Which is the reason M$ is optimizing every aspect of their new OS. I kinda thought that was a main point of the exercise.
No, they're optimizing the Metro interface, which runs alongside of the usual Windows. When I switch back to Windows I have a very tablet unfriendly machine, and I still haven't heard a convincing explanation as to how all those legacy Windows programs are going to rewrite themselves to take advantage of Metro.
Then they will relegate themselves to simple little applets, instead of full-featured programs. Problem solved!
But that's the whole point of contention-- making full-featured programs tablet friendly is a lot of work, and MS is acting like it's nothing more than a few tweaks to hop over to Metro. That seems highly unlikely to me.
Apart from that, their facade that they're calling a new OS, isn't that horrifying. Once it works it'll be used, and business dudes are going to launch Word and Excel and get on with their lives unchanged.
That's exactly the problem, its not suppose to be a laptop, its suppose to be a tablet... The whole POINT of a tablet is NOT having a keyboard and a mouse. People who need keyboard and mouse should buy laptops...
The world would be an easier place with all choices being either/or, black/white, good/bad, our way/the highway.
Indeed, ISTM that most people like convenience and simplicity, and are willing to give up much in order to get it.
But the rest of us are very interested in versatility and capability. We think different.
IMO Windows 8 will sink or swim as a tablet OS based on the market's response to Metro. The "it's a desert topping/floor wax" schtick is more of a gimmick, and hybrid use likely to be a niche.
That's not to say that Metro won't be successful, just that it will need to succeed on its own merits as a tablet UI, not as some kind of magical "Windows to go."
/agree
... with one caveat. The ability to use native Windows applications on the tablet will greatly increase it's appeal. Need to see a Word document? Open word and read it or sync it to your SkyDrive and use Office online (or 365). This IMO is where Apple has failed to captialize so far. If Lion would have ushered in a seamless iOS / OS X experience Microsoft would have less of an advantage.
As it stands right now there is no such things as Pages online and I can't run an iOS app on my Mac (natively).
So, again, apps are magically rewriting themselves with "a few lines of code" to become first class tablet citizens?
I doubt that any lines of code will be needed for rudimentary compatibility for most applications.
Likewise, I doubt that a few lines of code will provide an optimal experience.
I have no doubt, however, that most programs will be rewritten from the ground up so as to work beautifully as both tablet and desktop interfaces, while some others will fade into obscurity. The same thing happens every time M$ radically redesigns an OS.
The world would be an easier place with all choices being either/or, black/white, good/bad, our way/the highway.
Indeed, ISTM that most people like convenience and simplicity, and are willing to give up much in order to get it.
But the rest of us are very interested in versatility and capability. We think different.
But of course the "rest of you" have to give up much in order to get what you want as well. Real device design is always about tradeoffs. You can make something that does everything, but it's likely to sacrifice battery life, size, ease of use, etc. to accomplish that. Even Microsofts wretched old tablets had their enthusiasts; I'm sure they felt that the "versatility and capability" were worth it, but they were few and far between.
So the question is whether or not Microsoft's willingness to give up simplicity in favor of the Windows boat anchor will give them an advantage in the marketplace. We'll see.
That's not to say that Metro won't be successful, just that it will need to succeed on its own merits as a tablet UI, not as some kind of magical "Windows to go."
Agreed. It is a difficult task that M$ has undertaken. I hope that they can pull it off. Given the gaffes of the past few years, it is not at all certain that Win8 will be a good OS for either desktop/notebook use or for tablet use.
Personally, I have some huge reservations about the tile paradigm for desktop use - more than you seem to have about the ability to run desktop programs on a tablet. I hope that they don't dumb down the entire experience in order to shoehorn one OS into two form factors.
I doubt that any lines of code will be needed for rudimentary compatibility for most applications.
Likewise, I doubt that a few lines of code will provide an optimal experience.
I have no doubt, however, that most programs will be rewritten from the ground up so as to work beautifully as both tablet and desktop interfaces, while some others will fade into obscurity. The same thing happens every time M$ radically redesigns an OS.
But why rewrite an app when it can run as is? Why would, say, Adobe bother with the huge outlay in capital to get anything going on Metro when any device running Metro can already run regular Windows and has out of the box Adobe compatibly?
