company; the former state monopoly one. BT is their name- they used to be called "British Telecom", but they aren't any more- they're just called "BT". In the same way as "AT&T" is their name- nobody translates it to "American Telephone & Telegraph" any more.
Overpriced doesn't always mean "business grade". Looking at the prices we pay for everything from Dell keyboards, Airtech laptop bags, and K-locks, it can be anywhere from twice to three times the price you could buy it on the highstreet. For exactly the same models! The Dell keyboards we buy are exactly the same ones you get with an Inspiron desktop computer, and usually die by the exact same causes (coffee spills, the legs getting snapped off, someone bending the USB out of shape, etc.).
I'm willing to accept that the ThinkPads we use are higher grade than the Lenovo basic laptops, but there's only so much you can do with standard peripherals.
Personally, I'm an XFCE convert. The Xubuntu variant looks and feels very similar to the classic GNOME 2 Ubuntu, it's not overly flashy looking (I don't want my GUI to dazzle, I want it to stay out of my applications' way), and it's relatively hardware friendly. It's not as diligent about being slim as it used to be- but that's not necessarily a bad thing when I'm trying to use it as a full desktop environment on modern hardware.
Although I've never tried GNOME 3. Not a big fan of Unity for normal usage, although it probably suits my small-screen devices (netbooks etc.) well enough.
I know very well that Windows and Office revenue streams get protected, sometimes to the point of strangling worthy new products, but if this device was really "all that" then it should have been possible to add those capabilities. I am left to guess that either adding that was actively resisted or there were other limitations that prevented them from being added, and if that were the case it would be an even bigger black eye. After all, if it wasn't possible to add those features, what else would developers not be able to add, and developers are another area that tie in to the Windows and Office revenue streams.
I think that hits the nail on the head. So it doesn't have an email application- why not? Why not just write one? It's an incredibly simple solution- surely it isn't the case that no-one at MS thought of it. Companies have been writing email clients for decades- knocking one up must be routine for the likes of MS these days.
Ditto with Office. If they can put together a touch-based MS Office suite for other Windows tablets, why not this one? They have the source code, they have the APIs, they have the cash to throw at it (I was under the impression that MS spares no expense for Office development), surely that wouldn't be beyond them? And if it is- why? What's the hurdle?
I've always found it a worrying concept that someone can, for one, claim that the Bible is the verbatim word of God, Jesus, and the prophets, and represents the kernel around which to build their world view, while for another happily write off or ignore any part of the Bible which has either been proved wrong (e.g. literal young earth creationism) or is inconvenient (dietary restrictions, money lending rules, circumcision).
Surely it's either the words and instructions of the almighty, omnipotent creator who will judge your immortal soul (and you really should listen to it very carefully), or it's not (and you should pick a more stable basis for your life philosophy)?
Don't get me wrong, I'm pleased with this news and eager to see if Canonical can get it off the ground, but it's not ground breaking. And the biggest challenge will be getting a hardware partner to actually make the devices; Canonical can "make" a smartphone distro if they like, but it won't do anyone any good if it only works on a handful of dev devices and VMs. Crikey, I'm not even sure what's going to happen to the MeeGo project (thriving community and all) now Nokia is dropping it.
It probably means the same thing to Samsung. Consumers buy their phones from Walmart (etc.), not Samsung. Walmart buy their phones from Samsung.
So Samsung make the phone, and it's sat in a Samsung warehouse. Then Walmart buy 10,000 of them, and 10,000 leave the Samsung warehouse and are shipped to a Walmart warehouse. Walmart pay Samsung some money for their purchase. (That's the "shipped" part).
Samsung don't care what happens to them next, really. If Walmart want to pile those 10,000 handsets in a heap and burn them with lighter fluid, it makes no real difference to how much Samsung have been paid.
If you're trying to analyse what's more popular with the consumer, though, then "shipped" and "sold" are different.
Then there are the Firefox UI changes they've made with recent releases that only make it so much harder to use Firefox. Please bring back the menus! Please bring back the status bar! Please show the protocol in the URL bar again! Please reverse any design decision made by a so-called "UI designer". They don't help usability! Hell, even Thunderbird has been affected by this crap.
