lnstead, they've managed to totally underwhelm the world with a new product launch for a fine incremental update for something that would have looked fairly decent if examined in its own light.
Lets wait and see what the world thinks rather than the handful of rabid fans and trolls who were obsessively scouring the interwebs for unconfirmed iPhone 5 leaks and rumors. Although, come to think about it, the rumor sites have been accurately predicting the 4S for the last couple of weeks, so I don't know who is really that surprised.
This is far from the first time that Apple have failed to deliver the fusion-powered, unobtanium-cased ubergizmo predicted by rumor sites - they haven't gone bust yet.
Unless the specific application that you want to use is exclusive to mobile phones, such as a bank's check deposit application that uses a mobile phone's built-in camera, or any of several casual games.
The question is, how many of those apps make sense when they're not running on the mobile for which they were designed? In the case of the check example, why would you want to use the app on your laptop when you could just pick up your mobile - isn't it much easier to snap a picture of that check sitting on a table with a handheld? For the games, if its an accelerometer-controlled game, or one driven by your thumbs on the touchscreen, it might not be playable on a laptop.
Anyway, mobile seems to be developing into at least a two-horse race and developers seem to be coping with the idea of supporting multiple platforms. Its a far cry from the bad old days when anybody bravely choosing a non-Windows platform was on their own.
Remember, you don't just need one or two cases where this might be useful, you need a critical mass of applications that would make this OS switching a must-have feature.
iOS 5 is in fact going the other way, reducing its dependency on iTunes software. It appears Apple is opening the door to allow people to own only an iPad and not a Mac or a PC running Windows.
What they're doing is moving to a model whereby, instead of syncing device A with device B, you sync all of your devices with Apple's new cloud services. That's basically what Google has always been doing with Android and ChromeOS, and is a far more sensible way of doing things, provided you've learned to stop worrying and love the cloud. Its still "syncing". The use of iTunes for syncing everything has always been a weak spot of iOS and Apple's iOS productivity apps (and probably only happened because of Apple's problems with MobileMe): many 3rd party productivity apps have their own file exchange facilities and/or interface with the iOS version of DropBox.
....but that doesn't change the point that (say) Apple's Pages for iOS is a pared-down WP app designed to be manageable on an iDevice, and if you were working on a desktop you'd generally use the full-fat OS X version.
What seems strange to me is, why haven't other developers jumped in on this already?
Perhaps because its a feature nobody actually wants? It looks cool, but what are the practical uses? TFA refers to switching between ChromeOS, Ubuntu and Android - why? Last time I looked, ChromeOS was basically a gateway onto Google's web apps, which are available in any browser. Meanwhile I don't want to run Android/iOS apps on another OS - the point of a mobile operating system is that both the OS and the Apps are designed for mobile/touchscreen use: if I'm using a device capable of running a desktop OS then I'd also like to run full-fat desktop applications. Most decent mobile applications are designed on the assumption that you'll sync them with your desktop when available.
Macs, for instance, made a huge campaign of their products' new ability to finally support Microsoft Windows, yet (disregarding emulation options) they're still limited to booting to a single working system at any time."
Not sure what you mean by "emulation options" - modern virtualization tools are an order of magnitude better than old-school hardware emulators and perfectly adequate for all but the most demanding applications and some have gone a long way towards making Windows applications work as seamlessly as can be expected alongside OS X on the desktop and sharing files, clipboards. Plus, they let you do all sorts of other tricks like snapshots and exchanging virtual appliances that are useful for testing and experimenting. Parallels seems to be top of the heap in terms of OSX/Windows integration, some claim VMWare Fusion is more stable/has better support (I don't use it so I can't argue) and VirtualBox can't be beat for free.
I wish I could fail as badly as shipping 1.5 million units. I very much doubt that you've ever failed so successfully. In no sane measuer was the original eee a failure.
Yeah, so successful that they let the platform wither on the vine and started making entry-level Windows machines instead. So it depends what you mean by success - a couple of profitable quarters, or a successful platform in the longer term.
"Despite early successes on the Web, the latter years of Flash have been a tale of missed opportunities,
Not surprising, when the Next Big Things are smartphones and tablets, and - of the two leading platforms - iOS refuses to support Flash at all, and Android has very patchy support (I recently did an unscientific test in Best Buy and although several of the Android tablets claimed to support Flash, only the Xoom actually opened my Flash applet).
One of the key lessons from failure of the original windows "tablet" PCs, the failure of the original EEE PC "Netbook" concept (subsequent "netbooks" have been more and more like entry-level laptops) and the rise of the iDevices has been that phones and tablets need custom-designed software that matches the native UI. That's why Microsoft hasn't been able to Borg the mobile market: the killer apps (Office/Outlook) which help it to dominate the desktop (on PC and Mac) are worthless on mobiles without a ground-up rewrite. Flash has a similar problem: even if your tablet does run Flash, many "legacy" Flash apps just won't work with a touch interface or, if they do, are too fiddly to operate on a tiny screen.
However, "HTML5" (i.e. all, some or fewer of HTML5/CSS3/ECMAScript/DOM/SVG/WebGL/whatever) is only just approaching maturity - so there could be a move back from native Apps to webapps (given they can be made almost indistinguishable from Native on iOS/Android). Amazon have already produced a webapp version of the Kindle reader (to get around Apple's rules on in-app sales).