And even in the case of apps that are rewritten, will they be any good? Metro is just a UI, after all, not a magic touch experience generator. If the current state of Windows software is any indication, I suspect we can look forward to a great many half assed ports that aren't much better than the old Windows tablets of yore.
How does MS propose to enforce Metro conventions? Do they plan to at all? How does Metro deal with something like Word? Or Excel? Big sliding boxes don't seem very optimal, but that's pretty much all we've seen.
Unless MS has some compelling solutions for this kind of thing, Metro (for all the hype) will be for all intents and purposes a widget running, social network managing, "big phone OS" that just happens to reside on the same install as Windows 8. Which is fairly cool in its own right, if nothing more than for easy access to Windows documents. But I'm not sure if it's the paradigm busting move it's being made out to be.
And I can't see the logic of using a relatively underpowered tablet for a desktop machine.
Again we agree. The Motorola Atrix looks pretty sweet, but I really question whether it would provide any sort of satisfying desktop experience.
But whenever I ask such questions, I remind myself that playing video on a computer once seemed impossibly complex - you couldn't even fit one movie on a standard hard drive.
Then Real Player came along, and streamed music over your modem - another seemingly impossible task. Now we stream HD video seamlessly over optic fiber with more capacity than my ISP used to have for a whole city of users on their T1 line.
So I try to hold back my predictions of "It ain't good enough, and it never will be". Someday my phone will make the quad-core laptop I'm currently using seem quaintly under powered, just like this laptop makes my old desktop seem like a weak sister.
I used to save old computers, thinking I'd one day use them as servers. The other day I came across an old motherboard I had saved, with a Pentium 4 class AMD chip in it. I laughed and threw it in the garbage. But I still remember when I upgraded to that platform - it was amazingly fast at the time. I think I had a whole Gig of RAM in it, which is almost 5 times the capacity of my first hard drive.
But why rewrite an app when it can run as is? Why would, say, Adobe bother with the huge outlay in capital to get anything going on Metro when any device running Metro can already run regular Windows and has out of the box Adobe compatibly?
And even in the case of apps that are rewritten, will they be any good? Metro is just a UI, after all, not a magic touch experience generator. If the current state of Windows software is any indication, I suspect we can look forward to a great many half assed ports that aren't much better than the old Windows tablets of yore.
As I said before, some software will be rewritten from the ground up and will likely work great. Some will not be rewritten, and will work OK. Some will not be rewritten, and will work like crap, and will fade into obscurity.
It has happened lots of times before. With 3.1, with 95, with NT, XP and Win7.
There is a big difference between being able to use existing software and being able to optimally use the entire OS interface/paradigm. Legacy stuff will likely work, or most of it will mostly work, anyways. New stuff will work better. The best of the new stuff likely will work best.
Again we agree. The Motorola Atrix looks pretty sweet, but I really question whether it would provide any sort of satisfying desktop experience.
But whenever I ask such questions, I remind myself that playing video on a computer once seemed impossibly complex - you couldn't even fit one movie on a standard hard drive.
Then Real Player came along, and streamed music over your modem - another seemingly impossible task. Now we stream HD video seamlessly over optic fiber with more capacity than my ISP used to have for a whole city of users on their T1 line.
So I try to hold back my predictions of "It ain't good enough, and it never will be".
True enough-- my feeling is one of the reasons that the iPad is doing so well and desktop sales are slumping is that desktop machines are now (and have been for a while) more powerful than they really need to be for most of what most people are doing with their computers. Just endlessly adding RAM and bigger HDs and faster CPUs with more cores is no longer working as a sales driver for the PC industry, because the PC people are already using emails, surfs and word processes plenty fast as it is.
So you could be right-- a tablet with next year's hardware might be plenty powerful enough for most uses, even some current edge cases like photo finishing and video editing (which can be done on tablet hardware but faster is always better when it comes to big media files).
But the tablet paradigm may also blunt enthusiasm for hybrid devices, since many people might be perfectly fine just staying on the tablet (with the exception of tossing a bluetooth keyboard into the mix). I could see a tablet OS that works seamlessly with a mouse to be of some use, but I can't see how that wouldn't break multitouch gestures. My guess that Apple's approach here would to pair a bluetooth keyboard with a trackpad, allowing a close analog of the touch experience at the keyboard hand position.
