You should see the bars, restaurants and waiting areas in Terminal G of the Minneapolis airport.
Hundreds of iPads and credit card scanners - and a few wait staff to drop off the drinks and food you order. You order on the iPad and are then free to use them to play games and browse the web. Lots of people never order.
Man, I’m somebody who works with tech and keeps a finger on the pulse of the industry, and I missed that one by a mile, too.
Not because I thought tablets were stupid, though. I’ve been wanting that form factor for years. But I thought Apple was releasing something that was too limited in function at too high a price. At the original announcement, I thought they did a bad job communicating why anybody would want one. I expected it to get a lot of attention, but not sell very and keep other companies from really trying to make competing tablets.
As somebody who really LIKES tablets, I’m glad I was really, really wrong.
Cameraphones…yeah, the minute I used one I knew I wouldn’t own another phone without one. Sure, the quality was lousy…but if I ever encountered Bigfoot, I’d damn sure have a camera handy.
I still don’t desire a tablet but I read an article in the Guardian last week that made me understand their popularity. 'My iPad has Netflix, Spotify, Twitter – everything': why tablets are killing PCs | Computing | The Guardian
I would say 75% of the pictures on my phone are of my car in a large parking lot or parking garage. I don’t have the time to remember D12.
There are a number of apps for helping you return to a location. I have an android version. You activate the app when you park. When you need to find your car it helps with location. Works great in a mall lot, but I’ve never tried it in an indoor garage.
I’m not a fan of tablets, but I don’t think the argument “if you buy an external keyboard, you might as well have bought a laptop” stands up. Buying an external keyboard doesn’t mean that you always have to use it, so tablets retain their advantage in portability compared to laptops.
My real issue with tablets is that for many applications, even some “consumption” applications, touch interfaces are manifestly inferior to keyboard & mouse. There are several fundamental usability problems with touch interfaces - lack of tactile feedback, difficulty of selecting small screen objects, fingers obscuring view, and more.
I don’t know about that… You can still buy non-smart cell phones, but they all have cameras even so.
On the iPad and other tablets, my issue with them is the size. To my mind, there are only two (well, three) relevant size categories for an electronic device: It can either fit in my pocket, or it doesn’t and I need to carry a bag (the third category is “can’t even practically be carried in a bag”, which has its place, but isn’t relevant here). I find my iPod Touch quite useful, since it’s in that smaller size category, and I expect I’ll also find a smart phone similarly useful, once I can afford one. But for my purposes, an iPad is the same size as a laptop, and if I’m going to use something of that size, it’s going to be the more functional one.
There’s a thread out there I’m gonna link to in 10 years when our cars are driving autonomously.
There are still cell phones without cameras being sold. I bought one about 9 months ago.
I vastly underestimated the fraction of time the general public spends doing either content consumption or low-grade production. For me, I need a real computer perhaps 85% of the time, and the remaining 15% can be served by a tablet. I figured that for others, the number would be more like 50/50. It appears the number is really more like 2/98. I never would have guessed that anyone besides the elderly or small children could have their computing needs entirely served by a tablet.
I’ve taken exactly one pic per phone in 10 years just to see how to make it function…so that’s like 5 phones and 5 photos.
Never had a reason to send a pic of anything.
I agree with a lot of this, although I think part of the issue is that we’re guys and unless you carry a briefcase or some other “bag”, you don’t have a place to put a 10" tablet no matter how light it is. The situation is different if you’re a woman who carries a purse large enough to handle it.
But even at home, I find my tablet to be more versatile and comfortable than a laptop for a lot of functions. I don’t need a keyboard in the way for reading books or casual web browsing, watching movies or flipping through webcomics. The lower weight is nice when using it while laying on the couch or in bed. Heck, sometimes it’s nicer to “type” using the onscreen keyboard (using Swype) versus a real keyboard because one is silent and doesn’t annoy the spouse next to me trying to sleep or watch TV. And, when I do want a real computer, I have a desktop for that be it playing games, typing long posts/emails, productivity software and the like. Sometimes if we’re going to be out of the house for a few days, I’ll bring my Bluetooth keyboard along to make my tablet more computer-like but the truth is, I still barely use it. With a desktop picking up the heavy duty stuff and the tablet for browsing news sites from the couch, a laptop would really be the unneeded third wheel in my house. And it is – like I said before, my wife has all but abandoned her laptop & netbook for her tablet.
off topic, but: I think your gonna have to wait about 30 years, maybe more. And I sure hope that the Dope is still around then ,so you can link to this thread. 
I have a tablet and a keyboard for it; the reason I need the physical keyboard is that sometimes I write things other than web addys and the onscreen keyboard doesn’t play well with “non English letters”. No ñ, ç, diacritics… I can’t write my own address, since it includes a ç 
Most of the time that keyboard sits in a cupboard at home, I don’t lug it around unless I’m going someplace for several days and expect to be writing.
Speaking of keyboards, any of you guys know a dictation software for Android which doesn’t need an internet connection? I travel a lot on business so I’d like one I can use without paying for it (paying for the software itself is fine, I don’t want to pay roaming charges for every letter).
I can’t speak for all tablets, but my iPad has multiple keyboards built in. 
There is also an option to add others…
Android itself may have keyboard options somewhere but I can’t find it, all I’ve found are recomendations for keyboard apps. I’ve downloaded Swiftkey, but it doesn’t have an “international Spanish” keyboard: since you get both the keyboard and the predictor, it separates Spanish (EU), Spanish (LA) and Spanish (US). At least they have the ç (in the second page of symbols rather than in the main keyboard), but I haven’t tested yet whether Navigator will be able to understand it as a letter.
Mind you, I’m so weird I’d also like to be able to switch the fucking predictor off: no damnit, I don’t mean María, I mean Madrid! Guess I’ll google that one…
Swiftkey will let you pick ç with a long-press of c.
You just made the list.
In the late 90s I got my first of several PalmPilots. I also carried a cell phone. I remember thinking how cool it would be if my PalmPilot could make phone calls because then I could ditch my cell phone. I never thought about the reverse, i.e. making the phone do pda type stuff. I just thought Palm had the perfect OS for handheld computing and maybe they did for a while. I also thought it would be easier to add a phone to a pda than a pda to a phone.
Today, I can’t imagine life without my Android. How much longer are we going to keep calling them phones?
Well, this guy got it right:
As someone who bought one of the first “smartphones” (I had a T-Mobile SDA/HTC somethingorother in the mid-2000s), I never thought they’d take off either. It turned out the problem was not having anywhere to download apps.