No, not enough disposable income for such gadgets! 
I guess I didn’t realize that Hard Drive specifically meant “clunky spinny thing that probably should’nt be put in a portable device.” If you have more than 64 GB of music in your library, I’m impressed. I thought my 30 GB was a lot.
How much does your Tablet weigh?
That’s another reason I would use the stylus. 
There is a lot to what you’ve said here and that will certainly be the way of the future. The handwriting isn’t on the wall it’s already firmly entrenched in everyday life.
I personally hope it goes more toward Gangster Octopus’s vision of hand held computing. I prefer a computer to be as autonomous as possible but something like GPS is completely dependent on external input. And the greatest utility function of a personal computer is the internet. I’m hoping that thin film technology creates a screen that can be unrolled like a sheet of paper so that a hand held computer/phone can be turned into a full function computer but yet travel with the individual.
“Hard Drive” is short for “Hard Disk Drive”, and specifically refers to a magnetic data storage using rigid disks (as opposed to floppy disks). Semiconductor data storage devices are usually referred to as Solid State Drives.
I said iTunes library, which can include TV shows and movies. Although I’m sure many people do have more than 64GB of music. I already have 48GB of music plus 10GB of audiobooks.
My smaller one (Fujitsu P1630) weights 2.6 lb, though I could cut it down to 2.2 lb if I fit it with a smaller battery. But for lab work I use my Fujitsu T2020 which is 3.5 lb, but has an active digitizer which makes it much more suited to handwriting input.
What is an active digitizer?
You can buy a capacitive stylus for the iPad.
I’ve been kind of evangelizing this thing, even though I’ve never owned an Apple product. To me the frustrating thing is that people tend to discount the value of a great user experience as compared to lists of features they want.
This is a battle I fight every day in my job. I try to make the software work great, and marketing tries to jam as many feature bullet points into the product as they can. And generally, I lose, because engineers don’t think like regular people and don’t ‘get’ UI. The people in this forum, who are generally power users and think like engineers, don’t seem to get it either.
Let me tell you a story about Logitech’s scanner software. This is the software you run to import from a flatbed scanner to your computer. Over the years, each version had gotten more and more complex. Because the marketing guys always justify new releases by adding new features. So the software was very flexible, could do many different things… and customers hated it. Logitech’s support calls increased, customer satisfaction surveys said that the scanner software was a weak point of the product.
So, Logitech hired an interaction design firm to clean up the UI, organize things better, and make it more usable. But when the firm came back to them, they found that they had ripped out a large number of features. This caused much fighting and consternation, but ultimately the new design was good, so Logitech shipped it, hoping to find that the lost features would be more than made up for by the better user experience.
To their puzzlement, customers not only didn’t complain about the missing features, but they thought the new software was much more powerful than the old software. How come? Because the features that were removed were so hard to find and use that no one used them anyway. And by removing them, the company made the important features easier to use.
But here’s the critical thing: When this company came in, they did a user survey to find out what THE key feature was that everyone wanted, and then they zeroed in on that and made it great. In this case, it turns out that what everyone really wanted from their scanner software was to be able to select a portion of the image and scan it. That selection process was the prime point of frustration with the software, because it worked like lots of other similar programs. You rubber-banded the area, and if you got it wrong you had to try again. Logitech pioneered the method whereby the rubber band selection zone has handles that you can use to modify it. That one little change made the key feature of the software much more usable. But more to the point, making that one feature better made the software feel more powerful, even though many features had been deleted.
What Apple does is similar. They find THE key use case, or a handful of them, and make sure that the experience for those cases is excellent, even if they have to sacrifice other features. They don’t let anything compromise the core functions of the device.
Microsoft is more of the engineer’s mindset. Their programs have a million features. When the UI gets too cluttered, and the menu structure too deep, they just spend time trying to reorganize it so they can pack in even more. The result is ultimately flexibility, the ability to anything with anything - but a lot of it really doesn’t work all that well, and a lot of features are utterly obscure and people don’t even know they exist.
So when you guys make you long lists of things the iPad doesn’t do, I find it almost irrelevant. The question is, “Yes, but is it GREAT at few things?” That’s Apple’s forte. That’s also why this device isn’t a netbook, or a desktop, or an iPhone. And it’s also why you can’t judge it until you’ve actually used it.
I spend 80% of the time at my home computer surfing the web. Reading newspapers, blogs, research papers, and forums. If that’s all the iPad can do, but it does it in a better way and allows me to do it from anywhere, then that’s a huge win for me. The other stuff is gravy. As it turns out, the iPad looks like it will be great at two other things I really value - playing games, and reading. If it can do those three things and give me a better experience than my other computers do, then I’m a happy camper.
Oh I see now. It’s handwriting recognition. Even if I thought such a thing would be useful in my work, there is no way it would function with my handwriting. My notes are literally scribbled at a very fast pace. Also, in chemistry, a lot of stuff is not text. If that works for you, it’s great. I think there are some software companies developing it for the iPad. I’m just not interested.