As I said before, some software will be rewritten from the ground up and will likely work great. Some will not be rewritten, and will work OK. Some will not be rewritten, and will work like crap, and will fade into obscurity.
It has happened lots of times before. With 3.1, with 95, with NT, XP and Win7.
There is a big difference between being able to use existing software and being able to optimally use the entire OS interface/paradigm. Legacy stuff will likely work, or most of it will mostly work, anyways. New stuff will work better. The best of the new stuff likely will work best.
I guess, but there's a lot more work and thought and care and planning that goes into the transition from mouse to touch than from various iterations of Windows, the user facing portion of which involves little more than UI chrome.
Apple has approached this by keeping iOS a separate entity (in concept if not code), leading by example by providing best in class tablet software (iWork, Garage Band, etc.) and developing a robust and deep touch lexicon, with developer tools that strongly encourage consistency of that lexicon across apps. To achieve that level of uniformity and integration they've had to be disciplined, taking clear stands on what the iPad is and is not and how it does and does not work. The results speak for themselves.
MS appears to be suggesting that they can have their tablet cake and eat it too; that they can leave things kind of undefined and open to interpretation and still get a nice tablet ecosystem, even while providing a convenient fallback into Windows. I really question that strategy. You look at all those Windows programs with their various and eccentric ideas about UI (including a lot of Microsoft's stuff) and imagine how that works when you're talking about touch on a tablet, which is far less forgiving of random ideas that change from app to app. The iPad feels of a piece, that aren't many jarring moments when you launch an app and wonder where you are. I fear that that might not be the case with Metro apps, and that's going to impact the desirability of the device.
I'm also still really curious about how the Metro language works for anything other than things like social network feeds or browsing. Everything I've seen seems to emphasize the coolness of live tiles and sliding panels and nice typography; can't see how that serves a Metro Word, should that ever come to pass.
OK, here's a talk on building Metro apps that belies my idea that MS was just throwing this open to whatever-- they clearly have strong design tools intended to maintain consistency among apps.
And as far as that goes it looks pretty nice. However, everything that's being shown seems to center on feeds or web stuff. Early on the presenter explicitly concedes something like Photoshop must be relegated to the traditional desktop and mouse UI.
I think this is the drawback of yoking Metro to Windows 8-- it enforces a division between "real" apps and "tablet" apps. I suspect that MS has no plans to put Word, for instance, into Metro, because, again, why bother? Good old Windows is right there-- on any hardware that's running Metro.
Apple, on the other hand, has gone all in with touch, and so are motivated to create full touch versions of their bigger, more capable apps. Pages for the iPad may not be a Word rival at the moment, but it certainly gives you more word processing power on a tablet than either nothing or just getting dumped back into a Windows desktop.
True enough-- my feeling is one of the reasons that the iPad is doing so well and desktop sales are slumping is that desktop machines are now (and have been for a while) more powerful than they really need to be for most of what most people are doing with their computers. Just endlessly adding RAM and bigger HDs and faster CPUs with more cores is no longer working as a sales driver for the PC industry, because the PC people are already using emails, surfs and word processes plenty fast as it is.
Agreed. In the bad old days, you needed new hardware in order to just run the latest apps. But that has not been the case for mainstream users for many years now.
Quote:
Originally Posted by addabox
But the tablet paradigm may also blunt enthusiasm for hybrid devices, since many people might be perfectly fine just staying on the tablet (with the exception of tossing a bluetooth keyboard into the mix). I could see a tablet OS that works seamlessly with a mouse to be of some use, but I can't see how that wouldn't break multitouch gestures. My guess that Apple's approach here would to pair a bluetooth keyboard with a trackpad, allowing a close analog of the touch experience at the keyboard hand position.
But Apple didn't do that. Instead, they just eliminated the mouse, with no good way to replace it. Their dock solution is half-assed without a mouse, and the virtual keyboard is suboptimal compared with a full sized keyboard.
