Exactly my thoughts. All these cool-looking gadgets, but they're just too expensive. I'd rather just wait a few months or years and get it from craigslist. And that way I don't feel so nervous about tinkering with it!
No, I mean visually, how it looks. Though Rick Sternbach had a good laugh about how it looks and the name they decided to give it for a different reason. I suppose he was more tickled, though.
"iWank, now with extra jism for wannabe geeks!" If only Apple ran honest ad campaigns . . . Real geeks make toys, they don't buy toys at a 40% markup over retail.
This is $999 http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/04/lenovo-ideapad-u1-hybrid-laptop-by-day-unhinged-tablet-by-nigh/ This one would easily compete with the iPad: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0032ALW5C?ie=UTF8&tag=thblre-20&link_code=as3&camp=211189&creative=373489&creativeASIN=B0032ALW5C Both of them out before the iPad. Yet it didn't seem to make any major news. What's sad is that I've no doubt the Lenovo tablets will last longer than the iPad in durability and performance, but because the iPad is a flashy, larger iPhone, they'll be phased out before the iPad. I figure anyway.
A friend of mine has one in the same form factor as this. She hates it. Touch screen barely works, short battery life, power cord is bulky and prone to breaking. It makes a decent laptop, but a terrible tablet. 5.9 lbs ( did they fill it with lead?), and it has Win7 Starter. That's why. Eh...
All the CES coverage I saw was just gaga over that puppy. The big problem I can see with it, is that the tablet portion of it is running Linux. Geeks, of course, have no problem with Linux, and the various versions I've played with have all been as good as any Windows incarnation I've played with. Most people, however, have nary a clue about Linux, so they're likely to freak out about that part of it. Working on the laptop portion and then popping out the tablet portion and having it change OS's on you (and probably programs, if the one you're presently using has a recognized Linux variant installed on the tablet portion) is going to throw people hugely. Of course, if MS were a bit more reasonable about its licensing, then this wouldn't be an issue and both machines would be running Win7. Somebody had an ebook reader at CES which looked like an open book. One side of it was an eink screen with a touchscreen on it, and the other side was a normal LCD display with a touchscreen. If you were reading something on the eink side and there was a photograph, you could easily drag it over to the LCD side to see it in color, or a web search on some text you copied over. IIRC, the price was about the same as the iPad.
We'll see really nice tablets when enough people are comfortable with projected keyboards. I'm not sure what relation that has to "2 or 3" years, but I'm pretty sure it's a better indicator. Until tablets can replace laptops, they'll be kinda crappy. There's not ever going to be a huge market for devices that are somewhere between a good smart phone and a laptop.
That's a good point, Liet, one reason I wouldn't get the iPad is because if I need to do anything that can't be done on my iphone, I've got my laptop. I can't see the market for the in between really taking off. I would take an ipad if someone gave it to me but I can think of any reason to purchase one.
Far as I can tell, the iPads for the Ma and Pa market, those who want a PC but without all the associated crap that goes with having one. Stepdad has a pretty powerful lappy, does little other than surf or mail on it and frequently panics when firefox freezes or a meaningful message appears - should the Gods of Hex ever decide to decide to message about windows doing something retarded, I suspect sacrificial virgins shall be volcano bound to assuage the wrath of 0xFF456B8E... The iPad will be perfect for him, and for those like him, including the better half - email, surfing, shopping, silly games... iPad is a dumbed down lappy, and the market Linux should've gone for. I was very dubious about it at first, but now - I think it genuinely is a new class of computing system, and one that has a good chance of success. Only issue is the price point, given how Apple leans towards premium products with a nice fat profit margin they may be pricing themselves out of the market. Mind you, it's not like the competition has form in the same area. Running Linux is like running hurdles in lead-clad high heels, and Microsoft - with Ballmer at the helm - will probably laugh it off as they did the iPhone, and then watch as yet another market disappears from their grasp.
Wall Street Journal price for a subscription over the internet: 2$/week. Wall Street Journal price for an iPad subscription: 18$/month. At least the WSJ thinks that the target demographic for the iPad is people too dumb to figure out how to use a keyboard. I'm sure there are other similar examples out there to be found. I'm not sure that the Journal is wrong.
The iPad was a big disappointment to me. I was hoping it would run a real OS like Snow Leopard, but to just run the iPhone OS (and use the freaking APP STORE) is worthless to anyone who would want to use it to do anything. Dear Apple: Stop controlling distribution of software for your mobile operating systems, or you'll end up obsolete. Any Linux-based phone OSes out there?
Android phones, and Nokia has a tablet thingie about the size of an iPod Touch (don't remember the name of it) which runs a Linux distro.
The Android phones are okay, as long as you don't want to play 3D games. Yes, they have OpenGL ES, but they don't have the same accelerator hardware as the iPhone, and it blows chunks. And Android is not a good choice for tablets. Because of how the screen is tied to the OS (very nonstandard), to have a higher-resolution screen means you must outfit it with a more powerful, battery-draining processor. Apple really got the hardware and OS story right on the iPhone and iPad. It's the software distribution story that really, really, sucks.
The iPhone is actually more functional than a tricorder in a number of ways. Mr. Spock was forced to build a large hardware add-on to search Edith Keeler's career. An iPhone user would have merely used Wikipedia.
Today's the day. 7 alternatives to the iPad. The WePad (made by a German company, so we'll probably never see it in the States) looks really interesting, IMHO.
Want an awesome and useable alternative to the iPad, check out a Fujitsu Lifebook 1440. Its a bit pricey at $1199 for an starter device, but I think it blows the iPad away. Also the upcoming HP Slate should be pretty fantastic too.
No, but it comes with twice the storage capacity of the high end iPad, a real keyboard, the ability to use software that doesn't have to get filtered through a monopolist for approval, and the 3G addon costs half as much as it does on the iPad due to the miracle of three USB ports. And it runs Flash. It weighs a pound more than the iPad and the display isn't as good. If you want a souped up Kindle or really need that extra pound off, the iPad's superior, otherwise probably not.
This just in: The iPad is powerful enough to remotely govern a Scandinavian nation. So apparently it supports those fucked-up fonts Swedes and Norwegians are fond of.
So far most of the positive reviews I've read are saying that it's aimed for the non-technical sorts, and there are now plenty of YouTube videos showing toddlers and cats batting at 'games' on their screens. Is the touchscreen the best thing it's got going for it? Does having a touchscreen make web surfing that much better than an inexpensive netbook? Or does it just make games more fun to play (for cats)?
So this weekend I went to iPad Dev Camp in San Jose. My team wrote an App, Mac client, and Windows client in 3 days to do the Minority Report/Avatar thing, where you can fling a window on your computer at the side of the screen (a small window in the corner on Windows), the window disappears, and the iPad opens the window's URL(s) (and Google Maps URLs open in Maps, YouTube URLs open in the YouTube app), or starts playing the song that was playing, or opens the Netflix movie that was streaming, etc. Frankly, it's an awesome application. Won the competition in the Most Useful App category. We even got iPad to iPad transfers working too. Given everything I saw being done with the iPad this weekend, I can tell you now, it's not just a toy. The DJ today had two iPads with various music and loop creation apps running fed into a simple 2-source fader with no effects - nothing else in the way of gear - and it was as good as if it was done with laptops and a serious mixer.
