Disclaimer: I work for Touchsquid Technology Inc.

Disclaimer: I work for Touchsquid Technology Inc.

so someone calls out the truth to the FUD you’re here spreading and you badmouth “linux fanboys” as a joke, and tell them to grow up??? oh boy. YOU’ve got some serious growing up to do.

http://www.tgdaily.com/mobility-features/50167-canonical-preps-ubuntu-for-tablets

It isn’t even out yet, and you already know its shortcomings?

I will not argue about people returning their Ubuntu netbooks, since the solid statistics that you presented have humbled me.

As to Linux and its future on mobile devices in particular, it seems pointless to try to educate you about Maemo and MeeGo, but you may have heard of Android, which is also based on Linux?

Grow up.

Linux based OS’s will never become popular because they are too complex. When you have to go and get the software yourself, and don’t know exactly where, and then you often find that you have to compile it yourself, or search out the dependencies, you’re not going to sell it to the public, who either wants boxed software, or software they can download and use at once, and then have somewhere to go when they have a problem.

We now have Hulu. CBS has announced that by fall there will be a player. ABC has a player that gives us all their shows for free. A growing number of major sites have gone HTML 5, etc.

Would you like to bet that Time/Warner will change their minds?

In addition, having seen FP 10.1 on a Nexus 1, I’ll tell you that it’s ok, but not great. Too many videos still stutter, among other problems.

And as for other devices; most of them will never get 2.2, which is the only version so far that will use FP 10.1. We’re still seeing Android phones coming out with 1.6. Do you really think they will get 2.2? Keep dreaming. Already most cell companies and manufacturers have either stated that they aren’t updating their phones, or that they may, months from now.

Flash Player is a minor factor here. It will become less important as time goes on. Even Adobe acknowledged this, and are hedging their bets with HTML 5 software tools.

I find it interesting here that most all of the pro Apple posts have been rated down, and the anti Apple posts have been rated up. Tells us something about objectivity.

The reason the “Windows approach” to tablets was unsuccesful was due to it coming too soon. People weren’t ready for multiple devices. The tablet would have to be their only device. If it was capable of that it would have been too heavy and expensive. The Apple Newton was a failure because people weren’t ready for multiple devices.

Now we’ve had about a decade of desktops, laptops, PDAs, digital music players, digital cameras, mobile phones, smartphones, etc.

With the iPod Apple did what Apple does best, enter into an established market with a product that really brings nothing new technologically, but does bring a style and a sense of ease of use.

Apple followed the successes of the iPod, with the iPhone. Again, nothing in that phone hadn’t been done before, but it had Apple style and a sense of ease of use.

Now the iPad, the mythical new category. I agree, it isn’t a smartphone and it isn’t really a tablet. It’s too big to be a phone and too hobbled to be a truly useful tablet. Microsoft tried this earlier in the decade, releasing tablet devices with small phone OS. Windows CE devices didn’t do as well as the iPad, but people weren’t ready and Microsoft never had Apple’s style.

And, just as before, all other companies will copy Apple’s style and no innovation will happen for a while. Until, someone does come up with a new idea and Apple will come and make it pretty.

Written on my iPad.

Instead of everyone harping on features that can be easily leaped over in the next version. Potential “iPad killers” should concentrate on coming up with a compelling user experience that’s superior to Apple. That is were the battle lies. Not Flash or HTML5, what user really cares about that? Mac users buy macs because they just work at the things they want them to do. If Apple tells the public Flash is buggy and drains battery life, what expertise do they have to contradict, all they know is their shiny new toy runs rings around their laptop and they can do most of the things they would have done on a laptop a lot easier while on the go.

I see it this way, We all have a choice. Consumers can choose not to buy the device while waiting on their the next “mobile porn tablet”, no one is putting a gun to their heads. Developers can choose to create apps for Android, WebOS, Windows 7 etc. if they feel Apples rules are too restrictive, and the potential for financial gain isn’t worth their effort. If enough choose to go somewhere else. Apple may change it’s tactics, but I don’t see why they should as long as their is no one to fight. War what War?

Apple has done a great job finding 2 million and counting customers willing to see the cup half full with hands and wallets open for more. I for one hope there is a competing tablet soon, so I can stop hearing all the whining and complaining.