I have not yet seen any tablet that I feel like buying. I'd jump at a cheap web browser/movie watching tablet, or at a tablet that would work as well as a laptop. But the iPad doesn't seem to fit either category for me. The Nook Color seems interesting - maybe I should look at it more closely.
I kind of lost interest when it was announced that the iPad would use iOS, which I found too limiting even on a smartphone, having used PalmOS for many years before I got an iPhone. I'm still waiting for something cheap and basic, or something full featured enough to spend bucks on.
I was not sure about Window 8 tablet, but this might be my next buy thanks to AI.
I and my wife have some issues with our IPad 2. It looks nice in aluminum case, but there are not many things I can do with IPad apart from reading Internet contents, playing games and viewing photos like digital photo frame.
Sure you can watch paid movies and listen paid songs, but you really need to have Apple home theater. So, at the moment, it is a failed product in terms of media player.
You can not do Window based programs that are needed in work places or even for personal uses.
Camera is not in use due to it's poor quality and not being able to MSN messenger in video mode.
My wife enjoys playing games with IPad, but gets frustrated when she is not able to view full contents since it does not suppot Flash.
It has rounded corners, but it does have quite sharp edges all around if you look it side. I accidentally hit my Lockwood house wall with it's edges, which resulted small dent a couple of times. It was a little push, but made dent and I can not do anything about it as the wall is naked lockwood house wall. Also, when my daughter of 3 years old hit my ellbow bone with it's edges, it hurts.
My daughters, however, are able to do whatever they want to do with IPad. It's amazing. It will most likely be a toy for my daughters, pre schoolers, after we buy an alternative.
Window 8 tablet would be a completely different product from IPad for me. I am sure my case would be applicable to most of you.
So if Windows tablets are so awesome, why haven't you owned one since 1997? They've been around forever. What's stopping you?
The "it's a desert topping/floor wax" schtick is more of a gimmick, and hybrid use likely to be a niche.
Now that made me laugh out loud. Too bad most of the younger set on here won't get the reference, because the quote's not only funny, but it's the perfect metaphor for this MS effort.
I never realised how much I pressed the start button under normal use until I got frustrated with seeing that start screen animation. Its a one trick pony that breaks its leg on the first corner.
Comments
tablet users want easy-to-use apps, not "power," computing.
Then they will relegate themselves to simple little applets, instead of full-featured programs. Problem solved!
Which is the reason M$ is optimizing every aspect of their new OS. I kinda thought that was a main point of the exercise.
No, they're optimizing the Metro interface, which runs alongside of the usual Windows. When I switch back to Windows I have a very tablet unfriendly machine, and I still haven't heard a convincing explanation as to how all those legacy Windows programs are going to rewrite themselves to take advantage of Metro.
Then they will relegate themselves to simple little applets, instead of full-featured programs. Problem solved!
But that's the whole point of contention-- making full-featured programs tablet friendly is a lot of work, and MS is acting like it's nothing more than a few tweaks to hop over to Metro. That seems highly unlikely to me.
Apart from that, their facade that they're calling a new OS, isn't that horrifying. Once it works it'll be used, and business dudes are going to launch Word and Excel and get on with their lives unchanged.
I prefer iOS. It made great changes.
That's exactly the problem, its not suppose to be a laptop, its suppose to be a tablet... The whole POINT of a tablet is NOT having a keyboard and a mouse. People who need keyboard and mouse should buy laptops...
The world would be an easier place with all choices being either/or, black/white, good/bad, our way/the highway.
Indeed, ISTM that most people like convenience and simplicity, and are willing to give up much in order to get it.
But the rest of us are very interested in versatility and capability. We think different.
IMO Windows 8 will sink or swim as a tablet OS based on the market's response to Metro. The "it's a desert topping/floor wax" schtick is more of a gimmick, and hybrid use likely to be a niche.
That's not to say that Metro won't be successful, just that it will need to succeed on its own merits as a tablet UI, not as some kind of magical "Windows to go."
/agree
... with one caveat. The ability to use native Windows applications on the tablet will greatly increase it's appeal. Need to see a Word document? Open word and read it or sync it to your SkyDrive and use Office online (or 365). This IMO is where Apple has failed to captialize so far. If Lion would have ushered in a seamless iOS / OS X experience Microsoft would have less of an advantage.
