Within the next year, you’ll find the market saturated with tablet style devices. Again. They cycle around every 4-6 years. It remains to be seen if the technology + the price + features have converged enough to make it a lasting segment, but it’s far from something new. (Newton, Palm III, Windows Pen computing, etc.)
Apple makes mistakes (I have a woefully underused AppleTV), Apple makes some homeruns (It can be demonstrated that smart-phones exist in a ‘Before iPhone’ and ‘After iPhone’ history), and the iPad looks like a pretty good product.
ETA: It’s Running XP…but that still doesn’t invalidate my contention.
How a $750 iPad 3G stacks up against a $500 JooJoo or a $420 for a Hiton HT-960 (Hiton HT-960 tablet rocks HP Slate's specs, $100 cheaper price | Engadget) remains to be seen. I predict, however, that the Hiton, with it’s Atom processor, USB plugs, Windows 7, and WIDE OPEN OPPORTUNITIES won’t be as useful a device as the iPad.
I’ve seen a video of Windows 7 running on a touchscreen computer, it really wasn’t too bad. But the Windows UI is pretty complicated to be touching and dragging everything around. There’s a lot to be said for “it just works.”
I may eventually get a tablet of some kind, although I can’t see a need, but I can’t really see it being an iPad, the lack of multitasking, USB, kind of make it a no go. I also hear that it has really crappy wifi access.
Not just multitasking but folders!!! The iPhone finally catches up with 2005!
No, I am glad that Apple has finally seen the light and brought their OS on par with the rest. The biggest remaining shortcoming is the mediocre home screen which is looking primitive compared to , for example, HTC’s Sense UI. Apple also needs to seriously upgrade their hardware. At the very least they need a higher resolution screen, a 1ghz processor and a camera flash to bring it on par with the latest Android phones. I am pretty sure they will do at least the first two.
Anyway competition is good for all of us. Android devices have become clearly superior to the iPhone in the last few months and have become a serious threat. If Apple rises to the occasion and produces a serious competitor to the best Android phones that will benefit everyone. In the long run I suspect that the combination of Google software and East Asian hardware will be too much for Apple but in the next couple of years it should be evenly matched.
As others have pointed out, USB doesn’t really work like that, although I think it could have been implemented so as to work something like that - on first plug in, the device would have to expose some kind of generic mass storage containing the driver and other hardware information - but I think in order to make it platform-independent, the driver would have to run in some kind of virtual machine.
That was the result of my typing an e-mail to my friend (who also watches LOST) on an iPad in the giant new Apple Store on 14th and 9th Ave. in New York. Maybe the poor thing had been pounded on too much (TWSS) but the spacebar was hard to use and the apostrophe, which I have this silly habit of using for contractions, was on the “numbers” screen behind the first one.
I have long fingers but I’m still a girl and my palms were too small to span it for texting but it was hard to just type like on a laptop either, even when I turned it on its side. I’m sure I could get used to it, and the movies and music looked great. They had a few apps loaded in and ooooh, pretty, but I can’t see getting it when I still need a laptop. Uhm, and a job to pay for it all.
Device drivers for an x86 or AMD64 bit architecture…The iPad is NOT x86 compatible. You would have to recompile EVERY driver for EVERY device you wanted to plug in.
hey that ain’t the only thing, but hey if the “magic” saves it from drops and nobody minds a grubby fingerprinty ipad for their shift. hey what do I know it’s a “game changer”
Shoot, put it in an $8 medical grade ziplock. I had doctors asking me if I could develop WindowsCE based document management applications a decade ago (I passed), there’s a pent up demand. And they don’t need to be in the OR with flying guts n blood, they’d still have a use in GP stuff. Heck, put the charge station in a nice mist of anti-bacterial stuff.
There’s a massive push for paper reduction in medical records, if they were written to any level of open standard (https, jpeg, etc.) then you could use whatever pad you wanted…but the iPad’s pretty compelling there.
I skimmed the last page of this thread then had to go back far enough to figure out what the hell people were talking about with this USB stuff because it was so bizarre. It’s pretty amazing that people can start with a technically correct salient point like “Just adding a USB interface to a device won’t make USB devices work with it”, and then contort that into “therefore, not including a USB port is a feature for users”. I can buy that Apple made a product management decision to not support external USB devices but most of the weird contortions people are going through in this thread are just stunning.
