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Yet more crapware immediately deinstalled to make the thing usable.

There’s nothing different to the same stunt pulled with XP tablets, and look how they fared.

It’s just pathetic. By the time someone (other than Apple) produces a tablet with a good user experience, Apple will have already moved onto the next thing. It’s crazy to think that businesses can mess up their internal structure so much that it completely prevents them from being on the ball, let alone getting near it. HP are suffering the same internal crapfest that made Vista what it was.

Edit - Oh, and check out this piece of junk: http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/05/fusion-garage-joojoo-review/ "The truth is we could go on and on about software flaws" … "The JooJoo's integrated three-cell battery repeatedly lasted 2.5 hours … We will take this moment to non-tactfully remind you that the iPad lasts over 10 hours on a charge.

Edited 2010-04-05 22:54 UTC

ummm kroc? you do realize there are prefectly good UI's for pad style computer that came out even before teh iPad right? such as MintPass, and it's successor Sapphire (though that one isn't out yet).

I have not heard of these!

It’s HP I’m complaining at, they keep shovelling the same crap and they really should be doing better. If tablets become common, then it’s the iPad I’ll recommend to customers because life is too short to be shortening your life with stressful, badly designed gadgets.

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/04/02/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-thi...

http://daringfawnyball.wordpress.com/2010/04/05/expertise/

"While people will tolerate a lot of things, what we want are beautiful things that work well. There aren’t many nonexperts who can accomplish that. Expertise needs schooling, maturation, taste, and quite a lot of attitude."

"Nobody needs to program an iPad to enjoy using it, except those who have no capacity for enjoyment other than programming and complaining about same."

That guy needs a better brain.

"This was the weekend those of us with high standards lost their remaining residue of patience for ideologues who hyperbolize about open systems without actually creating something people want to use."

Yeah, like the internet. People don't want to use that.

Edited 2010-04-05 23:54 UTC

His only fault was that he leveled the rant towards the wrong people. The most vocal opponents are the ones who never actually create anything, ever. Ironically, the iPad is probably the ideal device for them.

ya i am not a huge HP fan either. especially after they destroyed the once amazing Compaq. I won't even get into my ran on how awesome Compaq was and how great their computers were as far as quality and life span, features, price, etc... no no, i won't get into that. and how OpenVMS was doing just fine with Compaq. no... thats a long rant for another time.... and i mean a long rant. anyone here who has read my rants and went, "damn, thats a long rant" then get ready for my Compaq rant some day. it will be song long it will have chapters and people will read it on their kindle and weeks later comment on how long that "book" was....

anyways. ya, hp kinda pisses me off these days. but dell isn't much better (though they are starting to make a comeback). Acer, MSI, and Asus are my favs now (and Fujitsu and Levono, asuming your made of money)

I really hope you're being sarcastic. Otherwise, you are the first person I've ever met (online or otherwise) with anything nice to say about Compaq. After dealing with their Presario line at home and at work (from the 486 to the P4), all I can say is "never buy Compaq".

compaq computer lasted forever. their P4 systems were not the best, but no ones were. they were build to last and out of materials that were not intended to be replaced every few years.

Agreed, some of their products were actually very good.

Not the Presario line, the consumer line. Perhaps the business line was better. But all Presarios were crap, made from crap components that even the lowest bidder wouldn't use. Everything is rebranded as "Compaq" hardware (usually Intel hardware) that won't work with non-Compaq drivers. The motherboards and cases aren't really AT/ATX formfactors. They're just crap.

At work, we've turned down donated Compaqs as they just aren't worth the trouble, even as thin-clients without harddrives.

Edited 2010-04-06 04:40 UTC

The ProLiant servers were decent.

The Deskpro series of desktops weren't horrible, but weren't great. But the Presario line was pure, unadulterated crap.

Same for Compaq laptops: the consumer ones were absolute crap, some of the business ones were decent.

You are getting it backward: HP didn't destroy Compaq. Compaq bought HP, using HP's money, and quickly destroyed the company culture. Very clever of them.

This is the one I am uber excited for: http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/06/icds-tegra-2-powered-gemini-is-t...

That's exactly what I was talking about in the another thread! (http://www.osnews.com/comments/23114)

When any other OS company other the Apple will start doing decent software?

I'm here hoping Google will get it right, but the same way i'm not confortable with Apple's excessive control, I'm not confortable with all my data on a server on the United States..

maemo is dead, long live meego

Exactly, this is what I thought when reading this from minute 1.