I agree with everything you say (if I wanted to use a browser that looked exactly like Chrome, I'd, you know, use Chrome). But I should point out that you can turn the menu bar back on; it was the first thing I did after installing the new version. You can put the http:/// back in your URL bar too (by mucking with about:config), although I haven't bothered with that one myself yet.
If they make an Android phone, they're latecomers to an already crowded market. Why should someone buy a Nokia device when HTC have a range of products, so do Motorola, so do Samsung, so do LG. What can Nokia do to persuade people to buy their phone instead?
Nokia is a big brand in their own right, with a surprisingly loyal user base. Many people would buy a Nokia Android phone over a HTC one just for the brand name. However "Android or WP7" would probably trump "Samsung or Nokia" as the deciding issue for most people.
I call rubbish on the interface comment too. Android's interface is highly customizeable by the vendor (most of the vendors have their own distinct style), whereas with WP7 there will be a much bigger element of "it comes the way it comes".
Let me put it another way. I work for a living. Let's say that my job could be easily replaced with a clever piece of software, and I'm sacked. That isn't my decision based on my enjoyment (or lack) of my job- it's the decision of my company in their endless quest for higher profits and bigger shareholder dividends. I now have no income. Let's say for the sake of argument that all jobs in my field have gone the same way, as have all jobs of a lesser skill level, and many of a higher skill level. I am unable to get a new job in the short to medium term.
I don't grow any food myself, and need food to stay alive. If I want food from one of the (automatic) farms, I'm going to need to find some money or something of worth to exchange with the big farming PLC that owns them. Ditto, I don't own a house- if I don't have something to give my landlord every month, why on earth would they let me stay here?
I'd be all for said communist utopia, where endless cheap food rolls off the state-owned auto-farms, and I'd be free all day to pursue my hobbies, family duties, or employment of choice. But how on earth are we going to get there?
When farming technology took a leap in the 19th and 20th century, many countries (uncluding the US and the EU) found themselves producing massive food surplusses. On the other hand, countries elsewhere in the world were desperate for a cheap plentiful supply of food, and were starving for it. It would have been a very simple economic adjustment to work this one out; but that's not what happened. Instead you have the ridiculous situation where US & EU taxpayer subsidies are being spent in order to encourage the farmers to grow less food, and about half the world's population carried on starving. Why? Because any other situation would have meant a collapse in profits for the farmers. I mean, if we couldn't work out that tiny new technologically-driven economic kink, what hope do we have of your Star Trek style utopia coming to pass?
Yeah, but who's going to pay anyone for not doing any work? If you have 10 taxi drivers on £20k a year, and you buy 10 Google auto-driving robot taxis, you don't have 10 auto-taxis and 10 taxi drivers larking about doing nothing for £20k a year (or £10k, or whatever), you have 10 auto-taxis and 10 unemployed men. If you can pull that trick for 90% of jobs, and you can't create exactly the same number of jobs (at the same skill level), you've got a big problem.
I suppose you could tax the taxi company on their profits and use that tax revenue to pay unemployment benefits or state services to those redundant humans, but that's basically a communist utopia (and last I heard, most Westerners were against that).
In the UK, most of the ghost-hunter programmes are funnelled off onto essentially a channel of their own, ironically called "Living". Pleasingly, most of the UFO and conspiracy "documentaries" are shown on the Sci-Fi Channel (er, SyFy these days I guess).
Slashdot Mirror
It wouldn't be "zero to near zero", because the last guy will have been thinking the same as you. What you'd be hoping for is "near zero" moving to "slightly less near zero".
Although to be fair, you can do all of those things with the latest Android tablets too. And I fear answering the question "which tablet should I get for my elderly relative" with "any of the best selling tablets" might be less helpful.
I wonder idly at the OPs "not too expensive" comment. An iPad is far from cheap (and all the other high-end tablets are no better). I mean you can get a Dell Streak or BlackBerry Playbook for not very much, but I doubt anyone would recommend it.
