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The Next Six Months

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Re: The Next Six Months

#211

Post by eftpotrm »

dstein wrote: post #209
eftpotrm wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really see offices full of workers staring at tablet PCs, trains & planes full of road warriors bashing out long reports on touchscreens? The home market may primarily shift to tablets; I'm not convinced by that and I think there's still a problem with the use case for content creators on tablets which includes an awful lot of school children. But the market I absolutely can't see abandoning PCs as we see them no…

Watch it happen. Tablets cost considerably less than desktop computers. There is nothing preventing you from being able to plug a second monitor and a mouse into a tablet and use it exactly the same way that you use a laptop and a desktop today.

At the moment, they're significantly more expensive and less compatible. They're also, by virtue of design, far easier to steal / lose and we've had quite enough (UK) stories about laptops being left on trains by mistake or stolen from homes and critical data being leaked as a consequence. Also, I can't see many people wanting a 10" desktop monitor or a 17", let alone 22", tablet.

I don't dispute it could happen, but I'd be surprised.

Re: The Next Six Months

#212

Post by saturdaysaint »

sofuture wrote: post #119
kenjackson wrote: post #19

Microsoft AND Intel being effectively missing from the tablet race is staggering. And there are a few reasons why its staggering: 1) Both have known it was coming, maybe longer than anyone else. But got the core requirements all wrong. 2) No one really seems to care. 3) Related to (2), there is no belief that they have anything up their sleeve. 4) Their existing ecosystem, probably a billion units strong, doesn't see…

I'm going to -4 on this, but: it absolutely still remains to be seen whether or not tablets are worth a damn . Seriously, people play shitty games on them, and I guess read ebooks (though I see vastly more Kindles on the subway, than iPads). I do not, at all see a compelling product yet, I see a trendy gadget that early adopters and trend followers have purchased. Sure there's great lip service to how revolutionary t…

"I guess read ebooks"

Ebooks outsell paperback and hardcover novels (not combined) on the internet's biggest bookseller - we can safely say that many people definitely read ebooks on tablets (assuming we're including Kindle).

When reputable manufacturers bring mainstream tablets (i.e. Android pads that support the Market) to the $300-400 range, I believe that mainstream consumers will give them at least equal consideration with laptops in the same price range.

Re: The Next Six Months

#213

Post by nmcfarl »

fierarul wrote: post #165
candeira wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does he manage without a Mac to use as a "dock" for the iPad? Sincere question, I am a linux user and have only seen an iPad a couple of times, but I understand you need to dock it via iTunes in order to do certain stuff with it.

There are few times when you need to connect to iTunes: * after the purchase (to "activate" it) -- which the store will do for you * if you want to update the OS * if you want to back it up * if you want to copy music/photos/videos/app data from your computer to the iPad. So, if you don't update the OS and you activated it at the store you'll just use it forever with the existing OS without ever touching a computer.…

To me this list sounds like a lot of occasions that you'd need a computer - but in actuality, my mother who is an early adopter at nothing except iPads, has been running like this since day 1.

And, as my life is itinerant, I've done multiple 6 week stretches without syncing. It works fine.

Re: The Next Six Months

#214

Post by ugh »

lukifer wrote: post #207
toadi wrote: post #194

The end of the PC era is always announced. But don't see how I can do my daily work on a Ipad. I need a laptop or PC.

The hyperbole of the language belies the underlying truth: not the death of the PC, but a widening of the spectrum in which PCs are a minority among numerous types of computing devices.

This is very much besides the point but I think that calling what you just described the end of the PC era is not hyperbole. When PCs stop to dominate personal computing – like they have ever since personal computing existed – that would be very much the end of an era. No hyperbole involved. That doesn’t mean that PCs will suddenly stop existing or even stop being made.

Re: The Next Six Months

#215

Post by arohner »

joeyo wrote: post #164
zzleeper wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you prefer reading the articles in paper or in the ipad? (I'm considering switching from paper to ipad) Thanks!

I'm watching this space very, very closely (i.e. tablets specifically for reading PDFs of articles). There are a lot of options but none are quite perfect: * iPad Pros: - Color screen - Can zoom to exact size desired - Multi-touch - Papers.app (easy sync/organization for PDFs) Cons: - Not e-ink - Battery life - Not as light/thin as Kindle * Kindle 3 Pros: - E-ink - Amazing battery life Cons: - Zoom is limited to a co…

Battery life is not an issue with my iPad. When using it for only reading (i.e. not streaming video), it can easily go for a week without charging. Even with video, on a full charge, it can easily play 8 hours without recharging.

