There are, of course, differences. The ThinkPad Tablet is clearly targeted at a business audience. So where the IdeaPad is all smooth lines and curves, the 1.57-pound, 14mm-deep ThinkPad Tablet is all black and features squared off corners and more visible buttons.
At that price, why wouldnt i just buy the thinkpad edge or something? looks to be about the same size + weight. or that low end X series?
Er, because the are two completely different things? A laptop does not deliver the experience a tablet does and vice versa. How many laptops weigh less than a pound and a half yet deliver 10 hours of battery life? How many laptops for 500 dollars have capacitive multi-touch screens? How many laptops at that price have zero moving parts to break? How many laptops are an "always on" device that will continue to get your email and notifications and perform tasks even when the unit is on "standby"? Tablets in this class have built-in accelerometers and GPS, front and rear cameras, etc. And on and on.
*see sales of iPad vs comparably priced Windows tablets on the market right now. Also note difference in sales between Windows Phone with "Office" and iPhones/Android handsets. Office on touchscreen devices does not appear to be a compelling differentiator to the mainstream market. That may change but no one can speak with a
let's face it
level of authority without a fully functional crystal ball. You don't have one because if you did, you wouldn't be putzing around on Slashdot.
My only question is, what is Apple to do about the marketing quandary when they drop the iPhone 5? If people think the 4 is 4G, that's not really Apple's fault so why waste it by bumping the number? Maybe iPhone 4S is in the future.
All I can say is that on my Acer Aspire one which is the weakest PC I have, there is no noticeable performance loss from using the in browser music player vs audacious or Amarok. And since my web browser is always open, the libraries are always loaded and the music player starts instantly unlike native players using qt and gtk Widgets which can be glacial sometimes. I have the music player set to run from a shortcut on my panel that starts it without browser chrome so you would be hard presses to realize it wasnt a native app if you didnt know better. The only issue is lack of plugins but for all i know, that may be in the pipeline.
I have all of my music synced with Google Music and I find the in browser media player to be quite good. Thw great thing is it frees me from having to sync my music between devices and I dont have to bloat my smartphone up with gigabytes of mp3's. And this is coming from an old winamp power user turned Amarok power user. Tell me what's wrong with the browser one?
I just bought a used Thinkpad R60 off of Craigslist recently that was great until I realized it only had a 60gb hdd. Then something strange happened. I realized all of my music was on Google Music, all of my Documents were in Google Docs, all of my videos were on Hulu and YouTube, I don't play games other than piddling around with ashes and all of the Roms are on dropbox so I can share with my Droid. And for that matter, my random crap is split between Dropbox, Wuala, and Ubuntu One. The only other stuff I use is Eclipse for work and the usual stuff like calculators, terminals, so on which ChromeOS could provide.
Somehow, the "cloud" snuck right on me and I feel like I'm just now waking up to the real potential of it. An example, I was in line at the post office the other day and I pulled my cell phone out and started hacking on my latest project that happens to be in dropbox. And since my eclipse workspace is mapped to my dropbox folder on all of my computers, as soon as I got to my desktop to do the real work, all I had to do was hit refresh in the idea and the changes I made at the post office were live. There's a there there.
But, what do those apps do that can't be accomplished with a web app in ChromeOS? Not to mention the web is still mostly designed for a mouse/keyboard based browser. Also, Chrome browser supports thousands of extensions that extend the functionality of the browser itself. You may love your i{ad and that's cool but it isn't just automatically better than a Chromebook.
FWIW, this is posted via my Xoom. I guess we all win.
It's also that thing that is running a third of all smart phones and projected to be running half of them in a couple of years. In case you missed it, 500,000 Linux powered cell phones ship out everyday and none of them forget the correct resolution. Linux is everywhere and enjoyed by hundreds of millions of people everyday. Sorry to be the one to tell you.
What i want to know is What difference does it make if something is closed or open to malware authors? I could package some malware up and put it on a website and call it MicrosoftSecurityEssentialsSetup.exe all day long and as soon as you click on it and click okay on the uac prompt, you're done. This has nothing to do with how easy it is to package vlc or anything else.
I must be the luckiest guy in the world because I keep hearing this but since upgrading to 3.1 on the Xoom, the web browser has crashed only once that I can recall and I use it constantly (like right now). I don't doubt your word but would you happen to be able to get a logcat output when the browser crashes so we could see maybe what actually causes it?
But you can very easily compile and install a gnu userland if you know how to use the ndk. That's no different to how gnu tools end up anywhere else. At aome point, somebody has to compile and install them into a distro before that diatro is shipped. What makes Ansroid different other than it's the user's choice to have that stuff. I have bash, vi and some other stuff installed on OG Droid as well as a full Ubuntu chroot.
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What 4.5 pound weight? It weighs 1.57 pounds.
This tablet weighs 4.5lb.
Are you trolling?