Problem is that Microsoft can't do anything drastic without threatening it's wide spread adoption and the very same is the reason why the slate won't make a huge impact on the market in its current incarnation.

What HP (and other similar PC vendors) needs is balls to make some drastic choices in order to bring a User Experience which boils down to more than a faster CPU. Maemo would definitely be such a choice (Or Meego if you like, it's all the same to me). These are lightweight, competent and consistent. Not to mention that at least from my perspective (and I'm certain from many others as well) it owns iPhoneOS any day of the week.

Now a completely different approach would be to go for Android, but for any slate a real webbrowser is obviously a necessity and here is where Maemo is the real thing. And the other real opp is to run for ChromeOS (is it called that?)

Obviously I can see how HP won't be walking down any of these routes as it might damage their relationship with Microsoft.

Now to finalize this, I'm really not a big fan of the tablet concept today, I'm far to dependent on a real keyboard but as a 6th computer I might have one.

Edited 2010-04-06 05:03 UTC

I might have to rephrase that, but what I really meant was a full fledged browser in terms of having plugins such as Flash and similar. Maybe Android has this all ready and if so, then brilliant =).

They've been releasing tablets with Maemo for years and they are pretty good.

And Windows 7 is not perfect but still better than the OS on the iPad. It can play video in any format, it doesn't need iTunes, it can multitask and it can run programs that don't come from Applée's app store.

"But it's the user experience that counts!"

The user experience is crap when you have to convert a movie just to play it. I fail to see what is the point of the iPad. It does everything your iPod does but is bigger and more expensive and it can't do more than that.

I thought the guy was talking about the iPod vs the iPad.
Anyway, if you want long battery life, buy an iPod. No real win with the iPad.

Isn't the iPad supposed to get up to 10 hours of video? That's double what the iPods get. That being said, supposed and actual battery life can be very different. A friend of mine got an iPad who also has an iPod Touch, and we noticed that while doing simple things like web browsing the iPod Touch drained at about half the rate of the iPad. This suggests that the iPad, while more powerful, isn't as efficient as the iPod Touch which can get at least double the battery life on a much smaller capacity battery. That also suggests Apple's battery estimates may be extremely optimistic at best, unless the video acceleration hardware is more efficient than the CPU. In either case, I'm sticking with my 1005PE. I have an iPhone OS device already (an iPhone 3gs) and don't think I'll buy another one despite some of the conveniences. In particular, I'm getting bit very hard at the moment by the lack of a user-replaceable battery in all of Apple's new lineup; my iPhone battery is draining at 3x the rate it's supposed to and it's not a software problem. I won't even consider an iPad unless they get replaceable batteries and that's not likely to ever happen. No matter how much I like some of the apps, I don't want to get a new device when, on any other device such as those from Nokia, I could just get a new battery for 20 bucks and solve the problem quickly. It's not so convenient anymore.
Ok, done ranting.

Apple said that they’ll give you a new unit if the battery was a problem. When it was a problem.

The service is 105 U$S.

http://www.apple.com/support/ipad/service/battery/

I don't know how successful they will be, but I got to play with my friend's shiny new iPad and it was... well... fun. Oh, and the virtual keyboard is quite usable.

Two reasons why I'm not that worried about typing:

(a) Touch typing may be something you are used to, but we can adapt VERY easily to other forms of input, even when touch feedback lacks. Our motor processor is very capable of adapting to different context.
An example of this from the field of sequence learning (a subfield of cognitive psychology) can be found in J. K. Witt, J. Ashe, & D. T. Willingham (2008). An egocentric frame of reference in implicit motor sequence learning. Psychological Research, 72(5), 542-552.

(b) Apple has so far proven to be very capable of creating keyboards (both tactile and digital) that are very ergonomically designed, that is, designed with the user in mind. As I said in my http://www.osnews.com/story/22296/Review_MacBook_Pro_13_">MacBo... , everyone touching the keyboard remarks how easily typing can be done. Equally so, I'm amazed at how well (and how flawless) I can type on friends' iPhones. That is why I never worried they were able to pull off the same thing for the iPad.

One thing I will put up for discussion is the "landscape vs. portrait" keyboards. I've already read reviews that some people had a blast typing in landscape (as it hardly differs in size from a standard keyboard) but that it's quite difficult in portrait mode. To return to #1, two variables are introduced in the context to "normal typing", namely that the tactile feedback disappears AND that the keys are spaced closer together. No wonder it becomes more difficult then.

But I'm sure that we will soon see several comments appearing online that after several weeks of typing, people have found no problem typing blindly on their iPad, as they do on a standard keyboard. Maybe they don't even want to go back, like I hate working with mice now I'm used to a multitouch trackpad.