I agree with what some people at least hinted at - that a lot of people have no concept that USB devices won’t work merely because another device has a USB port on it. We get a lot of people calling asking whether our devices work on gaming consoles like playstation. They don’t ask if we have support or drivers for gaming consoles, they just want to know if they’ll work. There’s a very clear difference and with the people who ask, it’s usually obvious that if we said “no, we haven’t created drivers for Playstation so our product isn’t compatible with it and we don’t have plans to develop them” they’d be totally lost. So we say, no, and leave it at that.
But in my experience people have an intuitive if imprecise understanding that it’s the USB device that isnt capable of working with their hardware, not that their hardware is incompatible. When we first started our first products didnt work on OS X. I think vanishingly few customers understood that Apple had very clearly documented their hardware and system software and that if we wanted, we could have spent thousands of developer hours writing drivers to make our hardware work on Mac, but hadn’t done that. But they did realize we could work on Mac, but didn’t.
So the argument that Apple can’t add a USB port to the iPad because people will expect it to work with anything USB is totally absurd. When people plug in their USB device and it doesn`t work they’ll blame the device manufacturer like they always have. And those are the ignorant customers. Were it to have a USB port, most customers would adapt and realize that when they’re looking to buy a camera or a keyboard or whatever else, they need to check if it has Mac OS X support, Windows 7 support AND iPad OS 4 support. Just like we always have.
Even beyond that though the idea that you don’t include an interface merely because people will expect their devices to be compatible is just insane on the face of it. We would never have had any interface at all if that logic made any sense. If it made sense, people would have said “what about adding a parallel port to this computer we’re making here, so people can get data into and out of it?” and they’d think about it and say “woooah, people will expect all their peripherals to be compatible with it, even if there’s no device driver written. Better not add one”.
Now I can understand why Apple may have looked at the product and determined how to market it and decided not to add any interfaces for external devices. I dont really agree with it but I'd say it's a pretty rational decision. But really? We can't add a USB interface because devices dont work without drivers? That’s really fucking stupid.
For crying out loud, the thing is supposed to be magical. I’m pretty sure they could have found an elegant way to download drivers as needed if that was how they wanted to go. Obviously there wouldn’t be (m)any products out that would work with it when it debuted but that’s how it goes. You just document things well and support your developers and low and behold companies develop drivers that work with your new product!
Bingo. If I want to buy a USB gizmo, I’m going to check what it will work on before I buy the thing. While I’d really like my beta USB printer to work on Windows 7, I can pretty well understand why it won’t. Same would go for anything Apple with whatever operating system they run on whichever device.
I’m going with what I said earlier. It is probably a way to say, “Hey, look at us with version 2! We’ve just invented this thing that will allow you to connect many devices into it with a common connector. We call it USB”. And the faithful will cry, “Praise unto Jobs, for he is wise, Amen”. And go mortgage the first born to pay for the new version.
The point is that the USB drivers are 3rd party programs that could potentially cause Apple to lose control of the user experience. If poor drivers cause delays in responsiveness, use up a lot of memory, or otherwise compromise the device, Apple has to deal with it and the iPad will be less usable. Like it or not, Apple has chosen to lock down the hardware to some extent so they can maintain control over the user experience.
And I think you forget that this device is not supposed to be a general purpose computer. Apple has said repeatedly that it’s a content consumption device, and should be seen in that light. A Kindle doesn’t have a standard USB port either.
By default, hitting the space bar twice enters a period and a space (for ending sentences without having to go to the next page to get the period). On the iPad, where the period is actually on the keyboard, it’s just a holdover from the iPhone and you can turn it off in preferences if you don’t like it.
As for the apostrophe, here’s a little tip that also gets you accented letters, alternate symbols, and the like: press and hold on some keys on the keyboard, and you’ll get a little pop-up list of alternate symbols: the apostrophe is hidden under the ! key, and non-English accented versions of letters are hidden under their unaccented form. (This works on the iPhone, too). Of course, for most contractions you don’t have to type the apostrophe at all – the iPhone/iPad will put them in for you.
If more folks thought like that, we’d still be in caves, banging rocks together.