One slightly different suggestion might be to go with a Kindle or a Nook. Both are dirt cheap compared to other tablets, both are very easy to use, and (aside from the obvious reading content), both the Kindle and the Nook Colour have games and other apps. A Kindle is only $139, and the Nook Colour is only $249 (I don't think the basic Nook has "app" content).
http://www.amazon.com/gp/search?ie=UTF8&keywords=kindle%20games&tag=kindlegames-20&index=digital-text&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/u/nookcolor-apps/379002750
Anecdotes are just anecdotes.
I tend to agree with you though; I've seen them "in the wild" occasionally; a couple of iPads, a few more assorted Android tablets. But on the whole, in the year or two since the iPad hit the scene, they're still a rare novelty. I guess a lot of people must keep them at home, but I see far more conventional laptops (and orders of magnitude more high-end smartphones) out there on display.
I think tablets will remain a bit of a luxury niche. Ironically, I think the thing that will hold tablets back is the smartphone, not the conventional laptops/desktops. I mean, if you're already carrying a £400, 4.3 inch touch screen device in your pocket at all times, why would you want to buy an additional 7 inch touch screen device that does pretty much exactly the same thing, and nothing more?
Yes, it does. I have a HP Pavilion laptop right here on my desk (sold with Windows XP) that now has 2GB of RAM (RAM being cheap), but still can't boot from USB. It is currently running Edubuntu; I tried Unity on it and it worked smoothly enough, although now it's running XFCE.
When my parents got married, back in the halcyon days of affordable housing, their marital home was still 3 times their combined annual earnings. It would have taken them literally a decade or more to put together the cash to pay upfront (with money being frittered away on rent in the meantime). Instead, they took a mortgage out and had it paid for within 20 years of small payments.
If you can buy a house cash-in-hand, you're either a) living somewhere with a young housing market that has yet to grow to dastardly, expensive maturity, or 2) earning far more money than most people.
"Credit Union" is pretty much a synonym for "Building Society" in the UK. You only need to look at how many of those demutualised as soon as they had the chance. And at how many of the demutualized Societies survived (hint- pretty much none).
That's pretty universal, not just Nationwide. If you get a chequebook with your bank account, that's a book of uncleared cheques- when you hand it over to someone, there's no guarantee on the part of the issuing bank (your bank) that any money will actually be paid (for example, if you've written a cheque that you can't afford, or you unexpectedly close your account). When you get a cheque over the counter, it's a completely different thing- it's a cleared cheque, your account is debited immediately and the money is moved into escrow, and the recipient is 100% guaranteed payment. Almost all banks and building societies charge for this service, in comparison to the usually free conventional cheques. Even if you had opted to have a chequebook, they would still have charged you for a banker's draft cheque.
The morale of the story is to pick a bank account with all the features you actually need. If you need cheques, you should pick an account that offers cheques.
(Incidentally, I'm surprised you did need a cheque to pay a mortgage. Most institutions will accept payment by debit card these days, and if not there's always electronic transfers (which aren't ideal for personal transactions, but are absolutely designed for paying money from one bank account to another)).
I don't use CDs much any more, but there are still lots of good reasons.
1) CDs are cheaper than DVDs, and massively cheaper than USB drives. They're cheap enough to be "throw away" (and definitely "give away" to anyone who wants one).
2) Not all computers can boot from USB (I have some not-that-old hardware which is prime Linux material that can't).
3) Almost every computer I've seen in more than a decade has had a CD drive, while DVD drives were still only taking off just a few short years ago.
4) DVD drives seem to stop reading DVDs long before their CD functionality craps out.
5) CDs burn quicker than DVDs and quicker than UNetbootin preps a USB drive.
6) If it fits on a CD, it fits on everything bigger than a CD too. It means you can use it with whatever comes to hand. Make it bigger and you're just cutting back on options.
For the sake of 50MB of applications, it doesn't seem worth it. It'd be different if they needed 1GB of space, and trimming it down by 300MB would stand in the way of their grand ideas, but for 50 measly MB they might as well stick with the most versatile medium.
