With Windows Phone 7 being a success among critics and probably the only mobile platform which tries to take at least baby steps away from the old WIMP/desktop paradigm, it’s not entirely unsurprising that a lot of people are asking for Windows Phone 7 on tablets. However, Microsoft once again reiterated that WP7 is not meant for tablets, since they view tablets as PCs – hence, they will be running regular Windows.
This comment has led to some confused faces on the web. Doesn’t the iPad demonstrate that you need a specific, designed-for-tablets interface in order to sell tablets? I mean, the iPad sells really well, so everybody should just copy Apple’s strategy, right? Well, there are two things wrong with this line of thinking.
First of all, as I’ve already argued in my iPad 2 review, the iPad doesn’t really have a tablet-specific interface. It’s a classic desktop/WIMP interface, and a rather mediocre one at that. For what is clamored as a ‘post-PC’ device, the iPad is remarkably like a PC. Like I said in the review – enlarging buttons and using a finger does not a new paradigm make.
And here’s the funny thing. Microsoft is the only one trying to at least take some baby steps away from the desktop/WIMP interface with their Metro UI. Especially on Windows Phone 7, Metro does away almost entirely with chrome, icons, and menus. Metro is a decidedly text-based interface (as far as looks go), where elements are not defined by lines or borders, but by text. Due to its sparse visuals, sharp contrasts, and utter reliance on text, Metro, for all its modernity, reminds me a lot of MS-DOS. At its core, WP7 is still a desktop/WIMP interface, but compared to the PalmOS/Windows Mobile/Android/webOS/iOS same-old same-old, Microsoft surely has the thickest veneer on top of it.
Second of all, just because the iPad is successful doesn’t mean it’s the only possible approach to developing a successful tablet. It’s a logical fallacy to assume that just because a traiditional umbrella works well against the rain, there won’t be another approach that might work equally well – or better.
Microsoft is trying to solve a problem the iPad suffers from. The iPad, for all its flashiness, is quite limited in its uses. It’s somewhat adequate at consuming content, but it absolutely sucks at creating it. So, if you want to get actual work done (i.e., type more than three lines), you’re going to need to bust out your laptop, or fire up your desktop. Sure, there are cases of people creating some truly remarkable things with the iPad (like Gorillaz using it to make an album), but heck, there are people who typed out the entire Harry Potter books using mobile phone numpads – that, however, doesn’t mean the numpad is the new LaTeX.
If you want a glimpse into how Microsoft wants to fix this inherent limitation of the iPad, you need not look any further than the Windows 8 demonstration by Sinofsky and Larson-Green. Larson-Green demonstrated the regular Office 2010 running alongside the new Metro-inspired interface, which baffled Walt Mossberg. Why didn’t the Office team create a Metro user interface for Office? Larson-Green’s answer was telling.
“Well. [The Office team] may do something… In the future,” she responded, “But, um, we don’t think people should have to give up everything they know and love to get to a more mobile form factor. So people can plug in a mouse and keyboard, and use it just like they would otherwise.”
Why can’t I take my iPad 2, plug it into a dock with keyboard, mouse, and display, and then have it switch to a Mac OS X desktop? Why doesn’t iWork on the iPad come with a full-featured desktop interface? There is nothing preventing Apple from doing this – the iPad 2 is more than powerful enough, there are no software barriers, and it would make a tablet infinitely more useful. No more laptop to lug around!
It would seem that this is exactly what Microsoft means when it says ‘tablets are PCs’. Why limit a tablet to just consuming some simple media? Why not use the technologies we have today to make the device infinitely more useful by giving it the ability to act just like a regular, full-featured computer at the push of a button? Wake up, check Facebook on your tablet, go to work, plug it into a dock, and use it like a regular computer, with all the features and possibilities of a PC. Go home, plug it into a dock at home, and do some work from there. Go watch some TV, take the tablet with you, and enjoy it on the couch.
This is what Larson-Green meant when she said what she said about Office. Of course there’s a team inside Microsoft working on a Metro interface for Office for basic viewing and editing of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents. Heck, it already exists on Windows Phone 7! Microsoft just wanted to show you could still run the full-featured Office on Windows 8 – because it’s a core part of the value proposition I described above.
