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Great article on why tablets hold so much potential – A-Zs of Tablets
January 20, 2010 | 2:17 pm
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By Paul Biba
With all the hype around the supposed new Mac tablet, I must admit that I’m not very excited. Not excited at all. I have a Macbook Air and I can’t really imagine why I should need anything else. My Kindle and Sony make fine ereaders and have weeks of battery life. Why would I want to read an ebook on a tablet? I can’t really think of a good reason.
There are a lot of people like me and now comes BestTabletReview, with the BestTabletArticle I’ve seen explaining why tablets have a future. It covers accessibility, education, entertainment, input, mobility, productivity, reading versatility, and zeitgeist.
Highly recommended. Go over and take a look. I’m still skeptical, but it has started me thinking though.
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Comments:
I think the author is onto something. In my opinion, tablets have held a *lot* of potential for a long time. But no company has managed to design a good one (I speak from experience on this – I used to work as an embedded software developer on tablet prototypes in early 2000).
When designing a tablet device, most companies take laptop hardware, slap on a touchscreen, pry off the keyboard and install a desktop user interface. The problem with this is that desktop UIs don’t translate well to a tablet that lacks a high-resolution pointing device (mouse) and a keyboard.
Ever try working with a Tablet PC? I have, and I just found it frustrating, ie: “why would I use this when I can just use a laptop?” – *exactly* because Tablet PCs provided a crippled laptop experience.
What we need is a solid tablet device with hardware and a UI designed from the ground-up for tablet-specific use cases. We need input systems that don’t feel as though they’ve been bolted on to compensate for missing keyboards and mice.
The original Apple Newton had its flaws, but by the time the MessagePad 2100 came around it did a few things very well. One of them was write-anywhere handwriting recognition (that was *much* better than the original Newton’s), and the second was the “Intelligent Assistant” feature – ie: if you were taking meeting notes and one of the items was “lunch with engineering group on Friday re: progress report”, you could tap it & the Newton would create a new meeting in your calendar at noon on Friday, and automatically send invites out to the engineers.
I’m not suggesting that Apple (or another manufacturer) brush off the old Newton – as I said, it had its faults. But if tablet computing is going to succeed, then we need to stop thinking of Tablets as a crippled laptop, and come up with a better design.
I’m hoping that Apple’s new tablet does exactly that.
– http://www.drtablet.com – Tablet news, info, rumors and opinions