Re: The Next Six Months

#216

Post by saw-lau »

arohner wrote: post #142
sofuture wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to -4 on this, but: it absolutely still remains to be seen whether or not tablets are worth a damn . Seriously, people play shitty games on them, and I guess read ebooks (though I see vastly more Kindles on the subway, than iPads). I do not, at all see a compelling product yet, I see a trendy gadget that early adopters and trend followers have purchased. Sure there's great lip service to how revolutionary t…

I use my iPad nearly every day. It's a better experience than my laptop (which I do use literally every day) in several areas: * reading in bed * reading long PDFs. This is my primary "work purpose". I read a lot of machine learning books and journal articles in PDF form. * quick checking of email, when you don't want to sit down for a while * looking up recipes while cooking * social media sharing: when friends are…

It's not all content consumption, either. My wife's studying for an MBA at the moment and as well as using GoodReader extensively for the course material (in PDF), also finds it really easy to create mind maps while working.

Re: The Next Six Months

#217

Post by bruceboughton »

jasonkester wrote: post #184
bruceboughton wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You take it into the Apple store. You know, the stores with great tech support that don't exist for PCs (yet).

Did you actually read the comment you're replying to? In this particular anecdote, the nearest Apple store would have been in San Diego, 3200 miles away. The nearest internet connected computer capable of downloading iTunes was a mere 150 miles away in Buenaventura, a 2 hour motor launch, followed by a (weekly) night boat from the village I was in. It was meant to illustrate that sometimes you take your mobile device…

I did. But if something hard crashes, then it's a fair assumption you're going to have to take it to somewhere where they can fix it. My point is that, if you ignore the out-in-the-wilderness scenario, iPad support is probably friendlier than most PC support for normal people.

If you take your dell laptop back to PC World, don't expect much.

Re: The Next Six Months

#218

Post by nooneelse »

zachallaun wrote: post #131
sofuture wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to -4 on this, but: it absolutely still remains to be seen whether or not tablets are worth a damn . Seriously, people play shitty games on them, and I guess read ebooks (though I see vastly more Kindles on the subway, than iPads). I do not, at all see a compelling product yet, I see a trendy gadget that early adopters and trend followers have purchased. Sure there's great lip service to how revolutionary t…

You're likely right in that tablets aren't about to kill PCs, but suggesting that tablets remain a simple "trendy gadget" seems a bit silly, especially considering Apple's Q1 reports [1]. Perhaps the iPad isn't to your taste, but it was to 7 million others. (And some 16 million overall.) One could argue that Apple does, in fact, have the largest consumer base of early adopters and trend followers of any company, but…

If you are going to go calling tablets of any kind "main-stream", then I'm afraid you are devaluing that term to the point that it is meaningless. TVs are mainstream. Cars are mainstream. Computers overall are mainstream, though it is still easy to find homes in which "the computer" is put somewhere "out of the way" and gets maybe an hour of interaction a month. Tablets are not mainstream.

Re: The Next Six Months

#219

Post by tomkarlo »

kisielk wrote: post #133
tomkarlo wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they can't get enough devices out in the market to make it a compelling target platform for app makers, it won't matter that they have all the pieces. That's increasingly looking like the outcome. Why would anyone develop an app for W7 before iPhone or Android, assuming they don't have incumbent knowledge of the W7 environment (and even then...)?

I wouldn't underestimate the huge number of .Net / Windows developers that exist for Microsoft's ecosystem. If they manage to line their technologies up just right and make a big push for the mobile space, there's a huge developer mindshare that's entrenched in the Visual Studio / .Net world. A lot of these people have never used a Mac or other OS, and never programmed for another platform. Many of them don't have th…

If a developer's personal inertia / sloth around learning a new framework is such a factor that they'll choose to develop for W7 rather than iPhone or Android, that doesn't bode well for the quality of the app they're going to produce. Most great devs I've ever worked with are perfectly happy jumping languages / frameworks if it means their work will be more successful.

Re: The Next Six Months

#220

Post by nooneelse »

ugh wrote: post #157
seabee wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well count yourself wrong: http://www.amazon.com/Fingerworks-IGESTURENUMPAD-iGesture-Pa... That thing even let you switch between apps with gestures. The iPod scroll wheel isn't an Apple paradigm either; jog dials for menu selection existed years before the iPod. I remember seeing it on the minidisc recorder in our school's music department.

Multi touch is not even the most important part of the iOS UI. It could have been done without it.

The most important part of the user experience that multi touch input enables might just be an onscreen keyboard that doesn't suck by being frustratingly slow and/or error prone. Requiring the user to only ever be touching the screen location of one key at a time slows the user down. And when the inevitable happens, i.e. the user is touching two on-screen keys at once, to take the average (which lots of older single-touch screens did) is not acceptable for text entry.
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