BT is a very large ISP and phone company; the former state monopoly one. BT is their name- they used to be called "British Telecom", but they aren't any more- they're just called "BT". In the same way as "AT&T" is their name- nobody translates it to "American Telephone & Telegraph" any more.
Presumably you would make that one of the key "must have" requirements when selecting your device, then. The beauty of market choice.
Overpriced doesn't always mean "business grade". Looking at the prices we pay for everything from Dell keyboards, Airtech laptop bags, and K-locks, it can be anywhere from twice to three times the price you could buy it on the highstreet. For exactly the same models! The Dell keyboards we buy are exactly the same ones you get with an Inspiron desktop computer, and usually die by the exact same causes (coffee spills, the legs getting snapped off, someone bending the USB out of shape, etc.).
I'm willing to accept that the ThinkPads we use are higher grade than the Lenovo basic laptops, but there's only so much you can do with standard peripherals.
Personally, I'm an XFCE convert. The Xubuntu variant looks and feels very similar to the classic GNOME 2 Ubuntu, it's not overly flashy looking (I don't want my GUI to dazzle, I want it to stay out of my applications' way), and it's relatively hardware friendly. It's not as diligent about being slim as it used to be- but that's not necessarily a bad thing when I'm trying to use it as a full desktop environment on modern hardware.
Although I've never tried GNOME 3. Not a big fan of Unity for normal usage, although it probably suits my small-screen devices (netbooks etc.) well enough.
I know very well that Windows and Office revenue streams get protected, sometimes to the point of strangling worthy new products, but if this device was really "all that" then it should have been possible to add those capabilities. I am left to guess that either adding that was actively resisted or there were other limitations that prevented them from being added, and if that were the case it would be an even bigger black eye. After all, if it wasn't possible to add those features, what else would developers not be able to add, and developers are another area that tie in to the Windows and Office revenue streams.
I think that hits the nail on the head. So it doesn't have an email application- why not? Why not just write one? It's an incredibly simple solution- surely it isn't the case that no-one at MS thought of it. Companies have been writing email clients for decades- knocking one up must be routine for the likes of MS these days.
Ditto with Office. If they can put together a touch-based MS Office suite for other Windows tablets, why not this one? They have the source code, they have the APIs, they have the cash to throw at it (I was under the impression that MS spares no expense for Office development), surely that wouldn't be beyond them? And if it is- why? What's the hurdle?
I've always found it a worrying concept that someone can, for one, claim that the Bible is the verbatim word of God, Jesus, and the prophets, and represents the kernel around which to build their world view, while for another happily write off or ignore any part of the Bible which has either been proved wrong (e.g. literal young earth creationism) or is inconvenient (dietary restrictions, money lending rules, circumcision).
Surely it's either the words and instructions of the almighty, omnipotent creator who will judge your immortal soul (and you really should listen to it very carefully), or it's not (and you should pick a more stable basis for your life philosophy)?
You could have just switched to Xubuntu. Unity isn't mandatory, you know.
Like MeeGo (/Maemo/Moblin) you mean?
Don't get me wrong, I'm pleased with this news and eager to see if Canonical can get it off the ground, but it's not ground breaking. And the biggest challenge will be getting a hardware partner to actually make the devices; Canonical can "make" a smartphone distro if they like, but it won't do anyone any good if it only works on a handful of dev devices and VMs. Crikey, I'm not even sure what's going to happen to the MeeGo project (thriving community and all) now Nokia is dropping it.
If you follow the link (I know, I know), you'll see their party trick at their trade stall was playing Avatar at 1080p.
For the same reason as there's a Safari for Windows?
It probably means the same thing to Samsung. Consumers buy their phones from Walmart (etc.), not Samsung. Walmart buy their phones from Samsung.
So Samsung make the phone, and it's sat in a Samsung warehouse. Then Walmart buy 10,000 of them, and 10,000 leave the Samsung warehouse and are shipped to a Walmart warehouse. Walmart pay Samsung some money for their purchase. (That's the "shipped" part).
