iPad? Really? (was RE: Voice recognition will never kill the keyboard was: Re: Evolution)

[Liam Proven]

On 4 October 2010 18:59, Ian King <IanK at vulcan.com> wrote:
> These things are coming out of the woodwork these days - you can't swing a dead Newton :-) without hitting another vendor.  Mine was purchased from an online vendor called Merimobiles, and is the "iRobot aPad E7001" with a dual-core Chinese RockChip processor.  There's an E7002 now, from what I've seen, with a bit more speed.  But the site slatedroid.com gives both information and opinion on a slew of new devices that fall between Ereaders-on-megavitamins and small-footprint netbooks, including somewhere in the middle tablets such as mine.  Some devices are being sold through department stores - I even saw a mall kiosk a couple of weeks ago.
>
> I too have "mature eyes" and use reading glasses.  I've seen these devices from 5" (ISTR there's a Dell device) and up to 10" or so.  I elected to go with the 7" form factor for convenience: it fits in my hand, it fits in the glove boxes of either my truck or my motorcycle, it slips into the bag that carries the laptop (Windows 7) that I use for work.  Yes, I thought about the larger devices, but frankly that was one reason I stopped consistently using my Fujitsu Stylistic Tablet PC: it didn't fit into a saddlebag.
>
> I'm not saying that my aPad is without flaw - it has its 'early adopter' warts.  (Many of these are addressed by new flash images built by people in the user community - ah, open platforms are handy, aren't they?)  But it's also $150.  It has an externally-accessible microSD slot, a USB port that works in either direction (access a keyboard, memory stick, etc. OR serve up USB mass storage), a multitasking operating system - and did I mention it was $150?  -- Ian

Glad you came back & followed up on this.

I'm with doc at vaxen.net on this. Defining a category does /not/ by any
means denote that a device is the best in its category. I've spent a
few hours playing with iPads & whereas I think they're brilliant
devices, I don't want one, any more than I want an iPhone. (And yes, I
like Apple kit & own a fair bit of it.) They're just too closed for
me.

I wouldn't want it any smaller, myself, nor any slower, but I /would/
want a couple of USB ports, a card slot (or 2 or 3, given the size of
the device), and a rather more open OS. I would add multitasking but I
believe the iPad is getting that very soon, so it seems a tad unfair.

But the UI of the iPhone and the iPad is a work of art. It's something
qualitatively different from mouse-oriented WIMPs: it's a GUI, but of
the WIMP acronym, there are no W, M or P, only I, and those are as
much buttons anyway.

The iPhone introduced the GUI and showed that a company completely new
to the mobile-phone sector could produce a device massively better
than all the best efforts of every mobile phone company ever. OK, so,
in many ways, it's constrained, but it's still brilliant.

But the iPhone was a bit too small to be a general-purpose computing
device. The iPad takes the idea and runs with it.

Me, I'd be much more inclined to an Android - or perhaps better still,
Palm/HP WebOS - clone with a bit more expandability and a lot more
openness.

But TBH, for my purposes, I foresee sticking to laptops. Not even
netbooks, but real laptops. I tend to buy ultralight "executive"
models that are 2-3 years old and so as cheap as netbooks, but with
2-4x the power and capacity.

-- 
Liam Proven • Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven
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