First, I do think some of your points aren’t valid. And no I don’t consider myself an Apple fanboy. I agree that the result we’re going to see in the short run is copy-cat Android tablets that look like the iPad plus something, but that’s still better than where we’ve been. And yes, I also wish people would push the envelope more. Even if the Courier was a stupid CGI marketing video, the form factor was very interesting, and might allow a large screen device in an easier to carry form factor. Hopefully somebody pursues that. Ditto the U1 design–with a laptop keyboard and shell to clip the tablet screen into (minus the stupid dual OS design). We’ll see what happens though.

Anyway, you are certainly driving a lot of traffic to the site. And honestly, go read a page of comments on Engadget someday. The comment thread here is actually quite eloquent in comparison.

Seriously, Windows 7 might be fine for a tablet if there was even a minimal set of applications that were touch enabled, and the vendor was willing to spend a bunch of time customizing stuff. But we’ve got what? One Note, the Kindle Reader, and … what was that third useful touch-optimized application for Windows again? Something that doesn’t need a stylus?

Plus of course the Tablet hardware problem is a difficult one. The iPad is ALREADY TOO HEAVY at 1.5 pounds. You can’t hold it up one handed for very long. And that’s with an ARM core. Try the same thing with an Intel CPU and it likely won’t work out–the thing will be too heavy or the battery life won’t be competitive. I assume this is what HP ran into.

I too hope that at some point the competition kicks in and we start to see some decent products actually ship. Hopefully Lenovo does a serious version of the U1 with only a single OS this time, since the previous product was STUPID. You may bemoan the loss of creativity, but STUPID products never fly far.

And hey, maybe Android tablets will iterate like crazy once they start coming out and that creativity will seep back into the market. With SD card slots (useful), USB ports (not sure for what), styli (if they can figure out how to do capacitive+resistive) for drawing and handwriting, different display technologies, higher screen resolutions, cameras, all the stuff people claim they want from a tablet. Personally I think a lot of this stuff is crap or stupid, but hey, maybe they’re right. Lets see. You’re just going to have to wait another 8-12 months.

It’s taken over three years for “better” hardware components to appear beyond what was state-of-the-art when the first iPhone came into existence. With the true cost of two-year minimum mobile data access added in, the newest high-end phones will cost 5 ~ 6 times what a more-capable iPad does, and there still won’t be a well-integrated software experience, just islands of functionality of widely-varying quality and inconsistent usability.

The PC manufacturers finally had to abandon the MHz Myth when everyone had been achieving the same numbers, and now, the race is on to see how many cores can be crammed onto a chip, despite the fact that very few applications can take advantage of what’s in a single 64-bit core, much less an armful of them. Most people can’t handle more than a few tasks at a time, and whatever they’re not working with directly generally doesn’t need scads of cycles to remain updated (when something scrolls off the screen, it’s no longer immediately relevant, and with the massive amounts of memory in today’s devices, it can be quickly recalled).

The iPad’s system software and usability features are based on nearly 40 years of R&D (not just at Apple, but, a lot of it has found a very comfortable home there – way more than at commodity-focused companies, like Microsoft, and especially all of the hardware companies, who have no idea what software is really about). Anyone who thinks that increased hardware specs makes it “trivial” to match what Apple has done in integrating the hardware and scores of levels of software clearly has no inkling of what’s really needed to produce something like the iPad, much less something significantly better, and particularly in volume at a lower price.

I wouldn’t hold your breath waiting for those trivially-simple-to-create, more innovative products (especially at iPad prices, much less lower ones), unless you’re trying out for the upcoming Smurfs movie (oh, brother, just what we needed).

Apple has wisely limited the features of this first-generation iPad (and is there any doubt that there won’t be an iPad “3GS” down the road, with a built-in video camera, and other non-critical baubles?) to minimize cost, maximize battery life and performance, and increase manufacturability (a frequently-missed factor of which pundits/critics without experience in consumer electronics development have no concept). Many people also miss the fact that the iPhone’s original price was well over $2,400 when the cost of the mandatory two-year AT&T phone/data plan was included, while neither the WiFi, nor the 3G versions of the iPad guarantee any additional revenue beyond the initial ~$500 – $640 price of an entry-level iPad (and the just-announced yanking of the unlimited data plan for the 3G model could provide a small increase in average income per iPad, depending on whether people can live with the new 200 MB/$15 – 2 GB/$25 monthly limits, or need to buy additional bandwidth – they will more likely seek out WiFi hotspots, instead, of which AT&T provides free access to its ~30,000 sites).

