HP attacks Apple iPad over Flash, ARM expects 50 new tablets in 2010 - Page 7

That is an insane statement. My wife knows nothing about computers yet uses my mac ( her account), to watch Days while doing things around the house. Mbp tied to a 24" HDMI screen. Anyway, Days of our Lives along with just about any streaming video is flash. Next time your watching something non dogs on skateboards, or non YouTube, but netqork or cable, right click it. 99% chance it will say flash and what's the big deal? We never have problems with flash, beside as an apple lover and apologist what I think will hurt the ipad except for those jail broken, will
be the inability to play xvid or some other codec that shares easy, is small but looks great. Plus not being able to install programs like transmission. Speaking of geeks, youbdo know gamers and overclockers is a huge community
go to madonion.com if you have doubts, now you may call them geeks but they are the ones who figure out how to get double the performance or speed on their CPU this is why hackntosh is a preety large group. These days I've read you can download a script that allows you to install a retail disk then build a machine that is just as fast as a mac pro for one quarter of the price and for the most part mac vs pcs use the same parts less a few apple parts, in fact, i think Asus builds the motherboards. Not sure. The point I'm trying to make is anyone who watched streaming video will care about flash if it's a tv show.

Other than the ugly bezel, the form follows the function. The similarities are organic.

And the properly proportioned screen is a dead giveaway that we are not looking at an Apple product.

Apology accepted.

Only geeks care about flash. Go geek out with windows, which is one big virus!

This is a good point. I've identified two reasons why the 'Pad is unacceptably compromised for me: It will suck to have huge holes in news stories where the video is supposed to be (mudslides work better in video than in text) and it would suck to have an aspect ratio that letterboxes videos into a tiny image.

The lack of common codecs is another huge problem, but I don't even get that far because of the antique aspect ratio of the screen.

I have another use for a tablet computer too: music. The codec problem rears its ugly head in this area of entertainment as well. In order for me to have my music on the 'Pad, it will be necessary to downgrade the content to MP3 format from .flac. This is unacceptable in a computer. I do it for my iPhone, but that's just a little pocket toy. If I spend bucks on a tablet computer, I want it to be a computer, and not a big toy.

And what does the 'Pad do for audio output anyways? Does it have good speakers? Does it have a headphone jack? Is there any way to play music over the home audo system wirelessly?

I had no idea there were so many geeks in the world, I mean, we're SURROUNDED by them! The next time I see someone watching iPlayer HD I shall shake their hand, as a fellow geek.

You might also might want to try using Win 7 for a week or two. Funny thing, it's surprisingly great. Fast, stable, 64-bit. The only blemish is iTunes, which is one of the worst Windows applications available. But hey, I guess you can't have everything.

iPlayer works in it's lowest quality version on an iPhone, with a dumbed down interface. Sure, the BBC could retool it for larger screens and support HD, but why should they? Who will pay to support an ultra niche device?

Maybe we should all try playing flash games with a touch screen before judging how well they play.

Flash will be on Android and Windows Phone 7 before the end of the year, and I believe it's also on some sort of Nokia brick. Apple are the only ones being stubborn. Android is now a viable alternative, and the Nexus One is a far superior piece of hardware to a 3GS. People will start to move, I know I'm thinking of it.

You appear to be in it.

The iPlayer 'Fact' is actually incorrect.
There is an iPhone App for iPlayer which will run on the iPad, making iPlayer just as accessible.

It's really quite silly to think that new Mobile Devices which create Large New Audiences should be limited to old technology, rather than expecting technology to start catching up.

I think we shall wait until both devices are launched and then later versions will be available. For now all we can do is to argue why one is better than the other. For example HP says they have the table ready since 2008. Have a look here:

http://www.thehdstandard.com/general...pete-the-ipad/

Catalin
Professional Streaming Consultant

If the "complete Internet" means bandwidth-sucking, CPU-hogging, battery-draining, system-crashing, content-obscuring and obnoxious advertisements, I'll take the "incomplete Internet". Thanks.

Yes.
http://www.apple.com/ipad/specs/

http://rentzsch.github.com/clicktoflash/
You're welcome.

If you are going to transcode for use on an iPhone you should use AAC. What is your definition of 'toy'? I doubt you could hear a difference between a 224 kbs AAC file played from an iphone via a dock and the original .flac played from anything you care to nominate.

If you want a lossless format on an iPhone or iPad, just transcode the .flac to Apple Lossless.

I am pretty sure you can stream from an iPhone/iPad to a home audio system using an airport express. I think it might even stream using Apple lossless.

Yes. Not close. Look:

HP Slate


Apple iPad



The design language is totally different in basically all respects. Head-on shots, yeah sure, they look similar. But look at them in person, it will be very easy to differentiate the two.

Now, if you want a copy-cat, look at the HTC Legend. The design language in the HTC Legend basically screams Apple and is a copy of Apple's aluminum unibody design language. If it wasn't for the black plastic inset for the camera, it'll be even closer, but as it is, it copies Apples aluminum unibody design language pretty well.

The important question is 'will they?'.


That would work for itunes purchases only. >100MB uploads are tricky for most home connections.


It's lighter and thinner than a convertible and it can do portrait mode unlike a netbook and it's faster to go into portrait mode than a convertible. Hardware keyboards are as important to the slates as they are to the iPhone/iPad. If you absolutely need one, you can use an external keyboard.