As it stands right now there is no such things as Pages online and I can't run an iOS app on my Mac (natively).
So, again, apps are magically rewriting themselves with "a few lines of code" to become first class tablet citizens?
I doubt that any lines of code will be needed for rudimentary compatibility for most applications.
Likewise, I doubt that a few lines of code will provide an optimal experience.
I have no doubt, however, that most programs will be rewritten from the ground up so as to work beautifully as both tablet and desktop interfaces, while some others will fade into obscurity. The same thing happens every time M$ radically redesigns an OS.
The world would be an easier place with all choices being either/or, black/white, good/bad, our way/the highway.
Indeed, ISTM that most people like convenience and simplicity, and are willing to give up much in order to get it.
But the rest of us are very interested in versatility and capability. We think different.
But of course the "rest of you" have to give up much in order to get what you want as well. Real device design is always about tradeoffs. You can make something that does everything, but it's likely to sacrifice battery life, size, ease of use, etc. to accomplish that. Even Microsofts wretched old tablets had their enthusiasts; I'm sure they felt that the "versatility and capability" were worth it, but they were few and far between.
So the question is whether or not Microsoft's willingness to give up simplicity in favor of the Windows boat anchor will give them an advantage in the marketplace. We'll see.
That's not to say that Metro won't be successful, just that it will need to succeed on its own merits as a tablet UI, not as some kind of magical "Windows to go."
Agreed. It is a difficult task that M$ has undertaken. I hope that they can pull it off. Given the gaffes of the past few years, it is not at all certain that Win8 will be a good OS for either desktop/notebook use or for tablet use.
Personally, I have some huge reservations about the tile paradigm for desktop use - more than you seem to have about the ability to run desktop programs on a tablet. I hope that they don't dumb down the entire experience in order to shoehorn one OS into two form factors.
I doubt that any lines of code will be needed for rudimentary compatibility for most applications.
Likewise, I doubt that a few lines of code will provide an optimal experience.
I have no doubt, however, that most programs will be rewritten from the ground up so as to work beautifully as both tablet and desktop interfaces, while some others will fade into obscurity. The same thing happens every time M$ radically redesigns an OS.
But why rewrite an app when it can run as is? Why would, say, Adobe bother with the huge outlay in capital to get anything going on Metro when any device running Metro can already run regular Windows and has out of the box Adobe compatibly?
And even in the case of apps that are rewritten, will they be any good? Metro is just a UI, after all, not a magic touch experience generator. If the current state of Windows software is any indication, I suspect we can look forward to a great many half assed ports that aren't much better than the old Windows tablets of yore.
How does MS propose to enforce Metro conventions? Do they plan to at all? How does Metro deal with something like Word? Or Excel? Big sliding boxes don't seem very optimal, but that's pretty much all we've seen.
Unless MS has some compelling solutions for this kind of thing, Metro (for all the hype) will be for all intents and purposes a widget running, social network managing, "big phone OS" that just happens to reside on the same install as Windows 8. Which is fairly cool in its own right, if nothing more than for easy access to Windows documents. But I'm not sure if it's the paradigm busting move it's being made out to be.
And I can't see the logic of using a relatively underpowered tablet for a desktop machine.
Again we agree. The Motorola Atrix looks pretty sweet, but I really question whether it would provide any sort of satisfying desktop experience.
But whenever I ask such questions, I remind myself that playing video on a computer once seemed impossibly complex - you couldn't even fit one movie on a standard hard drive.
Then Real Player came along, and streamed music over your modem - another seemingly impossible task. Now we stream HD video seamlessly over optic fiber with more capacity than my ISP used to have for a whole city of users on their T1 line.
So I try to hold back my predictions of "It ain't good enough, and it never will be". Someday my phone will make the quad-core laptop I'm currently using seem quaintly under powered, just like this laptop makes my old desktop seem like a weak sister.
I used to save old computers, thinking I'd one day use them as servers. The other day I came across an old motherboard I had saved, with a Pentium 4 class AMD chip in it. I laughed and threw it in the garbage. But I still remember when I upgraded to that platform - it was amazingly fast at the time. I think I had a whole Gig of RAM in it, which is almost 5 times the capacity of my first hard drive.