In theory, this creates a pretty compelling proposition from Microsoft – especially for businesses, since if Microsoft plays its cards right, these tablets+docks could be a lot cheaper than maintaining both laptops and desktops. I say ‘in theory’, because, obviously, this is a pretty lofty goal, and any number of things could go wrong.
When you look at tablets from this perspective, it makes perfect sense for Microsoft to work its way down from Windows NT, instead of working its way up from Windows CE. I’m not saying they’ll be able to pull it off, but I do have to at least commend them for trying. They are trying to eradicate the boundaries between desktop, laptop, and tablet, and no matter how much I dislike Microsoft for their anti-competitive and patent troll behaviour, I like that idea.
I stopped reading your post after “It’s somewhat adequate at consuming content, but it absolutely sucks at creating it”. Come on dude… look at the ipad versions of Garage Band, iMovie and iWork… it ROCKS!…
Toy versions…
Yeah.. toy versions.. that in many many aspects are much better than any similar application for Linux… toy versions that are easy to use, fun, cheap and works very very well… that’s enough for me. If I want the complete desktop experience, then I use my complete desktop computer…
I think you missed the entire point of the article. That tends to happen when you stop reading something before you’ve finished and jump to conclusions. The entire point of the article is that there would be no reason to switch to your laptop or workstation if the interface was designed properly; if you plugged a keyboard and a mouse into a tablet, would it not at that point essentially become a desktop?
Edited 2011-07-14 14:38 UTC
Not really… “more limited”.. They’re not toys, especially not GarageBand. In many ways, GarageBand does exactly what you need from a mobile recording set-up. The drum sequencer is pretty awesome… people pay a lot of money for something like EasyDrummer, and in this it is free. iMove is a harder sell, it works well with video recorded under iOS, but it pretty much fails if the movies are recorded in the wrong aspect ration (but fully supported otherwise by iOS.) Pages rocks.. I edited a 100+ page document on it recently, and it works really, really well. Not tried and of the iWorks apps, so can’t comment more.
Why would I want to carry 2 devices ? I already carry a phone.
Do I need an other device ? Maybe just a larger touchscreen-without-a-brain where I can plugin my smartphone ?:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWIe8wQBqS0#t=0m26s
Here an other example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oG3tLxEQEdg#t=1m04s
Maybe a projector and so on aren’t really needed. A normal larger screen and keyboard are more than enough probably.
A lot of smartphones already have a HDMI TV-out.
I wouldn’t be too surprised if large smartphone (too bad most are ridiculously overpriced now) / smallish tablet turns out to be what we eventually settle on, in a few years.
Together with decent voice commands recognition, it would finally give real purpose to BT headsets… (though I would probably prefer them to also include a basic, built in GSM (just GSM; it looks like that standard will be with us for a looong time, no matter the 3G/4G/5G/6G/7G/…) phone for emergency purposes)
There are different requirements for consuming vs content creation. For consuming I would like to have a small form factor (like at most 10 inch display), long-lasting battery, ARM processor is just fine. For content creation I need a larger screen (at least 13 inches), faster processor (for compiling or audio/video editing), more memory, the battery life is a lesser issue. So, I just can’t see how I can take a pad-like device, plug a keyboard and mouth into it and use for content-creation like a regular PC.
So, you can’t get away with having a single device. Just like you using your laptop as your ebook reader is suboptimal, using your pad for content creation is mostly impossible. Not because of operating system/applications but because of a hardware platform.
Really, dude?
Most people don’t do compiling or video/audio editing (more than iMovie, at least). And a BeagleboardXM based desktop is sufficient for most users these days. Watch a bit of YouTube, write some emails, manage photos and write a document once in a while(I mean really, most people use word as a damn notebook for most of the time)
Please, take the “Reading comprehension 101”, *dude* (which is something apparently you’ve flunked once in your life), before jumping to reply.
We are not talking about “most people”. Yes, most people don’t do any content creation. That’s besides the point.
Thanks for swooping to ad hominem attacks so fast. That really shows your best personal characteristics.
Newsflash, my dearie: Apple is there to cater to the average person (See their recent “love” towards professionals)
Try and re-encode a Blu-ray movie into H.264 on a tablet and see how far you get. Yet this is a very common process to watch movies on portable devices.
