My legitimate plea to Apple for a tablet
ok, as part of a test program at my college, one of my classes was issued tablet pc's to test out, and to evalute if the university should make either tab's or laptops required. i must say, after only a couple days of usage, i'm sold on the tablet idea. its perfect for students. with a program called windows journal, the whole screen turns into a piece of paper, and turning the stylus over to the blunt end even erases your virtual text. run out of space? hit the arrow key to make a new page. despite the fact that my tablet (toshiba) runs on windows and is a bit slow, its perfect. if apple invested r&d in a tablet and made some interface revisions to make the tablet completely usable in its tablet configuration, they would seel like mad. another setback with my tablet is that it has NO disc drive, a problem which apple would obviously have no problem solving. i think they left out the drive to make it thinner, but powerbooks are already SO thin. i have until the end of this semester to try out things with the tablet, so my experience might change, but so far this has been the most promising piece of hardware i've laid hands on in quite a while. if you ever try out a tablet, keep in mind that it was only after a lot of tweaking with windows that i got everything to work so well. at first, everything is frustrating, but an "iTab" with panther and expose would be perfect.... apple, i hope you read this.
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{Edit} It would always be the year of the laptop.
Actually if they did that I'd buy a book, and a G5 when the next ones roll out. But as it stands I'm just getting a G5.
does this table PC have a keyboard? typing is much faster than writing...
http://www.csd.toshiba.com/cgi-bin/t...il.jsp?comm=CS
I can imagine a tablet, and I've detailed it elsewhere. But it relies on technologies that are still in early R&D stages, and on integration and software that hasn't been developed or refined yet.
Basically, any tablet that's a funny-looking notebook running a conventional GUI with one or two extra applications is doomed. If you're going to have a radically different form like a tablet, where the user's interaction is completely unlike the mouse + keyboard paradigm, then you need to design the whole thing - software and hardware - around that fact.
You also want your basic input - handwriting recognition - to be at least as reliable as keyboard input. That'll take some doing, and it might be a while before the algorithms are sufficiently refined and a CPU that can run them in real time drops to a power consumption and price that can work in a tablet.
"Computer:
Play me some U2...something off the Joshua Tree album or earlier. Increase the bass slightly and cross fade all these songs.
While you're at it, please open iPhoto and download the pictures from my camera. I want you to 1-touch enhance the last three photos and would like to rotate the third picture negative 45 degrees.
Lastly, I would like you to prepare my 'Family Christmas' video in my movies folder for a DVD. Let me know when it's ready to burn.
Lastly, I need to type a letter. The first paragraph, 'Often times we hear about man's obsession with technology. There are plenty of geeks out there and I can consider myself one of them......... ' "
I think you get the picture...
Amorph is right, we need a radical departure in format. This would be something about the size of an A5 sheet (roughly a letter size page folded in half, actually an A4 page folded in half)
The ONLY practical paper notebooks are this size. They're small enough to pack easily and use anywhere (standing, lying on beach, sitting on the floor, at a lab counter, etc etc, anywhere you're not sitting at a proper desk.) The second you are sitting down, the keyboard is by far the superior imput technology. Those BIG letter size/A4 notebooks you see a lot of students carry, you never see students use those while standing or on the go, why? Too big/unwieldly, they're made to be used when seated in a class or at a desk, just like a notebook computer, and BOTH are better once you sit down and don't have to prop up the machine/book with one hand while writing with the other. At A5, they're still big enough to have useful pages, but they're small enough to support with one hand and use with the other, COMFORTABLY! NONE of the notepad computers I've seen can say that, NONE, even the slim compaq convertablet job.
When you accept the size limitation, neither the hardware not software technology is where it needs to be to make the device really practical, certainly not to make it consumer price sensitive.
Originally posted by DHagan4755
...The first paragraph, 'Often times we hear about man's obsession with technology. There are plenty of geeks out there and I can consider myself one of them......... ' "
I think you get the picture...
Who talks this way? In fact does the overage person "think" in paragraphs? The computer should be able to set the paragraph breaks based on the dictation and a set of basic grammer rules (modified to my "style" through fuzzy logic and nural net programing/learning).
No $$$ for Tablet$
Leading vendor is Acer and they only sold 100k for a year. Sales dropped in Q3. That's less than 5% of notebook sales for Acer.
Sounds like they are too expensive compared to the already expensive laptop (compared to desktop).
I'm not sure Apple could do enough to the $$$ to drive sales. I know I can type faster than I can write.