But why rewrite an app when it can run as is? Why would, say, Adobe bother with the huge outlay in capital to get anything going on Metro when any device running Metro can already run regular Windows and has out of the box Adobe compatibly?
And even in the case of apps that are rewritten, will they be any good? Metro is just a UI, after all, not a magic touch experience generator. If the current state of Windows software is any indication, I suspect we can look forward to a great many half assed ports that aren't much better than the old Windows tablets of yore.
As I said before, some software will be rewritten from the ground up and will likely work great. Some will not be rewritten, and will work OK. Some will not be rewritten, and will work like crap, and will fade into obscurity.
It has happened lots of times before. With 3.1, with 95, with NT, XP and Win7.
There is a big difference between being able to use existing software and being able to optimally use the entire OS interface/paradigm. Legacy stuff will likely work, or most of it will mostly work, anyways. New stuff will work better. The best of the new stuff likely will work best.
Again we agree. The Motorola Atrix looks pretty sweet, but I really question whether it would provide any sort of satisfying desktop experience.
But whenever I ask such questions, I remind myself that playing video on a computer once seemed impossibly complex - you couldn't even fit one movie on a standard hard drive.
Then Real Player came along, and streamed music over your modem - another seemingly impossible task. Now we stream HD video seamlessly over optic fiber with more capacity than my ISP used to have for a whole city of users on their T1 line.
So I try to hold back my predictions of "It ain't good enough, and it never will be".
True enough-- my feeling is one of the reasons that the iPad is doing so well and desktop sales are slumping is that desktop machines are now (and have been for a while) more powerful than they really need to be for most of what most people are doing with their computers. Just endlessly adding RAM and bigger HDs and faster CPUs with more cores is no longer working as a sales driver for the PC industry, because the PC people are already using emails, surfs and word processes plenty fast as it is.
So you could be right-- a tablet with next year's hardware might be plenty powerful enough for most uses, even some current edge cases like photo finishing and video editing (which can be done on tablet hardware but faster is always better when it comes to big media files).
But the tablet paradigm may also blunt enthusiasm for hybrid devices, since many people might be perfectly fine just staying on the tablet (with the exception of tossing a bluetooth keyboard into the mix). I could see a tablet OS that works seamlessly with a mouse to be of some use, but I can't see how that wouldn't break multitouch gestures. My guess that Apple's approach here would to pair a bluetooth keyboard with a trackpad, allowing a close analog of the touch experience at the keyboard hand position.
As I said before, some software will be rewritten from the ground up and will likely work great. Some will not be rewritten, and will work OK. Some will not be rewritten, and will work like crap, and will fade into obscurity.
It has happened lots of times before. With 3.1, with 95, with NT, XP and Win7.
There is a big difference between being able to use existing software and being able to optimally use the entire OS interface/paradigm. Legacy stuff will likely work, or most of it will mostly work, anyways. New stuff will work better. The best of the new stuff likely will work best.
I guess, but there's a lot more work and thought and care and planning that goes into the transition from mouse to touch than from various iterations of Windows, the user facing portion of which involves little more than UI chrome.
Apple has approached this by keeping iOS a separate entity (in concept if not code), leading by example by providing best in class tablet software (iWork, Garage Band, etc.) and developing a robust and deep touch lexicon, with developer tools that strongly encourage consistency of that lexicon across apps. To achieve that level of uniformity and integration they've had to be disciplined, taking clear stands on what the iPad is and is not and how it does and does not work. The results speak for themselves.
MS appears to be suggesting that they can have their tablet cake and eat it too; that they can leave things kind of undefined and open to interpretation and still get a nice tablet ecosystem, even while providing a convenient fallback into Windows. I really question that strategy. You look at all those Windows programs with their various and eccentric ideas about UI (including a lot of Microsoft's stuff) and imagine how that works when you're talking about touch on a tablet, which is far less forgiving of random ideas that change from app to app. The iPad feels of a piece, that aren't many jarring moments when you launch an app and wonder where you are. I fear that that might not be the case with Metro apps, and that's going to impact the desirability of the device.