This comment is so patently ridiculous that I should not respond, but I just can’t pass up the opportunity.
You are saying that you want to connect a BluRay drive to your iPad/other tablet computer, and have that device do the conversion to H264 so you can then watch that BluRay movie on the portable device? Really??? And that this is a very common practice? Really???
Never mind that there is NO BluRay drive that will connect to ANY pad-type device; that NO pad-type device has either the RAM, processor capability, or ripping/conversion software available to do this, you really expect to be able to do this on your pad device instead of on a fully capable desktop computer and THEN transfer the completed shrunk-down movie to the tablet device for viewing on your train commute or whatever?
I own DVD and BluRay movies, and I have converted them to a file size and resolution suitable for viewing on my iPad. And I have utilized the Digital Copy feature on a lot of BluRays and DVDs because they are done in a suitable resolution for my portable devices.
I don’t bother converting them to 1080p or even 720p because tablet displays are not capable of displaying full HDTV video. One must work within the capabilities of the portable device display when doing conversions. But I certainly don’t expect to be able to do all the converting on the tablet device itself, that’s just silly. That’s what I have my iMac for, with its 4 Gb of RAM, Core2Duo processor and all the software necessary to do the ripping and conversion.
Full-on PC’s have their uses and tablets have their uses. I don’t expect to do broadcast-quality video editing, special effects work, or anything like that on a tablet device, as the hardware is just not capable of doing it. I don’t expect to create horribly complicated spreadsheets on a tablet either, although I am sure some people are capable of doing that and that is just fine. It doesn’t make the device any better or worse if you can use it to do what you want to do, within the capabilities of the device and its hardware.
Well, in hindsight you probably would have been better off if you just let the opportunity pass by. Now you are just looking petty.
That’s not what the previous poster is saying. He is providing an example in the larger context of the thread’s discussion, namely that there are limits to what tablets can do and why they are not a replacement for “real” PCs and won’t be anytime soon.
Since you missed the sense of the post the first time around, I will explain it to you: Other posters in this thread are suggesting tablets can do all content creation tasks pertaining to the common use cases of tablets. The encoding example shows that at least one task is unsuited for tablets but is required for a common use case of a tablet. Thus showing that the all-quantified statement is clearly false and thus making the point that tablets cannot replace PCs at this point of time.
So, basically, the poster you are snarking at says the same thing you do, only more concise and eloquent.
But there will be absolutely no reason to do what “previous poster” is saying. You’ll just get a stream / digital download version of the film.
The tablet experience becomes successful not only because of the “local” (to the device) tech, also connectivity. And nobody laments how present PCs generally can’t accept VHS tapes.
Edited 2011-07-18 23:23 UTC
It’s called dynamic frequency scaling, and can conveniently happen in the background when we temporarily don’t care about portability / battery / when plugging the device into an outlet. You can even offload some processing on a local “router” or elsewhere…
Heck, just a few short years ago the PCs were no better, HW-wise, than present tablets; and we’ve done all things you “require” present PCs for. There’s very clearly something like “fast enough” …plus raw specs are not a clear indicator (witness how, contrary to pretty much all expectations in the style of “come on, when will UI paradigm start exploiting all that computing resources?!”, the paradigm shift came in the form of notably less powerful devices)
Who knows with the screen… (for one, some cherished dekstops used ~10″ ones not too long ago, it’s a bit fluid; then we could see, say, built-in laser projectors …solidifying the popularity of bright / white walls, I guess)
from iPad 2 review:
“And it shows: the iPad’s interface is not well-suited for tablet computing.
The biggest problem is that widget layout has been taken straight from the PC world, without ever adapting it for the tablet: most applications have their most-often used controls at the top of the screen.”
you really spend ENTIRE page bragging how Apple should put URL line in bottom of screen ?????
😀
When I use Windows 95, later W2K, I always wonder why STUPID Microsoft did put TaskBar in bottom on screen when ALL programs have drop down menus in top of screen ??? (first think that I do is to put TaskBar in upper part of screen where it should be in first place).
anyway, you said that iOS is still same desktop WIMP and WM7 isn’t ?? why? (except that iOS have URL bar in upper part of screen
)
aha… I see: WM7 buttons do not have borders !!! TA-DA !!! that’s it ???