ETA: continuing from #305
I agree that they do that, and they do it very well. But this monomaniacal obsession with user experience is not the only reason that some features are missing. In addition to some other reasons I mentioned upthread, another reason is that they don’t want to cannibalize their laptop sales.
I would bet that, had Apple not had a laptop line, the iPad would certainly have had some features that people are complaining about.
But, they do have a laptop line, and if they make the iPad too capable, many people will buy that instead of a Macbook.
So, your point about feature bloat and Apple’s obsession with user experience is well taken, but I don’t think it explains all the features that are “missing”
Not necessarily handwriting recognition.
I mainly use Microsoft OneNote for taking notes on my tablet PCs. I write on the screen, and the screen shows exactly what I input (i.e. vector graphics). OneNote does handwriting recognition, but it does not replace my scribbles with text (unless I tell it to). The handwriting is saved as graphics, and the text is only used for keyword searches.
So the note looks no better than what I write in a paper notebook, but no worse. Everything is left intact, including sketches, formulas and diagrams. The benefits are: (1) keyword searches are possible, at least on the words the software correctly recognized, (2) the note is automatically synchronized across the network so I can later view it on my desktop, and (3) I can easily add material from other sources (e.g. images and plots) - in the middle of the note if necessary. And other benefits inherent to electronic media - e.g. data storage takes little physical space, can be copied easily, won’t degrade, etc.
p.s. An “active digitizer” is the same technology used in Wacom graphics tablets. In fact, most active digitizers inside tablet PCs are made by Wacom.
Active digitizers do not respond to the human finger (not even the fingernail), so it’s not really a “touchscreen” - you need to use the proprietary stylus. But that’s actually a big advantage - it means if you put your palm on the screen while writing, it doesn’t get confused by the palm.
Active digitizers typically have better precision than touchscreens. And unlike resistive touchscreens, it requires very little pressure to register. (Actually it requires no contact to detect the position; if the stylus touches the screen, that’s registered as a click or drag.)
Also there are a few tablet PCs which are equipped with both a resistive touchscreen and an active digitizer. (These used to be called “multi-touch” but now that term means something else.) So you can use your finger to use it like a touchscreen computer, but use a stylus if you want more precise control. And when you are using the stylus, all other inputs are ignored.
I want the features I want and a great user experience. It is no good to have a great user experience without the features I care about. eg. I want tuna that tastes good, not tuna with good taste.
Now if I wanted to surf the web, and just watch/listen to media, then it is probably sufficient for that. But again, for the same cost, I can buy a netbook that will do all that and more. Plus, I don’t have to do clunky shit to get my stuff back and forth from my pc to the netbook.
Had one in my hands for about 10 minutes on my lunch hour.
The wifi connection I had was horrible bad, so things took forever to load. But that’s just that particular network being at the other end of the building.
1.5 pounds felt heavier than expected.
Liked the bookshelf, being able to change fonts and font sizes, even if there were only two (boo!) options for font sizes. I paged through Winnie the Pooh, which was really cool with the pictures and all.
Settings screens much easier to handle than the iPhone, mostly because they’re larger.
There were a couple of minor flaws with the OS. Like if a bunch of pictures were synced over to the device as part of an album, you couldn’t delete them. The delete button was still there, it just didn’t work.
Any news on jailbreaking it? Honestly, I think that’s what let the iPhone get popular in the first place. I mean, now people may avoid doing it, but, at first, it seemed like everyone did, due to the lack of built-in features being covered by someone who could.
And I still question the wisdom of encouraging this by offereing limited feature sets, as that just encourages people to use a feature that would actually let them download and use any app for free.
FWIW, I don’t usually leave my iPhone jailbroken for any period of time…it gets flakey when it’s jailbroken.
Sam Stone,
I don’t think there is a need to choose between a great user experience for the average user and more choices for the power user. By all means think hard about the default interface and try to make accessible to the novice. But then make sure there are choices under the hood which can be managed by the more experienced user. Firefox is a good example of this; a pretty standard and simple interface which anyone could use but also enormous potential for customization through extensions. Apple’s approach seems to be that it knows best and the user should bow to its superior wisdom.
That is not what I want from a device and I suspect in the long run it’s not going to be a very successful approach especially outside the United States where Apple’s marketing machine is relatively weak. One important point to note is that the user base is getting increasingly sophisticated with each passing year. By now most customers under the age of 40 are familiar with electronic gadgets and probably have a greater tolerance for complexity in return for power.
In iBook, the ‘A A’ control does not mean two font sizes. Tapping each multiple times makes the text successively smaller or larger.
A feature length compressed movie can be a gig easily. Personally 100% of my movies and TV shows stream from Hulu and Netflicks, but 64 GB isn`t a lot when you take into account movies and television shows.
The best approach is to avoid using the iPad as permanent storage - just load it up with the things you want to watch via iTunes and remove after watching. Only a problem when away from home for a long time.
As you note, streaming is the best solution.
This is definitively untrue. I just watched a video of a surgeon using it in the operating room. He was, of course, wearing gloves.
Was the video an advertisement? Maybe by advertisers that didn’t know it only reacts to capacitance? You would need some sort of special gloves for an iPad.