By keeping the features to “just enough” to get people to buy, while keeping the cost agonizingly low for their competitors, Apple is showing that it has learned from the Newton mistakes, and is building on what they did right in the iPhone (which, if over 50 million units hadn’t sold by now, there wouldn’t be an iPad). In particular, that installed base of 200,000+ apps has a lot to do with the iPad’s immediate success (even if only a few thousand apps have sold more than a few hundred copies – that’s true even moreso on Android and other devices). The genius of the integration of the App Store, iTunes, and the iDevices is still lost on many pundits, not to mention Apple’s competitors, whom would need to agree on a single place for customers to go to obtain content and software, and the resulting division of profits into essentially worthless fractions (assuming it would pass muster with anti-trust law).

Given the million-unit/month sales of the iPad, I would hazard a guess that Apple may have actually sucked all of the oxygen out of the 9.7-inch, 132 ppi, LED-backlit, color multi-touch screen manufacturing pipeline for the foreseeable future – competitors will very likely have to settle for smaller, cheaper, lower-resolution screen hardware (e.g., the laughable ~5-inch displays on some “potential iPad killers” from Dell, etc. With the iPhone experience, and their historical inability to satiate demand for many of their products in all categories, I’d bet that Apple negotiated some very long-term options on all of their suppliers’ production for products to be sold through the holiday season, and probably well beyond – they haven’t even talked at all about fulfilling what must be an incredible and rapidly-exploding demand from institutional customers (especially since OS 3.x provides virtually everything they need, and 4.0 will provide pretty much everything else they may think they need, e.g., all-app multi-tasking, which I believe is highly over-rated – being able to surf the WWW, while still continuing a call on the iPhone, is more than most of their competitors can support now).

There has already been a hue and cry from the punditocracy and blatherosphere that Apple needs to learn from its past mistakes in staying proprietary in both hardware and OS software, while a much larger market of cheaper, de facto standard products develops, as happened with the IBM PC, DOS, and Windows over the Apple ][ series. However, there are several very significant differences between Then and Now. First, many PCs were bought by corporate drones who wouldn't/couldn't risk buying computing products from anyone other than one of the Established Computer Manufacturers. Indeed, many companies were swayed by the PC hobbyists in their own IT departments, who were openly afraid of the even-then counter-culture Apple, Atari, Commodore, and other small-fry. Their livelihoods depended on a steady stream of devices that would need installation, support, training, security fixes, etc., etc., etc. - "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM", was the saying, back then. The Mac was still almost three years away when the first IBM PC was introduced in 1981, and Windows didn't start to become popular (i.e., barely usable) until three years after the first Mac was launched. However, the iPhone and iPad are proving what many Apple ][ and Mac users have known for a very long time - given their own preference, most _average_ people (not geeks) have found Apple's products easier to use and maintain (to be sure, there have been some dismal exceptions, but, every manufacturer has produced its own lead balloons).

In fact, Apple has long been the largest single manufacturer of desktop and laptop computers (PC manufacturers each only own a piece of the larger PC market), only dropping to number two once in a while while a PC manufacturer has gone hot, and then, inevitably, dropped back, when their marketing/pricing blitz resulted in unsustainable losses. There was a very telling exchange between Jack Tramiel, former CEO of Commodore, and Steve Wozniak, during a celebration of the 30th anniversary of the launch of the C-64. Jack was reminiscing about the Good Ol' Days when the C-64 finally outsold the Apple ][ on a monthly basis, and Steve responded that, while market share is nice, Apple's strategy has always been to remain a profitable company - and where are Commodore, Atari, etc., today? Heck, even IBM is long out of the desktop/laptop business, now.