😀 hilarious !! (I almost forgot why I reading osnews.com…)
you have iPad for like, what, 3 weeks and you say: “somewhat adequate at consuming content, but it absolutely sucks at creating it”… oh, please…! – try OmniGraffle for iPad – it is even faster to draw/zoom/scroll on multitouch screen than on Mac.
I often read about this “consuming content” rubbish. Most of the “content” people create is created in facebook, email, chat, etc, few lines of texts exactly. iPad is quite suitable for that. My daughter paints nice pictures on it, using special stylus. I’ve tried to write blog posts using Apple’s BT keyboard, it works just fine.
So if we need professional use, we need a desktop/laptop, and with most of standard consumer scenarios, iPad is almost perfect, with both, consuming and creating.
Yeah, but still, you would get an iPad-like device PLUS a device that can handle a fully featured Office Suite, fully featured music creation tool, fully featured graphics creation tool and what not. I don’t know about you, but I think to have the possibilities right there is quite compelling. And, you know, the first devices will come out next year, so ARM devices will be quite a bit faster than today. So, the speed shouldn’t be such a limiting factor anymore. And of course you can always opt for an x86 Windows 8 tablet, though you will probably lose quite a chunk of mobility with that.
I even think that Apple will try to do the exact same thing with iOS and Mac OS X. They’ll be merged eventually and run on a Tablet. So keep the idea growing on you and cheer Apple for doing it the day they announce this move
And don’t forget to keep on bashing MS meanwhile 
and next thing:
“Why can’t I take my iPad 2, plug it into a dock with keyboard, mouse, and display, and then have it switch to a Mac OS X desktop?”
first, you complaining on WHOLE page that iOS is to much WIMP and that URL bar is on top, and next thing is that you ask for keyboard and mouse on tablet ?!??! common Thom, get serious
if Microsoft said that you should have old user interface on tablet than it is ok ? and on other side, Apple does to little to get away from old user interface on tablets ?
I think I’ll stop reading right here.
“It would seem that this is exactly what Microsoft means when it says ‘tablets are PCs’. Why limit a tablet to just consuming some simple media? Why not use the technologies we have today to make the device infinitely more useful by giving it the ability to act just like a regular, full-featured computer “
beside, how do you think that ARM tablet would run Win32 legacy software ???
Edited 2011-07-14 00:54 UTC
Now, with a minor change to one section:
…and use it like a regular computer, with all the features he uses on a PC…
There, that’s better. Now it perfectly describes the day of my nephew who owns and runs a multi-million dollar international lawyer placement agency. He recently bought an iPad 2 and has ended up replacing his MacBook Pro with it. They use an Exchange mail server, he connects to terminal services both locally and at remote offices all around the world, uses a stylus to scribble notes and ideas in meetings and on the train, as well as all the standard word processing / spreadsheeting / presentation type junk, all with that mediocre interface.
You could also add in there things like …play some educational games with your baby daughter when you get home… and …read the paper / a book / your industry journals that have automatically been downloaded to the device on the train in the morning / afternoon…
Why should everything be judged and gauged by what techy geeks or people with specific industry or specialist needs require? Those who don’t like it should just buy a ‘droid device then download the source for whatever tickles their fancy and try to shoehorn it into the interface, and maybe a Kindle as well because we all know these color screens are absolutely hideous for reading on. Sheesh.
A lot? Well maybe one or two..
And hence, Microsoft has learned nothing from their abject failure into the tablet PC space, which if you recall, they did 10 years ago. A desktop OS is not suitable for a tablet.
Of course it does. Just because it shares some common elements with a desktop interface doesn’t make it the same thing. Everyone needs buttons, icons, etc.
The key is that its only about looks. Draw a border around those oversized text buttons and suddenly it looks very much like a standard interface. WP7 is a theme away from very traditional user interface. There is not really new ways to interact with the interface there.
Precisely why it has been successful. It does a few things, and it does them _really_ well. Just like the iPod did far less than other MP3 players out there, but it did it properly. Just like the iPhone did far less than Windows Mobile, but did it properly. Sure, you can try to make a tablet do everything, but you won’t succeed without compromising in some areas. Those areas will be ease of use (you can’t make the Office UI simple enough for touch), weight size and power requirements for faster hardware and more peripherals, more complex code requiring more resources etc.