It won't sell more than the iphone, which was 6 million in the first year. I personally think it will be around the 3 million mark. The iphone/ipod comprise 70 million devices and websites aren't ditching Flash in huge numbers to accommodate them - just a handful of large sites. Nine of the top ten smartphones will support Flash and that number easily rivals Apple's products.


Two things wrong there. First of all, the HP Slate doesn't need an external computer, merely an external drive. DVD encoding may certainly take a while but if it has the 9400M, it can be hardware-accelerated or even use a USB encoder like Elgato H.264. Secondly, the iPad also has a requirement that the video and audio be in Apple-supported formats whereas the HP Slate will support any video format and it does not need to be synced via itunes.


Surely that would mean they are incapable of doing that on any computer but even an iPad requires one so they're screwed in all cases.


I don't get why Apple don't just say to Adobe to build a lite player that only does the video decoding and Apple simply tacks on standard media controls then send function calls to the media display classes. Video is the single biggest reason for Flash. Flash games generally suck.

I am pretty sure you can't.

The "supports any video codec" feature, I don't see of any importance whatsoever. If you have an iPad, you transcode to the supported format. If you want to use it to create something, you do it in the supported format. If you want to do it multiple formats, it would be time to use a desktop or another computer. I don't see it as an appreciable minus on its feature list. The use cases just get smaller and smaller, and Apple design philosophy is to ignore the smaller use cases.

The external DVD drive, yup, I missed that. But. Really, the scenario seems rather pathological to me. A usage scenario where you are using a "slate" device as a video viewer where-in you are putting ripped and transcoded DVD movies/video on to it sounds not good to me. Really, what's the benefit? It would simply be better to use a hub computer for this where storage and computational power are 10x bigger.

I see it being done for CDs, maybe.


The hub computer has DVD install disks, with backup solutions. I think it's a fairly manageable thing to stick the install disk in and follow the options. For the HP Slate, how do you think it is going to be done? One imagines it can be done by an external DVD drive and a router/network backup. Once one starts entertaining solutions like that, it just gets more and more complicated.


I think it is fairly evident that Apple doesn't want Adobe controlling the de facto standard video format and have control of "Internet" application platform.

Sorry, my point was that the Lenovo looked really good on paper, comes from a reputable company, has prior experience with tablets, has highly regarded netbooks and provided a so-so tablet solution.


A slate of that size is not likely to have a 9400M but something like the GMA 500 paird with a Broadcom Crystal HD Accelerator as conjectured by Engadet. The better GPUs (even an older integrated one like the 9400) are likely too CPU constrained by Atom to be very worthwhile.

Eh...I think that you'll find that the iPad is snappier than the HP Slate and does mobile computing far better than a Win7 in a slate will. The only MS mobile computing product I'm interested in is Courier and right now that's concept video.

Win7 feels like it would be as constrained in a slate format as XP did and I have enough windows based slates littering my office. Hmmm...I can even install Win7 on them if I were so inclined.

Realplayer video is a pretty difficult format to convert as is WMV 9+. For people (especially Windows users) who need to view their existing digital collection of movies, it's more difficult than just having the playback support.


Some will buy slates as their only machine and 160GB storage is decent for ripped movies. Performance isn't an issue with something like the Elgato H.264 encoder as significant parts of the encoding is done by the USB stick, not the internal CPU.


Ah, I see where you're coming from now. Yeah it's not ideal but netbooks typically don't have optical drives nor does the MBA. Upgrades can be done online but moving to a new OS would require an external drive. I don't think major OS upgrades are all that common.


The Joojoo has the 9400M. It is a larger slate but 9400M can fit in smaller machines - the Joojoo internals are messy and there's a huge battery pack. The 9400M isn't constrained by the Atom much. A 9400M netbook plays Call of Duty 4 pretty well:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yvSyyVm3Dk


I agree iPad is snappier and the gestures better but it's only running mobile apps and stats show that people rarely use the 3rd party apps from the App Store. The main iPad uses will be movies, books and games and the PC slates cover those aspects equally well if not better than the iPad.

The battery life on the HP tablet is much shorter than the iPhone, and it will be a lot of thicker and heavier unit. Windows 7 is also much bulkier than OS iPhone OS that affect the operation. And application compatibility across whatever touch UI for Windows 7 sets tablet is useless if you try to use a pointer-precision UI with a fat finger.

So, Wait, forget all this stuff about Flash for a moment. When I turn on an HP slate and try to configure my network settings, screen brightness, email accounts or any of the other myriad of Windows 7 related settings am I going to face standard Windows 7 dialog boxes, with their tiny checkboxes, radio buttons, edit fields, OK/Cancel buttons, etc?

All these videos of the Slate seem to show either a skinned interface or a touch application running in the foreground, but I imagine I would still have to go (frequently) into the land of standard Windows UI to get some basic things done. And this is what I think is the failing of all the non-iPad devices: underneath the (very shallow) surface layer is a very standard, non finger-friendly, dektop-class UI that was meant to be driven via a keyboard and mouse.

Can you imagine trying to run Outlook, Word, or Excel on one of these devices using your fingers only? Or is MS going to come up with touch versions of these apps like Apple has done ?