Flash player itself is probably on the way out - for better or worse "HTML5" will probably take over, especially with Microsoft taking that road with Win 8. However, Adobe has a great opportunity: there's a great gap in the market for something like Flash Professional which can "publish" to HTML5, or even iOS/Android native code. It may not be the programmer's choice, but for certain types of app (e.g. relatively simple educational applets, or casual games) its a killer. Flash player dying doesn't have to hurt Adobe much.
Not that I'm a huge fan of Adobe's current bloatware offerings, but I don't currently see anything like Flash for HTML5 applet authoring...
What if your child was Hitler, Stalin, or Pol Pot?
How would you know? Convenient swastika-shaped birthmark? Tendency to pull the heads off any dollies who don't look quite perfect? Long queue of time travelers with nasty-looking guns at the door?
Seriously, the problem with all these moral dilemmas is certainty: if you were ever 100% absolutely sure that killing one person would save the lives of millions then, yes, perhaps you should do it - but that sort of certain foreknowledge just doesn't happen in real life. Occam's razor says that your mysterious friend who claims to be from the future was just a nutter, and your prophetic vision was caused by too many recreational pharmaceuticals during a Twilight Zone marathon.
The danger is when some cause, such as politics, religion, baseball, computer brand loyalty or even science (if you're doing it wrong), convinces you that something is unquestionably true and discourages critical thinking or doubt.
Nice - when the technology is mature. However, currently e-ink can't refresh fast enough for a tablet-style UI so you'd have to power up the LCD for every interaction. Also, you'd have to stick the LCD in front of the e-Ink without reducing the readability of the e-ink display.
- Swappable batteries (in different sizes).
There's a good reason why tablets and e-readers have non-swappable batteries: making a battery safely swappable adds a lot of bulk for the same amount of battery. You have to build in a battery door, a protective partition so you can change the battery without getting crap in the works, enough tolerance to be able to insert and remove it, spring-loaded contacts... then the battery itself has to be cased and re-enforced so it doesn't get snapped in half or shorted out when its carried outside the tablet (bad karma with a lithium cell!). This in a market where every millimeter shaved off the thickness is a selling point.
- 3D (Please no, but it is inevitable someone tries)
Stereoscopy sucks. The head-position sensing idea sounds promising, though.
- Ruggedized
Buy a case. Then you can take it off when you're not doing extreme sports.
- Sensible number of USB and full-sized SDs
More bulk - and increasingly irrelevant in the wireless age. Tablets are fundamentally handheld devices - how many cables do you want hanging off them? Via adapters, the iPad can connect to USB, SD, VGA, HDMI, Component and Composite - adding separate connectors for that level of connectivity would make for a much larger/thicker case and/or you'd still need a micro-to-fullsize adapter for each port.
Remember: even the original iPad was a tad on the thick/heavy side for sustained reading/media viewing. That's one reason why the Kindle is nicer for reading books on. The iPad 2 was an improvement, I'm sure the iPad 3 will shave a bit more off. You do not want to do anything to make it thicker or heavier.
I hope this whole tablet business will not delay what I really expect from Amazon - a hi-res color e-ink Kindle.
Nope, that's waiting on the technology. In particular, for an e-reader (as opposed to smart labels etc.) one of the USPs of e-ink is the clear black text for sustained reading. So there's no point going to colour if the trade-off is fuzzy, muddy brown text - which is what you'll inevitably get if you try and make black from cyan,magenta and yellow sub-pixels. There's a reason why conventional printing uses an additional black plate.
The up-and-coming electrowetting displays sound interesting, in that they're fast enough for animation, and can stack several colours in the same pixel.
A) Make it cheaper than all the other tablets. Corner the market by throwing money at it. Make a $150 tablet that is every bit as functional as a netbook, and watch them sell like hot cakes.
Except... so far all the "iPad class" tablets have cost the same as the iPad. Maybe this is because the manufacturers are greedy and want the same margins as Apple, but it does look a little bit like $500 is a realistic price for that much hardware. Of course, Amazon might be able to make it a loss leader against anticipated media sales.
B) Make it boot stock Cyanogenmod. Also have it be able to run Linux Mint and also Windows XP.
ROTFL.
Seriously, that's a complete nerds-eye view of the issue - the bulk of the tablet buying public doesn't give a wet slap about alternate OSs. Also, if the success of Apple and the failure (in the mobile arena) of Microsoft has shown anything, its that mobile devices need mobile software. XP and regular Linux would be unusable on a tablet. We had XP tablets before the iPad - they failed.
A really good video chat, at least as good as google's video chat, but with no sign in, just any email address would work, and anybody in your contact list is already added to your buddy list.
Isn't that pretty much a description of Apple's "facetime"?
D) Give it stylus capability and a great GIMP/airbrush program that really works, really well out of the box.
That could be a killer app for a small group (those currently salivating over one of those nice Wacom display/tablets) but would it have mass appeal? The success of tablets so far seems to be as "consumption" devices. Also, what is the actual resolution of the capacitive touchscreens used on tablets - all the available styli seem to be "finger shaped". Making a touchscreen that worked well for both stylus and fingers could be expensive.