Samsung don't care what happens to them next, really. If Walmart want to pile those 10,000 handsets in a heap and burn them with lighter fluid, it makes no real difference to how much Samsung have been paid.
If you're trying to analyse what's more popular with the consumer, though, then "shipped" and "sold" are different.
Then there are the Firefox UI changes they've made with recent releases that only make it so much harder to use Firefox. Please bring back the menus! Please bring back the status bar! Please show the protocol in the URL bar again! Please reverse any design decision made by a so-called "UI designer". They don't help usability! Hell, even Thunderbird has been affected by this crap.
I agree with everything you say (if I wanted to use a browser that looked exactly like Chrome, I'd, you know, use Chrome). But I should point out that you can turn the menu bar back on; it was the first thing I did after installing the new version. You can put the http:/// back in your URL bar too (by mucking with about:config), although I haven't bothered with that one myself yet.
If they make an Android phone, they're latecomers to an already crowded market. Why should someone buy a Nokia device when HTC have a range of products, so do Motorola, so do Samsung, so do LG. What can Nokia do to persuade people to buy their phone instead?
Nokia is a big brand in their own right, with a surprisingly loyal user base. Many people would buy a Nokia Android phone over a HTC one just for the brand name. However "Android or WP7" would probably trump "Samsung or Nokia" as the deciding issue for most people.
I call rubbish on the interface comment too. Android's interface is highly customizeable by the vendor (most of the vendors have their own distinct style), whereas with WP7 there will be a much bigger element of "it comes the way it comes".
Are you suggesting that a country should defend its territory from nuclear bombs by setting off huge nuclear bombs on the edge of its territory?
I like your style.
Let me put it another way. I work for a living. Let's say that my job could be easily replaced with a clever piece of software, and I'm sacked. That isn't my decision based on my enjoyment (or lack) of my job- it's the decision of my company in their endless quest for higher profits and bigger shareholder dividends. I now have no income. Let's say for the sake of argument that all jobs in my field have gone the same way, as have all jobs of a lesser skill level, and many of a higher skill level. I am unable to get a new job in the short to medium term.
I don't grow any food myself, and need food to stay alive. If I want food from one of the (automatic) farms, I'm going to need to find some money or something of worth to exchange with the big farming PLC that owns them. Ditto, I don't own a house- if I don't have something to give my landlord every month, why on earth would they let me stay here?
I'd be all for said communist utopia, where endless cheap food rolls off the state-owned auto-farms, and I'd be free all day to pursue my hobbies, family duties, or employment of choice. But how on earth are we going to get there?
When farming technology took a leap in the 19th and 20th century, many countries (uncluding the US and the EU) found themselves producing massive food surplusses. On the other hand, countries elsewhere in the world were desperate for a cheap plentiful supply of food, and were starving for it. It would have been a very simple economic adjustment to work this one out; but that's not what happened. Instead you have the ridiculous situation where US & EU taxpayer subsidies are being spent in order to encourage the farmers to grow less food, and about half the world's population carried on starving. Why? Because any other situation would have meant a collapse in profits for the farmers. I mean, if we couldn't work out that tiny new technologically-driven economic kink, what hope do we have of your Star Trek style utopia coming to pass?
Yeah, but who's going to pay anyone for not doing any work? If you have 10 taxi drivers on £20k a year, and you buy 10 Google auto-driving robot taxis, you don't have 10 auto-taxis and 10 taxi drivers larking about doing nothing for £20k a year (or £10k, or whatever), you have 10 auto-taxis and 10 unemployed men. If you can pull that trick for 90% of jobs, and you can't create exactly the same number of jobs (at the same skill level), you've got a big problem.
I suppose you could tax the taxi company on their profits and use that tax revenue to pay unemployment benefits or state services to those redundant humans, but that's basically a communist utopia (and last I heard, most Westerners were against that).
In the UK, most of the ghost-hunter programmes are funnelled off onto essentially a channel of their own, ironically called "Living". Pleasingly, most of the UFO and conspiracy "documentaries" are shown on the Sci-Fi Channel (er, SyFy these days I guess).