After long time Smartphone user I bought a tablet last year for three reasons - and only these reasons: A browsing device for the Couch, a reader for the evening and a photo viewer (holiday photos aso.) I love it. Works great for these three things, better than a phone or notebook.
Our Love Affair With the Tablet Is Over
171–180 of 201 posts
Re: Our Love Affair With the Tablet Is Over
#172I never really got tablets - too big to be portable and crippled by the lack of usable input devices. My 11" Macbook Air is just about as portable as an iPad, but is way easier to use, not just for streaming, but even for coding, etc. Of course, I've been wrong about things before and I'm not really a typical consumer user, but I just can't imagine a future for tablets with phones getting as good as they are, and sma…
Have you ever seen a child use a tablet? It's mind-blowing to see a 3 year old use one better than their parents. I don't think tablets will ever replace laptops, but that's not the point of consumption is it. They'd rather you buy a laptop for "work" a tablet for "consumption" and a phone, and...
I have a 3 year old, he likes my iPad, but I don't get the fascination of people with children that are "using one better than their parents".
Are they using it for anything useful? Are they reading emails? Are they browsing websites? Can they search YouTube for their favorite cartoons or songs? So what the hell are we talking about anyway? Moving stuff around the screen and opening their favorite game? I don't see how that's in any way fascinating.
My son likes to draw on the iPad btw. But he's way more happy when we draw things pencil on paper. Just something to consider - being able to use a device, doesn't make it useful.
Re: Our Love Affair With the Tablet Is Over
#173Tablets are great for children and seniors to casually consume email, news, books, movies, and games.
Re: Our Love Affair With the Tablet Is Over
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
In order to argue the author's point you would also need to be carrying around a 5" phone. He is pointing out the trend of more people using their phones for what they used to use their tablets for. I'd be interested to know if you have a 5" phone and whether or not you think it replaces the features of your tablet in any way.
Speaking for myself, no, my smartphone does not replace my tablet. The amount of screen realestate lost when going from 11" to 5" is just too much. It makes reading hard (particularly with less than perfect eyesight), movies too small, and all of the real time communication that comes with a phone is vying for my attention all the time. Now then, if I could make calls over a bluetooth headset connected to my iPad, I'…
I'm with you on that. Though actually my thinking is increasingly "dumbphone + tablet". Where the phone gets carried when I absolutely, positively, must be in contact (and the less that happens the better).
Re: Our Love Affair With the Tablet Is Over
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is exactly how I use my tablet too. I use my computer all day writing code, so when its time to relax with some Netflix, or an ebook I grab my tablet instead. Its perfect for laying on the couch or in bed. A phone definitely works in that case as well, but the tiny screen isn't as nice for reading and watching video. Not to mention by the end of the day my phone is usually mostly dead and its time to put it on t…
The difference in screen size between tablets and phones is much less apparent now than it was 2 or 3 years ago.
Sure, and there will likely be a big market for 6" phones for a good while to come - at least until EEG/eye-tracking controlled smart glasses replace them.
That said, I don't want a 6" phone. My Nexus 5 is too big. Just a bit smaller, and I'd be able to use it comfortably one-handed. I'd go 4" over 5" if there was an option with the price and performance I want, though 4.3" or 4.5" is probably perfect for me.
I have medium-small hands, and the Nexus 5 is hard to use one-handed. I made a case for it out of carbon fiber, and that improved things slightly by adding a bezel that sticks out from the screen by 1 mm or so. Its height is also at the upper end of what I want in my pockets. Unfortunately, the iPhone 5S is the only current/recent high-spec smartphone I know of that's the size I want, and I don't like iOS. When is Sony going to offer the Z1f outside Japan?
Re: Our Love Affair With the Tablet Is Over
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some of us wish for Tablets to be more than just a portable screen. Fortunately for those of us who wish to push the boundaries of computing, some companies are willing to go in that direction. Content Creation Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCKWn1zjejE Surface Pro obviously, but the concept of a highly-accurate stylus has become standard in Galaxy Note and Galaxy Tab as well. Android now supports multiple u…
> Programming on a Tablet: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XmxtIDWI_E That clip is 1.5 minutes long. I can handle any annoying thing for a minute and a half. But I can not see any way that would be sustainable for an entire day (week, years) of coding. I doubt I will ever give up my physical keyboard. Your drawing example makes perfect sense though. We started with the Wacom tablets and such since it very closely mat…
The AIDE programming environment was more of a proof of concept video, rather than an actual methodology to programming. No, we cannot program effectively on tablets with touch / pen yet. However, I bet that we will one day create a UI design program on the tablet (drag and drop perhaps? Gesture based?) that is more natural.
At least, more natural for programming tablet applications.
There is a major advantage when you can do the whole compile / link / debug process on a single device. When the programming cycle becomes compile / link / upload / debug, you lose a bit of productivity.
Besides, many tablets support a dock by now. Transformer book, T100, Galaxy series... even iPads have those crappy Bluetooth keyboards that go kaput whenever the 2.4 GHz spectrum gets overloaded. (No seriously, a dock makes things much better).
So at the end of the day, yes, a tablet that is a tablet 99% of the time, but then you can just plug in a keyboard, or perhaps use a docking device, is frankly the future.