Technology is not magic, you don’t get everything for free.
Because you would be disapointed at the performance. So why not upgrade the processors? Cause then you sacrifice battery life and size and weight.
Just because you don’t understand something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
No it isn’t. It’s nowhere near as powerful as my iMac, or has as much space, or as much RAM. The desktop experience would be wholly unsatisfactory.
That is a lot, that’s nearly 100% of all WP7 users!
Well, I’m not asking for a WP7 tablet, so that would cut the 100% to 50% of all WP7 users.
More generally, maybe WIMPy paradigm is what ultimately really works for humans… what strikes me in most (early) demonstrations of WP7, is how relatively lost in the UI the presenters appear (people who are meant to promote the product, show how nice it is, hence supposedly familiar with it)
Obligatory car analogy: maybe it’s a bit like with the steering wheel. It took some time to get to it (like with WIMP), and no further “refinement” was able to usurp it since (well, maybe autonomous cars can change that, I can see a central “swinging joystick” controller more suited to those; just like a totally new overall approach of, say, mind uploading would certainly change the way we do computing)
Edited 2011-07-19 00:05 UTC
Tablet are better described as Mobile Internet Devices. Now, I’ve heard people also use them to read ebooks and watch movies but I think the most it’s used for is browsing the internet. Also, I think in most peoples minds a PC is a Wintel compatible Desktop/Laptop.
Popular or not, I enjoy my BlackBerry Playbook, precisely because it doesn’t dumb down the Internet.
Normal web pages, look like normal web pages. And FAST at that.
Now I don’t subscribe to the FUD+BS by Apple against Adobe’s Flash. It just works well enough IMHO.
The Playbook has a true and proven real-time symmetric multitasking QNX OS.
I admit I am partial to QNX since I’ve been developing with it since 1982.
Just follow the money, and you’ll understand everything better.
I believe Apple spread all kinds of BS about Adobe, to justify the monetization (and 30% Apple Tax) of all apps sold. Basically to herd people to the Apple App Store. And generate recurring revenues.
If the cloud is Internet driven, it makes sense to utilize HTML and any (real) web browser.
Does Google / Amazon / Facebook really require a dedicated app?
Maybe, but first, let us use the full Internet via a true web browser.
Even Google’s Chrome as Flash built-in.
What gets me is the cognitive dissonance the Apple cultists display: They need to believe Apple can do no wrong regardless of evidence or facts.
(BTW: this is not directed at you RichterKuato.)
And for me at least, any tablet is a consumption device. PERIOD.
Gimme a break, one cannot perform compute intensive processes on a mere low-power-battery operated device.
Any mobile device’s purpose is merely form-factor, wirelessness, and optional IMHO. Yeah, try to build a house with a cordless rechargeable saw/drill/screwdriver.
The right tools for the right job.
~~~~~~~~~~
Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.
~ Malcolm Forbes, 1919-1990
Please try playing Dragon Age on facebook. Also, a quick trip over to pogo.com would also be fun…
The one of reasons Apple doesn’t want to put flash on the iPad is due to the fact that a lot of flash programs require hover. Flash only has: left-click, left-double click, & hover.
I still haven’t learned how to hover on a touch screen.
Sorry, this should have been posted as a reply to the comment above saying that flash on a BlackBerry PlayBook works ok.
Edited 2011-07-14 04:41 UTC
An iPad is an excellent content consumption device and lightweight content creation device. It is most certainly not a full fledged content creation device.
You can already purchase a number of Windows based PC’s that can be used in tablet form and can also be ‘plugged in’ or converted to use a keyboard or mouse. Those sell in the tens of thousands at best so ‘the market’ clearly has no interest in them.
Your sound like Gates saying ‘iPad has today what we had 10 years ago’. The point the both of you are missing is that it actually has way less then what Mictosoft had 10 years ago and that’s why Apple is selling them by the truckload.
*whoosh*
Umbrellas weren’t originally designed to keep people dry. They were designed to keep the sun off wealthy Chinese women so their skin stayed fashionably pale.
The idea that the tablet could replace the notebook, by docking, etc. Is intriguing.
But I see why apple doesn’t do it.
Why have one device, when you can sell end users a notebook *and* a tablet?