There are, of course, differences. The ThinkPad Tablet is clearly targeted at a business audience. So where the IdeaPad is all smooth lines and curves, the 1.57-pound, 14mm-deep ThinkPad Tablet is all black and features squared off corners and more visible buttons.
No problem at all!
At that price, why wouldnt i just buy the thinkpad edge or something? looks to be about the same size + weight. or that low end X series?
Er, because the are two completely different things? A laptop does not deliver the experience a tablet does and vice versa. How many laptops weigh less than a pound and a half yet deliver 10 hours of battery life? How many laptops for 500 dollars have capacitive multi-touch screens? How many laptops at that price have zero moving parts to break? How many laptops are an "always on" device that will continue to get your email and notifications and perform tasks even when the unit is on "standby"? Tablets in this class have built-in accelerometers and GPS, front and rear cameras, etc. And on and on.
I second the mobile phone thing. I have job offers up to my ears in northeast Florida. Android is hot here!
Word, etc.
Real Office on tablet = niche*
*see sales of iPad vs comparably priced Windows tablets on the market right now. Also note difference in sales between Windows Phone with "Office" and iPhones/Android handsets. Office on touchscreen devices does not appear to be a compelling differentiator to the mainstream market. That may change but no one can speak with a
let's face it
level of authority without a fully functional crystal ball. You don't have one because if you did, you wouldn't be putzing around on Slashdot.
That's funny because with a simple chroot, I can run 99 percent of the applications in the Ubuntu repository. Seems pretty Linuxy-goodness to me.
What application can be written for a Windows tablet that cannot be written for an Android tablet that actually makes sense for the form factor?
This Windows 7 tablet is on sale at this very moment for 549 dollars. Less than a comparable iPad. Yet, it collects dust on the retailers' shelves.
Yeah, you're probably right.
My only question is, what is Apple to do about the marketing quandary when they drop the iPhone 5? If people think the 4 is 4G, that's not really Apple's fault so why waste it by bumping the number? Maybe iPhone 4S is in the future.
When a post like this gets modded "overrated", you know the anti-google shills are on a rampage.
All I can say is that on my Acer Aspire one which is the weakest PC I have, there is no noticeable performance loss from using the in browser music player vs audacious or Amarok. And since my web browser is always open, the libraries are always loaded and the music player starts instantly unlike native players using qt and gtk Widgets which can be glacial sometimes. I have the music player set to run from a shortcut on my panel that starts it without browser chrome so you would be hard presses to realize it wasnt a native app if you didnt know better. The only issue is lack of plugins but for all i know, that may be in the pipeline.
I have all of my music synced with Google Music and I find the in browser media player to be quite good. Thw great thing is it frees me from having to sync my music between devices and I dont have to bloat my smartphone up with gigabytes of mp3's. And this is coming from an old winamp power user turned Amarok power user. Tell me what's wrong with the browser one?
Depends on the work. Documents and many other things are cached locally so any changes you make will be synced up when you resume connectivity.
Somehow, the "cloud" snuck right on me and I feel like I'm just now waking up to the real potential of it. An example, I was in line at the post office the other day and I pulled my cell phone out and started hacking on my latest project that happens to be in dropbox. And since my eclipse workspace is mapped to my dropbox folder on all of my computers, as soon as I got to my desktop to do the real work, all I had to do was hit refresh in the idea and the changes I made at the post office were live. There's a there there.
FWIW, this is posted via my Xoom. I guess we all win.
My ThinkPad R60 with Win7 was collecting dust until I found putting Linux Mint on it made it a lot more useful.
It's also that thing that is running a third of all smart phones and projected to be running half of them in a couple of years. In case you missed it, 500,000 Linux powered cell phones ship out everyday and none of them forget the correct resolution. Linux is everywhere and enjoyed by hundreds of millions of people everyday. Sorry to be the one to tell you.
What i want to know is What difference does it make if something is closed or open to malware authors? I could package some malware up and put it on a website and call it MicrosoftSecurityEssentialsSetup.exe all day long and as soon as you click on it and click okay on the uac prompt, you're done. This has nothing to do with how easy it is to package vlc or anything else.
If "Droid" is a race to the bottom why are Samsung and HTC reporting record profits selling handsets with it? FUD much?
As sound as legal analysis from an anonymous poster on pro-Google Slashdot must be
You are on Slashdot and are obviously not "pro-Google". There are many others like you here. Please get off of the persecution complex soapbox.
I must be the luckiest guy in the world because I keep hearing this but since upgrading to 3.1 on the Xoom, the web browser has crashed only once that I can recall and I use it constantly (like right now). I don't doubt your word but would you happen to be able to get a logcat output when the browser crashes so we could see maybe what actually causes it?
It's not funny when ot's actually happening.
But you can very easily compile and install a gnu userland if you know how to use the ndk. That's no different to how gnu tools end up anywhere else. At aome point, somebody has to compile and install them into a distro before that diatro is shipped. What makes Ansroid different other than it's the user's choice to have that stuff. I have bash, vi and some other stuff installed on OG Droid as well as a full Ubuntu chroot.