E) Include an excellent ereader and every text out of copyright downloadable for free in an easy to read format. Also include a great organization to find and download them. Something better than currently exists.
I agree that an out-of-copyright bookstore with the same nice browsing/recommending/reviewing features as, say Amazon, would be a really, really nice feature. Amazon do have a "free classics" section, and links to other free sites, but you have to dig a bit to find it. I can't for the life of me think why the people with bookstore experience (e.g. Amazon) don't make it easier to find free books. Answers on the back of a $20 bill, please.
Seriously, though, its no Amazon, but the Project Gutenberg website isn't exactly rocket science.
Do these 5 things, and you will beat them all: Apple, Google, Microsoft, Barnes and Noble, Amazon, HTC, Samsung, all of them.
The way the wind is currently blowing, its just going to be Apple to beat, unless Google or Amazon pull a rabbit out of the hat. I half suspect that Apple's patent shenanigans are just short-term efforts to try to block a series of HP-style fire sales of Xooms and Galaxy Tabs this holiday season, after no bugger buys them.
Yes, the B&N nook is a hit with the Slashdot crowd who want a cheap tablet to hack, but I doubt that is enough to make it a huge, sustainable commercial success on the scale of the iPad.
The DX is not really being pushed by Amazon here in the UK, although you can get one for about £300 - getting into half-decent tablet territory. The regular kindle is £110-£150 which is just cheap enough to justify buying it as a single-purpose device for reading novels & similar.
Also, in the UK/EU we have this utterly stupid tax regime that really hobbles e-readers: printed books are exempt from sales tax, but e-books are subject to (typically 20%) tax. I get the impression that (printed) text books here are rather cheaper than in the US - but not by the time you've added 20%.
The tablet market is not yet established, and Apple is currently just in first mover advantage.
...except we've had the first round of competitors and they've pretty much failed to offer any real competition. Apple seem to have established the price point for iPad-class tablets - the competition offerings have failed to either offer the same for significantly less, or substantially more at the same price point.
I'm guessing the next round will be the industry getting a clue and realizing that you can't beat the iPad by offering a slightly faster processor or a bit more RAM the way you can in the commodity PC market - you have to offer a better all-round "platform". Possibly Googleola and Amazon will be the next challengers - both more interested in selling the platform than shifting hardware for the sake of it. I think my money is on Amazon (the Kindle seems to have the "just works" secret sauce that lets it thrash competing e-readers without having any clear technical advantage - if they can bring that to tablets they may have a chance).
I fail to see how this new tech will become a problem. The hardware makers want to sell hardware. Given their already thin margins, it would be stupid of them to agree to limit their boards to any one particular OS.
...of course, those thin margins make any sort of branding/incentive scheme (a better deal on software licenses, a kickback for qualifying for and displaying some sort of "Works with Gizmos" badge...) awfully attractive. Fortunately, our tech firms are ethical and law abiding and would never resort to using such schemes to obtain an anti-competetive advantage.
If you think they should be, make your case to the EU. You never know. The existing rulings against Microsoft were made because companies complained. The way Apple is going, with a chance of achieving a monopoly in the tablet market, I suspect they'll cross swords with the EU at some point.
However, the issue here is not whether Microsoft should be able to market their own-brand locked down tablet - its the hypothetical idea that MS could use its leverage with OEMs (i.e. the cost of MS software licenses, and other incentive schemes) to encourage them all to lock out non-MS operating systems. Hypothetical, but a plausible extrapolation from their past practices...
But do not fret, you can still install whatever OS you like on an Apple Mac.
Not that I'm suggesting my very poor government tries to build it's own device but surely a tablet sized kindle would be better?
E-ink still takes too long to refresh (with that bizzare negative after-image effect) to support an iOS/Android style touch interface, without which panning and zooming around large PDFs, following hyperlinks, rapid skimming, annotating PDFs etc. is just too cumbersome.
E-ink rules for bedtime reading (long chunks of plain text in sequence) but for reference use with technical documents and hypertext - especially where it hasn't bee knidle-ized to render as re-flowable text, the slick UI beats the low-eyestrain display.
Plus, you can't use a Kindle to watch the cricket on iPlayer. All the Kindle has is an easter-egg "minesweeper" game (which would certainly lead to "Minister plays sick bombing game in Cabinet meeting - we ask mother of legless war hero what she thinks" headlines in the wonderful British tabloid press).
So.... the sooner the government sponsored postal service goes out of business, the sooner the private companies will have to shoulder their part of the burden,
Yeah, just like they've fallen over themselves to roll out high speed fiber broadband to the boondocks. I'm sure they'll offer really competitive rates for postage in areas where they offer the only coverage, just like the phone companies do.
Private companies' only obligation is to make money: if they can make a profit serving 90% of the population, why should they throw money away serving the remaining, loss-making 10%?
and the sooner companies will have to pay the real (hopefully non-profitable) cost of junk mail?
No - they'd offer junk delivery to 90% of the population, which would be enough for the advertisers, and probably reduce the cost. The outliers wouldn't get junk mail... or any mail at all.
The 'required skills' of a lot of job specs always make me laugh with their massive list of requirements. I don't honestly understand why they do it because you'll never find someone with all those skills.