It is much easier to keep one master device, rather than a Tablet, Laptop, and Desktop. If one device can satisfy all of those without issue, then it will replace all three... much like how the Smartphone replaced the Rolodex, PDA and cellphone.
Re: Our Love Affair With the Tablet Is Over
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some of us wish for Tablets to be more than just a portable screen. Fortunately for those of us who wish to push the boundaries of computing, some companies are willing to go in that direction. Content Creation Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCKWn1zjejE Surface Pro obviously, but the concept of a highly-accurate stylus has become standard in Galaxy Note and Galaxy Tab as well. Android now supports multiple u…
I see where you are going with that. One of the challenges of stylus' and tablets are the technology just isn't there. I've not tried the Note yet but the Wacom stylus on the IREX Illiad V2 has been the closest thing to what I want, my current best approximation is the JotScript and its not there yet in terms of lag or accuracy. So much to get right, and so cheap to just use a pen to draw in a notebook. I agree with…
Instead of trusting companies who are reinventing the wheel from the ground up... try a _real_ Wacom stylus.
Try the Galaxy Note 2, Surface Pro, or Wacom's own $2,500 Cintiq 24HD.
http://www.techindustriya.com/2011/11/11/wacom-launches-the-...
Wacom has been making styluses for many years. They have perfected the art, and their best-of-the-best perfectly mimics the most complicated and intricate of pen movements. (including pen angle, rotation, thousands of levels of pressure sensitivity, multi-pen and so forth).
The Surface Pro and Galaxy Note use the cheaper "Bamboo" class Wacom styluses, which "only" have thouands of levels of pressure sensitivity. (but fail to keep pen angle and rotation in check).
Nevertheless, if you've only used iPad crap styluses, you're in for a treat. Both the Surface Pro and Galaxy Note know whether or not your "finger" is on the screen, or if it is a stylus. In fact, you can use both. Your palm does NOT mess up the advanced Wacom styluses on these tablets. Its totally on a different league than JotScript.
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Anyway, the stylus is only one more tool that I hope will become standard issue for tablets. But that isn't the part that matters. What is important is for Tablets to continue to accelerate and become more and more useful.
Before the past couple of months... Tablets were nothing but toys. They were as you said, but portable screens with a little bit of smarts to them.
But the industry is moving on. They are marching towards progress, and eventually, content creation will become a real thing.
If you need a little bit of imagination to take you where we're going... it is currently possible (with enough hardware / software), to capture an object with the Surface Pro's camera, import those images into a 3d model, manipulate the model and then print it using the Makerbot 3d Printer.
All on nothing more than a "tablet".
Re: Our Love Affair With the Tablet Is Over
#178Although I own three tablets, my love affair with the tablet as it exists today never really took off the same way it did for so many consumers. The primary reason is that I do not believe that tablets should be first-class computing devices. Tablets, and in my opinion, the entirety of what we today call "mobile," should be subservient to a general computing model of personal omnipresent applications [1]. Put more co…
Rob Pike seems to share your dream, at least in part:
What hardware do you use?
A bunch of Macs at home, Macs and Linux at work, plus of course the Google compute clusters. When I was on Plan 9, everything was connected and uniform. Now everything isn't connected, just connected to the cloud, which isn't the same thing. And uniform? Far from it, except in mediocrity. This is 2012 and we're still stitching together little microcomputers with HTTPS and ssh and calling it revolutionary. I sorely miss the unified system view of the world we had at Bell Labs, and the way things are going that seems unlikely to come back any time soon. (...)
What would be your dream setup?
I want no local storage anywhere near me other than maybe caches. No disks, no state, my world entirely in the network. Storage needs to be backed up and maintained, which should be someone else's problem, one I'm happy to pay to have them solve. Also, storage on one machine means that machine is different from another machine. At Bell Labs we worked in the Unix Room, which had a bunch of machines we called "terminals". Latterly these were mostly PCs, but the key point is that we didn't use their disks for anything except caching. The terminal was a computer but we didn't compute on it; computing was done in the computer center. The terminal, even though it had a nice color screen and mouse and network and all that, was just a portal to the real computers in the back. When I left work and went home, I could pick up where I left off, pretty much. My dream setup would drop the "pretty much" qualification from that.
Re: Our Love Affair With the Tablet Is Over
#179Although I own three tablets, my love affair with the tablet as it exists today never really took off the same way it did for so many consumers. The primary reason is that I do not believe that tablets should be first-class computing devices. Tablets, and in my opinion, the entirety of what we today call "mobile," should be subservient to a general computing model of personal omnipresent applications [1]. Put more co…
I've always thought this is what I wanted too, and until now, never thought that maybe this makes the Chromebook the right platform going forward. Though still 'first class citizen' machines, they're probably the thinest client available, which kinda gets to where we're going. Or maybe Microsoft (with that shiny new CEO) can deliver on the streaming OS vision and truly provide I/O focused devices http://www.networkwo…
Sounds like a police state's dream.
Re: Our Love Affair With the Tablet Is Over
#180I really didn't see much of the point in tablets.
They're too big to be properly portable like a phone, needing some kind of case or bag, but lack the OS, real keyboard, and general power of a laptop. Being stuck between the two doesn't seem appealing even without their general lack of mobile data capability.