Plus, they seem to heading down the road of dumbing devices down, not making them more useful (no real multitasking, no root access, controlled application ecosphere etc.)
Microsoft might be onto something here. If the tablets are powerful enough (at least netbook levels) and they can be used like a “normal” notebook for 95% of the time, then suddenly the “once in a while” benefits of tablet use becomes workable.
At least for people like me, who largely view tablets as a gimmick, that is.
Huge numbers of people are buying iPads, because it does exactly the limited things (compared to a laptop) people do most in a more convenient way a ‘normal’ computer does.
If Apple were to make it do more, like bump the specs, add a keyboard, add connectors, the price would go up, battery life would go down while only a small amount of users may actually make use of it.
An iPad, or any tablet, is a tool which might be the best one for certain tasks, but not for others.
Definitely a computer.
Definitely personal.
But one of different abilities and strong points.
PS.. might be wrong but i dont think that the gorillas totally recorded there album on the ipad. With all the plugins and mastering pro’s do I take this with a pinch of salt.
If MS puts a phone os on a tablet then they can only be expected to charge phone os license fees.
MS desparately wants pc licensing fees and they’re trying to set themselves up to charge those fees hoping they’re going to just automatically dominate the tablet market whenever windows 8 is released.
With this attitude on their part I have to think they’ve already screwed up and lost the tablet market unless somehow they come up with some wonderful business model and apple and google really screw things up royally.
My predictions: Tons of astroturfed and planted marketing efforts before launch. MS’s foray into the tablet space will be followed soon after by a slew of patent lawsuits against android tablet providers similar to what we’ve seen with the release of WP7, especially if the release is lackluster.
Did everyone here miss the Win 8 tablet demo?
Win 8 *is* WP7 on tablet, sort of.
Pretty much. If you just read the first part of the article, It seems like Thom missed that. He circles around to it at the end. I think he’s really just justifying Microsoft’s slow pace as divine insight. You want a tablet today… Uhm, well, a tablet is a pc wait for windows 8 in a year. With the Enterprise only slates, microsoft sort of has an upgrade path from the desktop UI (win 7) to the tablet UI ( win 8). But they’re really missing the inverse: a tablet with wp7 that could be upgraded to win 8. And that’s what people are complaining about. I don’t know how many of them have faith in microsoft releasing win 8 on schedule ( is there a real public target date ?).
They’re deliberately ignoring customer requests today, in hopes of giving them what they think they need “in the future”. For a smaller company that would spell doom.
Win 8 is still not a tablet OS. It still falls back to a full on desktop experience when you hit any apps that are not optimised. Being able to run any app recompiled for ARM is cute, but the UI needs to be rationalised too – a bit like Hildon did for GTK+ apps under Maemo, even when the app wasn’t specifically using the Hildon API.
I’m going to have to disagree with that statement. The definition of paradigm newness obviously cannot be objectively determined. Additionally, its a meaningless point. The newness or lack of newness doesn’t really change anything. There are zero decisions that have ever been made based on the paradigm newness factor that you are using.
I am actually waiting for a “usable” tablet. Like many others, I would like to have a laptop replacement, or let’s say a device that evolved from laptops into what we call tablet PC.
I toyed around with the iPad 1 at BestBuy for more than half an hour after it came out. I went to the store with the money in my pocket and the intention to buy one. But I quickly came to the realization that this is more like a cash machine for Apple’s App Store than an evolution of the old trusty laptop. Very limited in its use, and I couldn’t install any application that is freely available on the internet. I guess I was expecting MacOSX with a different GUI in tablet format.
I am really looking forward to Microsoft’s approach. It’s exactly what I have been waiting for!
Give me a tablet that will run Debian and I’m happy. I want the option to run the same tools on my tablet that I run on my bigger machines plus the option to run tablet UI specific programs.
Thus far, the limitation has been the chosen OS not the hardware. Give me one of these fancy new tablet hardware platforms and touch drivers that make the screen work under Debian and I’ll give you a nice thick roll of cash. Until that time or, at minimum, a tablet as capable as Maemo/Meego.. I’ll keep adding to the biggy bank while I wait.