Just guessing: If you reject someone who meets all the requirements in favor of another applicant who has something useful you weren't expecting, then they might accuse you of discrimination. So list everything you might conceivably base your decision on. Of course, anti-discrimination laws are a great idea - in a parallel universe where HR departments adopt them in spirit. Back in this world, HR departments interpret them in the most paranoid and defensive way possible and try to turn recruitment into a quantitative science (thereby discriminating against anybody who has potential but has not been able to gain qualifications and experience because of, e.g. discrimination, poverty or other misfortune).
Do you have any data to show what parts of the U.S. are not reached by FedEx or UPS (separately or together)?.
That's "premium" packages and document services which offer a reasonable profit margin.
National postal services are typically obliged to make daily deliveries and collections of everyday letters and small packages for the regular cost of a stamp, which is a rather different proposition.
Never before in human history we were buying so many goods from remote locations all over the world to be delivered by... postal services!
Except that the nationalized postal services face a lot of competition from private courier firms who aren't hamstrung with government requirements to provide a universal service and can cherry-pick the best routes.
That's certainly the situation in the UK: the postal service is obliged to charge a ridiculously low price for the basic first-class letter, and to deliver & collect them from right out in the sticks, but has long since lost ts monopoly on postal deliveries, so faces lots of competition for lucrative business deliveries around major cities. They mainly survive by delivering vast quantities of junk mail.
If you want a universal postal service you have two choices: give 'em a monopoly to make up for the universal service requirement, or just accept that they won't be profitable and that you are going to have to put money in and get a service out. Then tackle the remaining problems with inertia and unions head on, instead of messing about with ideology-based pseudo-free-market kludges in the vain hope that the invisible hand will make it all better.
The article states that they print ROLLS of this stuff over a meter wide and up to a kilometer long... Why can't I have a color e-ink reader with an 8 1/2" x 11" screen, a touch screen, and full PDF support?
I don't care what it costs, shut up and take my money!
I get the impression that they're talking about large sheets of the "microcapsule" material used in the displays, rather than complete displays with the electronics required to "write" pixels to them. They're pretty clear that the electronics are the limiting factor.
Meanwhile, the Kindle seems reasonably happy with displaying PDFs - its just that panning and zooming them is painful - partly because of the limited controls on a Kindle, but mainly because of the very slow screen refresh.
I was fairly horrified at the story early this week that the colour Kindle is LCD.
...but e-ink (even the colour e-ink described in TFA) is far too slow for video, games etc. Its also too slow to properly implement an iOS/Android style multitouch interface (sure, you can add a touch sensitive screen, but its the visual feedback that "makes" these interfaces).
I'd also like to see what the resolution/contrast of these colour e-ink screens is like, especially when displaying black-on-white text (as far as I can see, adding colour can only reduce the black-on-white resolution).
The rumour was that the B&W Kindle was going to continue alongside the new "Kindle tablet" - which seems like sense. The B&W kindle is unbeatable for reading novels etc. even though the iPad Kindle app has better functionality. Convergence between e-readers and tablets depends on some new display technology with the battery life and clarity of e-ink plus the colour and speed of LCD.
...and it is unbeatable for sequentially reading large quantities of flowing text - but until it has a much faster response rate, that is about all it is good for. Paper books have better random access! Aside from the lack of colour or video, it can't even implement a decent multitouch interface (sure, you can add the touchscreen but you can't give the sort of fluid visual feedback on which iOS and Android depend).
I have an iPad and a Kindle - the Kindle is far more relaxing for reading novels on, but for anything else, even for reading reference books and other PDFs, the iPad is more practical.
On the other hand, Amazon have kept the price of the e-ink Kindle down to the point where it is viable as a single-purpose device. If the price given in TFA for the Amazon Tablet is correct (presumably they will be subsidizing it from media sales) then you could get a tablet + an e-ink Kindle for the price of most half-decent tablets...
Wonder if its going to have "free" worldwide 3G like the Kindle?
However, it does sound a bit like Kindle Tablet owners are going to be able to tell iPad owners "Lock-in? That's not a lock-in... This is a lock-in..."
I distribute a document on a disk to the users of my systems (chain stores and suppliers)
So anybody could send a fake message to one of your users giving them a new fingerprint. Or, if someone MITMd your site they could route people through a page that told them the fingerprint had changed. I've no idea whether your line of business involves sufficiently valuable information to make you a viable target for such effort and, critically, neither do the browser writers. Your system still doesn't guarantee anything - your users have to trust that the document really is from you, and you have to trust your users not to fall for simple social engineering and you add the disadvantage that you have to physically distribute fingerprints (with some sort of physical anti-counterfeiting arrangement, and all the contingent arrangements for when people lose/forget them or if you have to change your server certificate). The current CA system could doubtless be improved, but ultimately you have two choices: distribute key fingerprints with appropriate physical precautions or use a trusted third party to verify identity. Both are imperfect.
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lnstead, they've managed to totally underwhelm the world with a new product launch for a fine incremental update for something that would have looked fairly decent if examined in its own light.
Lets wait and see what the world thinks rather than the handful of rabid fans and trolls who were obsessively scouring the interwebs for unconfirmed iPhone 5 leaks and rumors. Although, come to think about it, the rumor sites have been accurately predicting the 4S for the last couple of weeks, so I don't know who is really that surprised.