Microsoft has tried, unsuccessfully over the long term, to stuff its Windows code into everything from phones, to TV set-top boxes, to cars, in the belief that a cheap per-unit price on commodity hardware is the path to ultimate domination of all markets, but, the evidence is now unarguable how wrong-headed that really is. There's an old saying about trying to make a fancy purse from a sow's ear, and that's amazingly apropos in this case. Trying to shove a dialog-and-menu based system into something with such a small screen as a phone is sheer folly, as is the idea that people are going to watch TV from their couch with a mouse. Really? The Dot-Bomb startup WebVan.com was going to "revolutionize grocery shopping" by building a completely parallel universe to the existing grocery chains (which operate on less than a one percent profit margin - and dropping, with WalMart in the mix) so that people could shop for food on-line. Unfortunately, they weren't able to replicate the majority of the grocery shopper's cues - squeezing the Charmin as well as the melons, smelling the cleaning and personal hygiene products, and poking the meat to see how red the blood was under the plastic over-wrap. In other words, they weren't paying attention to what the customer wanted, instead of some pundit's/critic's/marketeer's imaginary wish list, and that's what this article basically amounts to - too much stuff (see also George Carlin's take on "stuff"), at too high a cost, creating bug-infested complexity for both the user and the manufacturer, for tiny slivers of the market that normal people could care less about.

I suppose P.T. Barnum's words will still ring true as competitors try to "innovate" knock-offs of the iPad by adding power-sucking USB ports, using cheaper/less-responsive/lower-quality displays, yet-more inaccurate handwriting recognition, and who-knows-what else. Apple itself could still pull off some bone-head moves (the choke-hold on app deployment is definitely high in a nominatable category, but, hey, 200,000+ apps can't all be wrong) and AT&T's changing of iPad rate-plan horses in the middle of the stream is already providing fodder for the blatherers. As for innovation, who is seriously going to argue that Apple hasn't been serving as the R&D lab for the rest of the personal computing industry for nearly 35 years, and counting? Even Bill Gates knew that letting Apple die in the late 1990s would mean the loss of their primary source of inspiration, and they pumped $400 million into the near-corpse to ensure a continuing stream of ideas from Cupertino (some Insanely Great, some average, and more than a few albatrosses). The IBM PC wouldn't have existed if it weren't for the Microsoft Softcard for the Apple ][ (based on Digital Research's CP/M - the largest single market for that OS - over 300,000 vs. ~100,000 for all S-100 "standard" computers). Windows wouldn't have come along when it did if it hadn't been for the Mac's user interface, which Microsoft licensed for many years - they might have bought a more complicated version from Xerox, but, they weren't even aware of it, and it would have required what Apple did, anyway, to get it to run on a PC. Now, after 10 years of Microsoft and its hardware partners screwing around trying to get Windows XP, Vista, and 7 running on tablets, it looks like Apple has done it again - that innovation thing. Sometimes less really is more - less lifecycle cost, less complexity, less support, less training, and just plain less work, at least on the part of the customer. Making it look easy is the hard part, and maybe that's the real innovation that Apple has been pulling off all these years, and probably will continue to do for at least a while longer (the industry had better hope that there's a viable succession plan in place at Apple when Steve Jobs' replacement liver gives out statistically within the next five years - his absence for the better part of a year seems to augur well for The Rest of Us, regardless of whose products we buy).

As Dennis Miller likes to say, "But, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong."

Joe Blow

But in the process, it now means that everyone is going to play copycat the next couple of years similar to the iPhone with the big difference that, unlike the cell phone industry, there are no big tablet or UMPC players with significant market share. Even so, I can see some level of innovation coming a couple of years down the road just as smartphones are finally becoming post-iPhone in form factor. Kudos to Apple for finding one set of use cases that the tablet is well suited for. True competition in this space will be dependent on other vendors finding other types of use cases that can be optimized, whether they be portals for cloud computing assets, multi-tasking tablets with greater power, new types of content creation, or other interesting uses.

By using a modified version of the iPhone OS, Apple has shifted the focus of tablet computing. It’s not about writing a word document, it’s not about using a tablet like a notebook while pretending it’s not a compromise. The iPad is a device designed with the strengths of a tablet in mind. Will developers and users come up with new ways of using it? Sure, that’s the point.

As a new platform, the iPad is a good start, and there’s now plenty of room in the market for innovation and smartly designed competitors. HP, Google and others will take advantage of the space trailblazed by iPad.

Manufacturers, after spending billions on R&D, have to have a good idea if those products will sell in the numbers required to pay back the R&D and manufacturing start-up costs. Then they have to realize a profit.

Often, supporting the last few percent of a possible customer base adds too much to the overall costs, so it isn’t done. Smaller companies, with simpler products that are copies of the ones researched by the big companies then serve those smaller customer bases. That’s the way it works.