I'm also still really curious about how the Metro language works for anything other than things like social network feeds or browsing. Everything I've seen seems to emphasize the coolness of live tiles and sliding panels and nice typography; can't see how that serves a Metro Word, should that ever come to pass.
And as far as that goes it looks pretty nice. However, everything that's being shown seems to center on feeds or web stuff. Early on the presenter explicitly concedes something like Photoshop must be relegated to the traditional desktop and mouse UI.
I think this is the drawback of yoking Metro to Windows 8-- it enforces a division between "real" apps and "tablet" apps. I suspect that MS has no plans to put Word, for instance, into Metro, because, again, why bother? Good old Windows is right there-- on any hardware that's running Metro.
Apple, on the other hand, has gone all in with touch, and so are motivated to create full touch versions of their bigger, more capable apps. Pages for the iPad may not be a Word rival at the moment, but it certainly gives you more word processing power on a tablet than either nothing or just getting dumped back into a Windows desktop.
True enough-- my feeling is one of the reasons that the iPad is doing so well and desktop sales are slumping is that desktop machines are now (and have been for a while) more powerful than they really need to be for most of what most people are doing with their computers. Just endlessly adding RAM and bigger HDs and faster CPUs with more cores is no longer working as a sales driver for the PC industry, because the PC people are already using emails, surfs and word processes plenty fast as it is.
Agreed. In the bad old days, you needed new hardware in order to just run the latest apps. But that has not been the case for mainstream users for many years now.
But the tablet paradigm may also blunt enthusiasm for hybrid devices, since many people might be perfectly fine just staying on the tablet (with the exception of tossing a bluetooth keyboard into the mix). I could see a tablet OS that works seamlessly with a mouse to be of some use, but I can't see how that wouldn't break multitouch gestures. My guess that Apple's approach here would to pair a bluetooth keyboard with a trackpad, allowing a close analog of the touch experience at the keyboard hand position.
But Apple didn't do that. Instead, they just eliminated the mouse, with no good way to replace it. Their dock solution is half-assed without a mouse, and the virtual keyboard is suboptimal compared with a full sized keyboard.
I have not yet seen any tablet that I feel like buying. I'd jump at a cheap web browser/movie watching tablet, or at a tablet that would work as well as a laptop. But the iPad doesn't seem to fit either category for me. The Nook Color seems interesting - maybe I should look at it more closely.
I kind of lost interest when it was announced that the iPad would use iOS, which I found too limiting even on a smartphone, having used PalmOS for many years before I got an iPhone. I'm still waiting for something cheap and basic, or something full featured enough to spend bucks on.
I was not sure about Window 8 tablet, but this might be my next buy thanks to AI.
I and my wife have some issues with our IPad 2. It looks nice in aluminum case, but there are not many things I can do with IPad apart from reading Internet contents, playing games and viewing photos like digital photo frame.
Sure you can watch paid movies and listen paid songs, but you really need to have Apple home theater. So, at the moment, it is a failed product in terms of media player.
You can not do Window based programs that are needed in work places or even for personal uses.
Camera is not in use due to it's poor quality and not being able to MSN messenger in video mode.
My wife enjoys playing games with IPad, but gets frustrated when she is not able to view full contents since it does not suppot Flash.
It has rounded corners, but it does have quite sharp edges all around if you look it side. I accidentally hit my Lockwood house wall with it's edges, which resulted small dent a couple of times. It was a little push, but made dent and I can not do anything about it as the wall is naked lockwood house wall. Also, when my daughter of 3 years old hit my ellbow bone with it's edges, it hurts.
My daughters, however, are able to do whatever they want to do with IPad. It's amazing. It will most likely be a toy for my daughters, pre schoolers, after we buy an alternative.
Window 8 tablet would be a completely different product from IPad for me. I am sure my case would be applicable to most of you.
So if Windows tablets are so awesome, why haven't you owned one since 1997? They've been around forever. What's stopping you?
The "it's a desert topping/floor wax" schtick is more of a gimmick, and hybrid use likely to be a niche.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZdBbkiA3Yg
I never realised how much I pressed the start button under normal use until I got frustrated with seeing that start screen animation. Its a one trick pony that breaks its leg on the first corner.