This is far from the first time that Apple have failed to deliver the fusion-powered, unobtanium-cased ubergizmo predicted by rumor sites - they haven't gone bust yet.
Unless the specific application that you want to use is exclusive to mobile phones, such as a bank's check deposit application that uses a mobile phone's built-in camera, or any of several casual games.
The question is, how many of those apps make sense when they're not running on the mobile for which they were designed? In the case of the check example, why would you want to use the app on your laptop when you could just pick up your mobile - isn't it much easier to snap a picture of that check sitting on a table with a handheld? For the games, if its an accelerometer-controlled game, or one driven by your thumbs on the touchscreen, it might not be playable on a laptop.
Anyway, mobile seems to be developing into at least a two-horse race and developers seem to be coping with the idea of supporting multiple platforms. Its a far cry from the bad old days when anybody bravely choosing a non-Windows platform was on their own.
Remember, you don't just need one or two cases where this might be useful, you need a critical mass of applications that would make this OS switching a must-have feature.
iOS 5 is in fact going the other way, reducing its dependency on iTunes software. It appears Apple is opening the door to allow people to own only an iPad and not a Mac or a PC running Windows.
What they're doing is moving to a model whereby, instead of syncing device A with device B, you sync all of your devices with Apple's new cloud services. That's basically what Google has always been doing with Android and ChromeOS, and is a far more sensible way of doing things, provided you've learned to stop worrying and love the cloud. Its still "syncing". The use of iTunes for syncing everything has always been a weak spot of iOS and Apple's iOS productivity apps (and probably only happened because of Apple's problems with MobileMe): many 3rd party productivity apps have their own file exchange facilities and/or interface with the iOS version of DropBox.
....but that doesn't change the point that (say) Apple's Pages for iOS is a pared-down WP app designed to be manageable on an iDevice, and if you were working on a desktop you'd generally use the full-fat OS X version.
What seems strange to me is, why haven't other developers jumped in on this already?
Perhaps because its a feature nobody actually wants? It looks cool, but what are the practical uses? TFA refers to switching between ChromeOS, Ubuntu and Android - why? Last time I looked, ChromeOS was basically a gateway onto Google's web apps, which are available in any browser. Meanwhile I don't want to run Android/iOS apps on another OS - the point of a mobile operating system is that both the OS and the Apps are designed for mobile/touchscreen use: if I'm using a device capable of running a desktop OS then I'd also like to run full-fat desktop applications. Most decent mobile applications are designed on the assumption that you'll sync them with your desktop when available.
Macs, for instance, made a huge campaign of their products' new ability to finally support Microsoft Windows, yet (disregarding emulation options) they're still limited to booting to a single working system at any time."
Not sure what you mean by "emulation options" - modern virtualization tools are an order of magnitude better than old-school hardware emulators and perfectly adequate for all but the most demanding applications and some have gone a long way towards making Windows applications work as seamlessly as can be expected alongside OS X on the desktop and sharing files, clipboards. Plus, they let you do all sorts of other tricks like snapshots and exchanging virtual appliances that are useful for testing and experimenting. Parallels seems to be top of the heap in terms of OSX/Windows integration, some claim VMWare Fusion is more stable/has better support (I don't use it so I can't argue) and VirtualBox can't be beat for free.
the failure of the original EEE PC "Netbook"
I wish I could fail as badly as shipping 1.5 million units. I very much doubt that you've ever failed so successfully. In no sane measuer was the original eee a failure.
Yeah, so successful that they let the platform wither on the vine and started making entry-level Windows machines instead. So it depends what you mean by success - a couple of profitable quarters, or a successful platform in the longer term.
"Despite early successes on the Web, the latter years of Flash have been a tale of missed opportunities,
Not surprising, when the Next Big Things are smartphones and tablets, and - of the two leading platforms - iOS refuses to support Flash at all, and Android has very patchy support (I recently did an unscientific test in Best Buy and although several of the Android tablets claimed to support Flash, only the Xoom actually opened my Flash applet).
One of the key lessons from failure of the original windows "tablet" PCs, the failure of the original EEE PC "Netbook" concept (subsequent "netbooks" have been more and more like entry-level laptops) and the rise of the iDevices has been that phones and tablets need custom-designed software that matches the native UI. That's why Microsoft hasn't been able to Borg the mobile market: the killer apps (Office/Outlook) which help it to dominate the desktop (on PC and Mac) are worthless on mobiles without a ground-up rewrite. Flash has a similar problem: even if your tablet does run Flash, many "legacy" Flash apps just won't work with a touch interface or, if they do, are too fiddly to operate on a tiny screen.
However, "HTML5" (i.e. all, some or fewer of HTML5/CSS3/ECMAScript/DOM/SVG/WebGL/whatever) is only just approaching maturity - so there could be a move back from native Apps to webapps (given they can be made almost indistinguishable from Native on iOS/Android). Amazon have already produced a webapp version of the Kindle reader (to get around Apple's rules on in-app sales).