EDIT: Turns out OSNews links don't like quotation marks in the text between < a > and < /a >.

[i]Edited 2010-04-06 01:43 UTC

I wasn't referring to feedback, but the fact that virtual keyboards often change. A keyboard in one iPhone app can have different symbols than another app. Hopefully this won't be as much of an issue on the iPad due to its size, but on the iPhone it means you cannot type completely blind unless you remember exactly where each symbol is in each app. Compare, for example, the address field in Safari vs the email address field in Mail. I'm hoping the iPad will not have different keyboards for each app but rather just display a full keyboard appropriate for the currently selected language input. I'd love to try one, unfortunately I'm about 2.5 hours away from the nearest Apple store and am not going to plunk down at least $500 on the iPad without trying it myself first.

Another parent at our Den meeting (son is in scouts) had one and was planning on trying to pair with a bluetooth keyboard he has at home, tonight.

There has been two big problems with tablets that are the main reasons for the absence of the success of the form factor, but neither are the OS and tailoring of it.

Those two problems are price and screen size.

First the tablets have always been way more expensive than comparative laptops, and most people don't pay more for a computer that can do less than a cheaper more power-full device. Simple as that. And HP repeats the mistake with this tablet, It's basically netbook hardware, and most people don't spend 549 EUR on a netbook.

The other ting with tablets are screen size, 5-7" tablets are simply toys. Those tiny screens are not much better than that of your smartphone, hence most people don't care and use their phones instead. To make an impact a screen with decent resolution and size of 10-13" is needed. Unfortunately the common netbook screens with WSVGA (1024×600) is not a good solution, 600 is to low(perhaps the iPads non widescreen solution is a good compromise to get decent resolution).

I suspect that would depend on how many apps you have running, and whether they used good SSDs or cheapo ones. Fast file access helps a great deal, but it won't help much if you open more programs than you have memory. In that case, the faster flash might help the swapping performance but at the cost of seriously degrading the flash storage faster than an hd equivalent. Like everything else, it depends on what you run and how Windows is set up by default. Having dealt with HP before my confidence isn't high that they'll do a great job with that. HP has great servers, but their default desktop setup is lackluster at best. Can't wait to see what their custom UI is going to be, I hope they do a better job with it than they do with their other software. Still, how will a custom UI compensate when a program you wish to run simply has no touch optimization at all? The operating system is only one part of the experience, after all.

Well, I don't use Windows much, only for encrypted wireless. 90% or more of my time is spent in Haiku-OS and that is fast on this system.

This suggests to me that for certain tasks putting another OS on the machine would be worth while.

With usable USB ports, small mice/keyboards will make it work as a net-book, then with even a simple mouse driver to make the screen act like a track-pad simple browsing or viewing the contents of files a snap.

Whoa wait! Haiku works fine on the NB205?!? Network? Sound? If this is true, I know what I am doing tonight!

Wireless now works, Ethernet requires the patch I have posted on Haikuware. Sound only comes from the internal speakers, I still can't get the out-jacks to work.

The video port is great, when at home I run on an external monitor at 1280 by 1024. And battery life is over eight hours in Haiku, I think the longest I have ran it was 8:45 when I first got it. My optical mouse seems to use a lot of power, I lost about an hour's life when using it.

And check out webpositive.

Trackpad? Does it work?

The trackpad works fine. It is what I use when away from the monitor/keyboard/mouse setup in my room.


That is why I think even if all you do is get the tablet's screen to act like a trackpad (option in BIOS?) then it would become usable for most free OSs out there.

Can't get my wireless to work. It recognizes it, but no DHCP...

Ah! Oh well.

To connect to a WLAN make sure that it is an unprotected (no WPE, WPA, WPA2) one that doesn't need a password for login.

I'll try installing the plugged in network driver and go with that.

Don't turn it off. S3 sleep is the only way to live.

I agree. I think this where something like the Ubuntu Remix would shine. Man Apple has it figured out with the full package. App Store & unified interface.

Buy a tablet with Maemo or some other linux customized. There are many of them out there.

Hahaha, I thought you were serious at first, but I finally got it at "only G networking". Like you feel so constrained by having only 54 Mb/s on a surfing tablet.

Wireless G halves the bandwidth for every client connected. 54mbps is theoretical.

The best I have gotten is around 27~ Add another client and it becomes 13, another and 6.5. That is under ideal conditions.

But you are right... Wireless G isn't the problem... it can't do anything due to processor and display resolution anyway.