For me, tablets miss two things to be considered as “the real thing”
-The ability for everyone to program low-level software and OSs for them (which means a common, well-documented, lock-free tablet hardware architecture)
-The ability to do so on the device itself (without the help of an external desktop and laptop)
At this point, tablets become true independent personal computers. Until it is reached, they remain mere peripherals, a minor evolution of the PMP that claims to be the next big thing.
I want the tablet hardware running a general purpose OS not the results of a hatchet job followed by pretty’d up jail cell gently balanced on top.
I want tablet apps that fit the form factor and touch input. I want standard GUI apps I run on my other desktops and can use with the onscreen keyboard or externally added keyboard/mouse. I want the cli environment and cli apps I run on my other systems. I want gcc to compile tarballs and more abstracted languages to run python, perl and ruby code.
Right now I take the build scripts from my notebook, change the Xorg video driver from intel to nvidia and those on my desktop; tadaa.. same system on two seporate chunks of hardware. I want to take my buildscripts, swap in the Xorg video and input drivers and rerun those scripts on my tablet.
There is nothing in hardware that limits this. The limitations are purely synthetic impositions from the manufacturers. bah.. what can you do.. the business goal is to harvest cash from wallets not enable users to the maximum ability of the hardware.
Thom,
the whole idea behind your thought process is that the iPad is terrible at producing content. I don’t accept that. Apple along with several other developers have created a multitude of applications for the iPad that make content creation as easy as any desktop computer. The problem, at least to me is that advanced application development is still in its infancy.
It’s important that applications be custom adapted to this new interface model. Microsoft has a different approach to Apple and (like you) I’m excited to see how it pans out as its very unique. Apple’s approach is not a rehashed W.I.M.P. interface any more than Microsofts.
I’ve created a considerable amount of content thus far on my iPad. I still prefer my computer but not because the iPad is inferior to the computer for content creation but rather, because so many of my other files are on my computer that I use to create my content.
I think that is the current weak link in tablets however I see the cloud as being a great way to address that shortcoming.
All tablets suck at content creation, at least current ones. No exceptions. From the very moment that a decision is made to sacrifice performance for the sake of battery life, it becomes inevitable that you are creating a consumer! No if’s or but’s. Throw in the mix a filesystem that is hmmm user unfriendly (to say the least) and there you go. Last the nail in the creation coffin. As far as some comments here trying to “beautify”, “justify”, “support” etc., all your remarks are outlining workarounds. Using terminal services is not an adequate solution, it is an alternative! Couple that with a increasingly questionable corporate ethics from Apple and iPad gets a resounding “I’ll pass” from me.
I think this is a very smart stratergy Microsoft is taking with Windows 8 and tablets. I don’t think a tablet will replace a desktop PC for heavy duty work, but it certainly can replace netbooks and laptops as an all purpose mobile PC (AKA laptop/notebook). This is exactly the type of tablet I have been waiting for. I don’t think it was possible in past due to mobile hardware just not being powerful enough. Times have changed with multi-core mobile CPU’s, higher end mobile GPU, and things such as SSD. The big key to this will be Intel jumping heavy into the mobile market as they announced they would. I expect Intel to catch up big in the mobile area. With a X86 Intel tablet running Windows 8, you have a full OS that runs all your past apps when used in a laptop/notebook mode (Microsoft doesn’t need a app store to build up), and existing USB devices will even work (would be nice to have a tablet I can hook up via serial to console hardware). While being used in tablet touch screen mode you use the enhanced Metro Interface, and applications can offer an advanced mobile interface. So basically your old applications will work (best used in laptop based mode), and new applications that support the touch interface mode take advantage of that. This would finally get me to buy a tablet, and replace my netbook (or laptop). I could see this being a HUGE competitor to the current tablets. The 2 keys will be Windows 8 running well and Intel really starting to have some good mobile CPU’s, both of which I think are possible. The ARM version will be limited in applications (not sure about the ARM strategic move completely), since the applications would have to be programmed using .NET or Silverlight to work on both X86 and ARM easily. Will just have to see how it all turns out.
As a programmer/designer i would love a iPad with a couple of 30″ 2560×1600 -screens and a 10-button mouse, and a space-cadet keyboard, and a couple of TB of storage, and windows.
I don’t see why the Ipad couldn’t replace current PC’s for the serious user.
After all, tablets are the future.