Flash player itself is probably on the way out - for better or worse "HTML5" will probably take over, especially with Microsoft taking that road with Win 8. However, Adobe has a great opportunity: there's a great gap in the market for something like Flash Professional which can "publish" to HTML5, or even iOS/Android native code. It may not be the programmer's choice, but for certain types of app (e.g. relatively simple educational applets, or casual games) its a killer. Flash player dying doesn't have to hurt Adobe much.
Not that I'm a huge fan of Adobe's current bloatware offerings, but I don't currently see anything like Flash for HTML5 applet authoring...
What if your child was Hitler, Stalin, or Pol Pot?
How would you know? Convenient swastika-shaped birthmark? Tendency to pull the heads off any dollies who don't look quite perfect? Long queue of time travelers with nasty-looking guns at the door?
Seriously, the problem with all these moral dilemmas is certainty: if you were ever 100% absolutely sure that killing one person would save the lives of millions then, yes, perhaps you should do it - but that sort of certain foreknowledge just doesn't happen in real life. Occam's razor says that your mysterious friend who claims to be from the future was just a nutter, and your prophetic vision was caused by too many recreational pharmaceuticals during a Twilight Zone marathon.
The danger is when some cause, such as politics, religion, baseball, computer brand loyalty or even science (if you're doing it wrong), convinces you that something is unquestionably true and discourages critical thinking or doubt.
- A hybrid e-ink/LCD transflective display.
Nice - when the technology is mature. However, currently e-ink can't refresh fast enough for a tablet-style UI so you'd have to power up the LCD for every interaction. Also, you'd have to stick the LCD in front of the e-Ink without reducing the readability of the e-ink display.
- Swappable batteries (in different sizes).
There's a good reason why tablets and e-readers have non-swappable batteries: making a battery safely swappable adds a lot of bulk for the same amount of battery. You have to build in a battery door, a protective partition so you can change the battery without getting crap in the works, enough tolerance to be able to insert and remove it, spring-loaded contacts... then the battery itself has to be cased and re-enforced so it doesn't get snapped in half or shorted out when its carried outside the tablet (bad karma with a lithium cell!). This in a market where every millimeter shaved off the thickness is a selling point.
- 3D (Please no, but it is inevitable someone tries)
Stereoscopy sucks. The head-position sensing idea sounds promising, though.
- Ruggedized
Buy a case. Then you can take it off when you're not doing extreme sports.
- Sensible number of USB and full-sized SDs
More bulk - and increasingly irrelevant in the wireless age. Tablets are fundamentally handheld devices - how many cables do you want hanging off them? Via adapters, the iPad can connect to USB, SD, VGA, HDMI, Component and Composite - adding separate connectors for that level of connectivity would make for a much larger/thicker case and/or you'd still need a micro-to-fullsize adapter for each port.
Remember: even the original iPad was a tad on the thick/heavy side for sustained reading/media viewing. That's one reason why the Kindle is nicer for reading books on. The iPad 2 was an improvement, I'm sure the iPad 3 will shave a bit more off. You do not want to do anything to make it thicker or heavier.
I hope this whole tablet business will not delay what I really expect from Amazon - a hi-res color e-ink Kindle.
Nope, that's waiting on the technology. In particular, for an e-reader (as opposed to smart labels etc.) one of the USPs of e-ink is the clear black text for sustained reading. So there's no point going to colour if the trade-off is fuzzy, muddy brown text - which is what you'll inevitably get if you try and make black from cyan,magenta and yellow sub-pixels. There's a reason why conventional printing uses an additional black plate.
The up-and-coming electrowetting displays sound interesting, in that they're fast enough for animation, and can stack several colours in the same pixel.
A) Make it cheaper than all the other tablets. Corner the market by throwing money at it. Make a $150 tablet that is every bit as functional as a netbook, and watch them sell like hot cakes.
Except... so far all the "iPad class" tablets have cost the same as the iPad. Maybe this is because the manufacturers are greedy and want the same margins as Apple, but it does look a little bit like $500 is a realistic price for that much hardware. Of course, Amazon might be able to make it a loss leader against anticipated media sales.
B) Make it boot stock Cyanogenmod. Also have it be able to run Linux Mint and also Windows XP.
ROTFL.
Seriously, that's a complete nerds-eye view of the issue - the bulk of the tablet buying public doesn't give a wet slap about alternate OSs. Also, if the success of Apple and the failure (in the mobile arena) of Microsoft has shown anything, its that mobile devices need mobile software. XP and regular Linux would be unusable on a tablet. We had XP tablets before the iPad - they failed.
A really good video chat, at least as good as google's video chat, but with no sign in, just any email address would work, and anybody in your contact list is already added to your buddy list.
Isn't that pretty much a description of Apple's "facetime"?
D) Give it stylus capability and a great GIMP/airbrush program that really works, really well out of the box.
That could be a killer app for a small group (those currently salivating over one of those nice Wacom display/tablets) but would it have mass appeal? The success of tablets so far seems to be as "consumption" devices. Also, what is the actual resolution of the capacitive touchscreens used on tablets - all the available styli seem to be "finger shaped". Making a touchscreen that worked well for both stylus and fingers could be expensive.
E) Include an excellent ereader and every text out of copyright downloadable for free in an easy to read format. Also include a great organization to find and download them. Something better than currently exists.