If I were working at Apple, I would ensure that the inkwell and expose developments made good progress in performance and stability, and then keep an eye on various aspects of hardware development. Especially the following:-
* Non-Volitile RAM, about 4 gigs worth. This can then be used to store the OS and plenty of room for small apps and documents.
* Low power CPU improvements. I read an article about how AMD were looking into replacing silicon in chip design. Since silicon transistors leak electricity when they are supposed to be off, this accounts for a LARGE amount of a CPU's power consumption.
* Lightweight, yet very robust screens. Remember, you are gonna be scratching away on them with a stylus.
* Then, once you are done there will be wireless transfer of the saved data onto a REAL computer. The actual tablet wont have a HD or CD. It will just have enough power to run farly basic data capture / presentation programs. Maybe something like a Keynote viewer, and a web browser, etc.
Working with that 'thing' is soooo frustrating.
i truly hat that junk.
First, handwriting recognition, well it sucks (not for everyone i guess, but then again, often i can't even read what i wrote 2 weeks ago:-) )
It runs on some sort of transmetta cpu, and it's slow, no cd, pen is super uncomfortable, right clicking is a serious task...
I don't know, it might be me but i just hate that f**** thing!
:-)
see how frustrated can you get?
I know some people running a consulting firm specializing in EMR (Electronic Medical Records). They convert doctors offices and hospitals, over to electronic systems.
Tablets are big in this area because they replace the medical file folder. Each doctor has one and enters all notes, symtoms, etc into the tablet. It's amazing the improvements that are happening because of this. The program they use has an expert system type interface which is specifically designed for a tablet. The doctor doesn't do a lot of writing with the tablet, but chooses from menus, or enters small ammounts of text.
The obvious benifits are better records management, data mining, and sharing files between doctors, but the systems are getting even better than that. As you enter information the next screens that come up are based on what you have input. The system can even help with diagnoses. Reference materials can be brought up right there, instead of going to the bookshelf.
All doctors offices and hospitals will be going with EMR in the future. There are the beginings of standards for records formats based on XML, so there will be a thriving homegenous software market. As it stands Apple is going to be completely left out of this market. The guys I know actually preffer Macs, especially for clients, but that's not even an option here.
I agree with SJ that tablets aren't going to do very well, but in some markets they will dominate, and it sucks that Apple won't be there. If they had clone manufactures who could take a risk on a smaller market it would be a different story.
As it is, this is the sort of thing that Linux - really, the closest thing available to a commodity OS - could excel at: Highly specialized, almost embedded applications. It sounds like the OS is essentially irrelevant in this scenario.
Apple doesn't have to be everything to everyone. It will always be true that, for some applications, something else will be better suited to the job.
Originally posted by Amorph
If clone manufacturers had stuck to niches Apple didn't address rather than going for Apple's jugular, we might still have them around.
Very true, but obviously the money isn't in the niches. The problem is that the strategic value of the niche can be much greater than the profit potential. I don't like to see a market where Apple doesn't even offer a solution, even though based on OS X they could probably offer the best solution.
Apple could have been smarter about the cloners, requiring them to make or not make certain types of products as part of the license. It also didn't sound like they were making enough off the OS license. There could be ways to license OS X to everyone's advantage. It wouldn't necessarily be 'cloning' because the licensees wouldn't be building Mac clones, but something different.
[B]
As it is, this is the sort of thing that Linux - really, the closest thing available to a commodity OS - could excel at: Highly specialized, almost embedded applications. It sounds like the OS is essentially irrelevant in this scenario.
[B]
Not completely irrelevant. First of all the OS has good pen support, making the app easier to develop. There's often more than one app that are integrated and used together, but they're still seperate applications. Also these machines do duty as a general purpose computer. Web browsing, email. PDF viewing...
Personally I'm hoping that Apple is treating the tablet market like the MP3 player market. Let other compnies create the interest and demand, look at their successes and failures, don't be hasty, and eventually come out with the best solution. I think SL/Apple is smart in this respect. PDA's are being taken over by cellphones. Tablets are going slow. He's been right on both counts. So what's the magic formula? Like people here have said, a real tablet. Bigger than a PDA, smaller than a notebook. Basically a modern newton.
Who knows, Apple may be planning this. Coming out with something ahead of it's time doesn't do any good. I think they're just waiting for the market to be there for the tech and designs they already have.
Touchscreen - no keyboard.
Job done!