Quote:
Originally Posted by
digitalclips 
He in lies the problem of Apple showing and telling long before sales started.
Well, Apple really doesn't have a choice about that. It's an FCC issue. The reason both the iPhone and the iPad were announced before they could ship was because Apple had to submit them for FCC approval, which is a public disclosure process. They can't both keep a product under wraps and submit it to the FCC at the same time, so they just announced them when they were sending them in to the FCC.
It's true that doing this gives Apple's competition the opportunity to sweep in and scoop them, as HP is clearly trying to do here. But on the other hand, it gets Apple out in front and lets them capture the public interest. The iPad was on the front pages of newspapers when it was announced, for cryin' out loud. It made the front pages of CNN's, The New York Times' and the Washington Post's Web sites.
So I really don't know whether early announcement is a net gain or loss for Apple. It could go either way.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Gazoobee
That tablet is a crystal clear violation of Apple's trademark they were granted a couple of weeks ago.
Apple got a trade dress trademark for the iPad? I totally missed that. Any chance you might happen to have a link to a news story about it? (Not challenging you; I just didn't hear about it before now is all.)
Quote:
Originally Posted by
gFiz
sadly, HP is right. from a pure web surfing experience, the HP is indisputably superior.
Well … sort of. They've got a
strong selling point on the "surf the whole Web" thing. In fact, I seem to remember that Apple hit that same point very hard when they released the iPhone, back when WAP or whatever it was called was still considered a thing.
But HP's argument begs the question of whether Flash is really "part of the Web" or not. Take PDF for example. Lots of PDF documents are posted to the Internet. Is PDF therefore "part of the Web?" What about Microsoft Office documents? I still, bafflingly, run across Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and Powerpoint decks posted to Web sites for download. Are they "part of the Web?"
Apple's taking the position (for a couple reasons at least) that Flash isn't really "part of the Web." It's … like … Web-adjacent. Whether they've got a point, and whether the public at large will agree, remains to be seen.
But the bigger point is this:
Quote:
Originally Posted by
addicted44
Flash depends heavily on hover, and click and drag. How many flash (games esp., since this is something that cannot be done in HTML5) are actually compatible with a touch interface?
EXACTLY. This is a vital point that many people list. Just this morning I got a link to a little Flash game from a friend, and I spent a minute messing with it. (You throw balls to knock blocks off platforms. It's cute, in a "this amused me for ten minutes" kind of way.) Trouble is, that game had keyboard controls built into it. I
might have been able to play the first few levels on a touch interface — it was strictly click-and-drag at first, which can be emulated with gestures. But once I reached the point where the game said "press 'E' to make such-n-such happen," I would have been shit-out-of-luck on an HP slate.
If you think about it, Flash is used pretty much exclusively for four things on the Web today:
1. Video
2. Advertising
3. Casual games
4. As an alternative to HTML and CSS for designing Web pages.
Number four has been on its way out for a long time, and I think we can say that it's effectively dead now. The Virgin America thing (was it America? Virgin Airlines? Whatever) was the highest-profile instance of a Web site owner eschewing Flash in favor of Web standards, but it was hardly the first. We're rapidly reaching the point where #4 will be extinct.
Number one, similarly, is on its way out. Any minute now, the Firefox people are going to wake up and realize that leaving out support for today's universal video delivery codec in favor of one literally
nobody has ever used would be an astonishingly stupid idea. "You can't watch Youtube in our browser" is not going to be a very good marketing position. (Though is Firefox a for-profit enterprise? Maybe they don't care about losing market share? I really couldn't say.)
There's already a significant push to move Web advertising away from Flash, for the simple fact that if your customers are on mobile devices without Flash support, they're not seeing your ads, which means you're not getting paid.
That leaves casual gaming. Apple is not stupid; they've thought this through already. They know that casual gaming is a big deal, which is why they've made sure that the iPhone and iPad are both at least generally suitable for developing and distributing casual games. Of course, writing an iPhone game and writing a Flash game are radically different things, but the iPhone and iPad owners don't care about that. If the question is, "Can I play casual games on this?" then Apple's answer is "Yes," and they're betting that's good enough. Seems to have worked out okay for the iPhone so far; we'll see how it scales as the customer base grows.
HP's position, in a nutshell, is, "Our device lets you surf the Web as it was a year ago, even to the point of having games and Web applications fail to function because they expect a mouse and keyboard." Apple's position is, "This is the way the Web is going, and our device is ready for it."
Which one of them will turn out to be right? That's up to about ten million people with credit cards and a few hundred bucks to blow on a pure luxury item. We'll have to wait and see.
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