I agree that an out-of-copyright bookstore with the same nice browsing/recommending/reviewing features as, say Amazon, would be a really, really nice feature. Amazon do have a "free classics" section, and links to other free sites, but you have to dig a bit to find it. I can't for the life of me think why the people with bookstore experience (e.g. Amazon) don't make it easier to find free books. Answers on the back of a $20 bill, please.
Seriously, though, its no Amazon, but the Project Gutenberg website isn't exactly rocket science.
Do these 5 things, and you will beat them all: Apple, Google, Microsoft, Barnes and Noble, Amazon, HTC, Samsung, all of them.
The way the wind is currently blowing, its just going to be Apple to beat, unless Google or Amazon pull a rabbit out of the hat. I half suspect that Apple's patent shenanigans are just short-term efforts to try to block a series of HP-style fire sales of Xooms and Galaxy Tabs this holiday season, after no bugger buys them.
Yes, the B&N nook is a hit with the Slashdot crowd who want a cheap tablet to hack, but I doubt that is enough to make it a huge, sustainable commercial success on the scale of the iPad.
The DX is not really being pushed by Amazon here in the UK, although you can get one for about £300 - getting into half-decent tablet territory. The regular kindle is £110-£150 which is just cheap enough to justify buying it as a single-purpose device for reading novels & similar.
Also, in the UK/EU we have this utterly stupid tax regime that really hobbles e-readers: printed books are exempt from sales tax, but e-books are subject to (typically 20%) tax. I get the impression that (printed) text books here are rather cheaper than in the US - but not by the time you've added 20%.
The tablet market is not yet established, and Apple is currently just in first mover advantage.
...except we've had the first round of competitors and they've pretty much failed to offer any real competition. Apple seem to have established the price point for iPad-class tablets - the competition offerings have failed to either offer the same for significantly less, or substantially more at the same price point.
I'm guessing the next round will be the industry getting a clue and realizing that you can't beat the iPad by offering a slightly faster processor or a bit more RAM the way you can in the commodity PC market - you have to offer a better all-round "platform". Possibly Googleola and Amazon will be the next challengers - both more interested in selling the platform than shifting hardware for the sake of it. I think my money is on Amazon (the Kindle seems to have the "just works" secret sauce that lets it thrash competing e-readers without having any clear technical advantage - if they can bring that to tablets they may have a chance).
I fail to see how this new tech will become a problem. The hardware makers want to sell hardware. Given their already thin margins, it would be stupid of them to agree to limit their boards to any one particular OS.
...of course, those thin margins make any sort of branding/incentive scheme (a better deal on software licenses, a kickback for qualifying for and displaying some sort of "Works with Gizmos" badge...) awfully attractive. Fortunately, our tech firms are ethical and law abiding and would never resort to using such schemes to obtain an anti-competetive advantage.
So that's all right then.
...call my PC my trusted companion cube.
...and throw it in the furnace.
Are iPads legal in the EU?
If you think they should be, make your case to the EU. You never know. The existing rulings against Microsoft were made because companies complained. The way Apple is going, with a chance of achieving a monopoly in the tablet market, I suspect they'll cross swords with the EU at some point.
However, the issue here is not whether Microsoft should be able to market their own-brand locked down tablet - its the hypothetical idea that MS could use its leverage with OEMs (i.e. the cost of MS software licenses, and other incentive schemes) to encourage them all to lock out non-MS operating systems. Hypothetical, but a plausible extrapolation from their past practices...
But do not fret, you can still install whatever OS you like on an Apple Mac.
Not that I'm suggesting my very poor government tries to build it's own device but surely a tablet sized kindle would be better?
E-ink still takes too long to refresh (with that bizzare negative after-image effect) to support an iOS/Android style touch interface, without which panning and zooming around large PDFs, following hyperlinks, rapid skimming, annotating PDFs etc. is just too cumbersome.
E-ink rules for bedtime reading (long chunks of plain text in sequence) but for reference use with technical documents and hypertext - especially where it hasn't bee knidle-ized to render as re-flowable text, the slick UI beats the low-eyestrain display.
Plus, you can't use a Kindle to watch the cricket on iPlayer. All the Kindle has is an easter-egg "minesweeper" game (which would certainly lead to "Minister plays sick bombing game in Cabinet meeting - we ask mother of legless war hero what she thinks" headlines in the wonderful British tabloid press).
So.... the sooner the government sponsored postal service goes out of business, the sooner the private companies will have to shoulder their part of the burden,
Yeah, just like they've fallen over themselves to roll out high speed fiber broadband to the boondocks. I'm sure they'll offer really competitive rates for postage in areas where they offer the only coverage, just like the phone companies do.
Private companies' only obligation is to make money: if they can make a profit serving 90% of the population, why should they throw money away serving the remaining, loss-making 10%?
and the sooner companies will have to pay the real (hopefully non-profitable) cost of junk mail?
No - they'd offer junk delivery to 90% of the population, which would be enough for the advertisers, and probably reduce the cost. The outliers wouldn't get junk mail... or any mail at all.
There's no way that's profitable at ~$5 per package.
...and yet the USPS is obliged to make the same trip for a 44 cent letter sent from Hawaii - and to collect mail from all areas without appointment.
Plus, several other posters have pointed out that these firms sometimes hand packages for remote areas over to USPS anyway.
Well, it is apparently interesting enough to slashdot the TFA's server.
Plus, they mentioned Apple, so the fanbois vs. haters flamewar will be starting in 3, 2, 1...
The 'required skills' of a lot of job specs always make me laugh with their massive list of requirements. I don't honestly understand why they do it because you'll never find someone with all those skills.
Just guessing: If you reject someone who meets all the requirements in favor of another applicant who has something useful you weren't expecting, then they might accuse you of discrimination. So list everything you might conceivably base your decision on. Of course, anti-discrimination laws are a great idea - in a parallel universe where HR departments adopt them in spirit. Back in this world, HR departments interpret them in the most paranoid and defensive way possible and try to turn recruitment into a quantitative science (thereby discriminating against anybody who has potential but has not been able to gain qualifications and experience because of, e.g. discrimination, poverty or other misfortune).
Do you have any data to show what parts of the U.S. are not reached by FedEx or UPS (separately or together)?.
That's "premium" packages and document services which offer a reasonable profit margin.
National postal services are typically obliged to make daily deliveries and collections of everyday letters and small packages for the regular cost of a stamp, which is a rather different proposition.
Never before in human history we were buying so many goods from remote locations all over the world to be delivered by ... postal services!
Except that the nationalized postal services face a lot of competition from private courier firms who aren't hamstrung with government requirements to provide a universal service and can cherry-pick the best routes.
That's certainly the situation in the UK: the postal service is obliged to charge a ridiculously low price for the basic first-class letter, and to deliver & collect them from right out in the sticks, but has long since lost ts monopoly on postal deliveries, so faces lots of competition for lucrative business deliveries around major cities. They mainly survive by delivering vast quantities of junk mail.
If you want a universal postal service you have two choices: give 'em a monopoly to make up for the universal service requirement, or just accept that they won't be profitable and that you are going to have to put money in and get a service out. Then tackle the remaining problems with inertia and unions head on, instead of messing about with ideology-based pseudo-free-market kludges in the vain hope that the invisible hand will make it all better.
The article states that they print ROLLS of this stuff over a meter wide and up to a kilometer long... Why can't I have a color e-ink reader with an 8 1/2" x 11" screen, a touch screen, and full PDF support?
I don't care what it costs, shut up and take my money!
I get the impression that they're talking about large sheets of the "microcapsule" material used in the displays, rather than complete displays with the electronics required to "write" pixels to them. They're pretty clear that the electronics are the limiting factor.
Meanwhile, the Kindle seems reasonably happy with displaying PDFs - its just that panning and zooming them is painful - partly because of the limited controls on a Kindle, but mainly because of the very slow screen refresh.
I was fairly horrified at the story early this week that the colour Kindle is LCD.
...but e-ink (even the colour e-ink described in TFA) is far too slow for video, games etc. Its also too slow to properly implement an iOS/Android style multitouch interface (sure, you can add a touch sensitive screen, but its the visual feedback that "makes" these interfaces).
I'd also like to see what the resolution/contrast of these colour e-ink screens is like, especially when displaying black-on-white text (as far as I can see, adding colour can only reduce the black-on-white resolution).
The rumour was that the B&W Kindle was going to continue alongside the new "Kindle tablet" - which seems like sense. The B&W kindle is unbeatable for reading novels etc. even though the iPad Kindle app has better functionality. Convergence between e-readers and tablets depends on some new display technology with the battery life and clarity of e-ink plus the colour and speed of LCD.
The technology had promise.
...and it is unbeatable for sequentially reading large quantities of flowing text - but until it has a much faster response rate, that is about all it is good for. Paper books have better random access! Aside from the lack of colour or video, it can't even implement a decent multitouch interface (sure, you can add the touchscreen but you can't give the sort of fluid visual feedback on which iOS and Android depend).
I have an iPad and a Kindle - the Kindle is far more relaxing for reading novels on, but for anything else, even for reading reference books and other PDFs, the iPad is more practical.
On the other hand, Amazon have kept the price of the e-ink Kindle down to the point where it is viable as a single-purpose device. If the price given in TFA for the Amazon Tablet is correct (presumably they will be subsidizing it from media sales) then you could get a tablet + an e-ink Kindle for the price of most half-decent tablets...
Wonder if its going to have "free" worldwide 3G like the Kindle?
However, it does sound a bit like Kindle Tablet owners are going to be able to tell iPad owners "Lock-in? That's not a lock-in... This is a lock-in..."
I distribute a document on a disk to the users of my systems (chain stores and suppliers)
So anybody could send a fake message to one of your users giving them a new fingerprint. Or, if someone MITMd your site they could route people through a page that told them the fingerprint had changed. I've no idea whether your line of business involves sufficiently valuable information to make you a viable target for such effort and, critically, neither do the browser writers. Your system still doesn't guarantee anything - your users have to trust that the document really is from you, and you have to trust your users not to fall for simple social engineering and you add the disadvantage that you have to physically distribute fingerprints (with some sort of physical anti-counterfeiting arrangement, and all the contingent arrangements for when people lose/forget them or if you have to change your server certificate). The current CA system could doubtless be improved, but ultimately you have two choices: distribute key fingerprints with appropriate physical precautions or use a trusted third party to verify identity. Both are imperfect.