So Apple will sell tens of millions of these, then Archos will come out with an Android product that will have the extra features and sell a hundred thousand. They will make much less profit, and withdraw the product after a shorter time.

Bigger companies will offer products with some of those features, but will still sell far less than Apple will sell because they won’t work as well in their major areas of functionality, which is what most people buy products for.

As to your last statement, here’s a quote:

“The superior man understands what is right; the inferior man understands what will sell.”
– Confucius

No. It helped innovation move forward!

If HP and Microsoft had sales worthy products they would not have cancelled them. All this PC companies have had years to “innovate” the tablet into a mainstream consumer product and failed.

The fundamental problem was running a tradition desktop OS like Windows or for that matter Linux or OSX on a device meant to be used without a mouse. Stylus, please! Nobody wants to use a stylus for anything but drawing.

Sure, there’s a market for traditional desktop OS PC tablets, unfortunately it will never be a mass-market consumer device and that’s why HP dropped the Slate in light of the iPad. Not because the “killed innovation”, rather it showed HP there is a new innovative approach that could be a successful mass-market consumer device.

I also don’t think the Courier was killed by the iPad other than it just isn’t a feasible device at this time. The battery life would have sucked with two screens and the OS running overtime to support such a dynamic interface. In truth, it was another geek device that would have been nothing more than a niche device.

Where’s the profit? That’s what killed the Slate and Courier. After all, it’s about sales and profit and neither offered that with or without the iPad.

I’ve now owned my 3G 64GB iPad for almost a month. I can tell you that it’s one of the most innovative devices around. Criticizing Apple for what it’s done is entirely unfair. You really have to have one, use it, and get a number of programs before you can assess it properly.

There won’t be a tablet on the market that will do everything that everyone wants. Heck, there isn’t a computer on the market that does that. In fact, there isn’t a single device in any category that does that.

Calling for diversity isn’t the answer. It’s looking at what MOST people will want that matters. Maybe people don’t want diversity. We can see the truth to that in the p.c. market. Linux gives people what you seem to want, but who buys it? Almost no one.

What I tend to see is tech writers, and some people in posting that demand what most people aren’t interested in.

They rail against Apple’s “walled garden”, but fail to see that not only are there vastly more programs in it, but that those programs cover much more areas than programs in other platforms. Sure, agin, those tech writers and few posters demand obscure software that the 99% of the public couldn’t care less for, but so what? Is any company really competing for that 1%? No, they are not.

So what will happen is that all other companies will look to the iPad sales, and if they continue to hold up, will attempt to duplicate the device and environment, as both palm and Google have done with the iPhone. What else is to be expected?

Once the IBM PC took off, almost all other computer development died. Of the four that were left, the Amiga, the Atari St, and the Mac, only the Mac remains. Linux, as I said, is going nowhere, despite every year being declared by Linux supporters as “The year of The Linux desktop”.

I don’t see tablets being any different.

Microsoft has now has a full 10 years to develop a usable tablet OS, and they’ve failed. Despite Gates declaring that by 2005 most people would be buying Windows tablets, as usual, his prediction is a loser.

If you’ve tried the Arches 9, a Windows 7 tablet, you would see why Windows is a failure in tablets.

Android isn’t a tablet OS the way the iPad version of Apple mobile OS is, and so far, Google isn’t working on it, as far as we know, at least, and Google isn’t shy about their plans as Apple is. They insist that their web focussed OS, Chrome is for tablets. I doubt that will work.

What else is left? Well, apparently, Hp will be trying with WebOS. But they will have to re-work that one as well. And the truth is that is simply isn’t liked very much except again by tech writers, and some posters. It’s a tough OS to understand. It really does need a manual, unlike Apple’s OS. So, maybe it will work, and maybe not..

The only thing left, really, is Linux again, and again, as in netbooks, where the first models were shipped with Linux, the public will reject it.

So even though you hate the idea, it’s going to be Apple, and Google. And of the two, only Apple has a well working OS for a tablet sized device, with over 8,100 programs currently available that are specifically programmed for it. And I can tell you that the over 50 that I now have in many different areas, work pretty darned well.

I’m interested in a varied ecosystem.

also interesting to see how the votes weight. Did someone link this to a apple fan forum or something?

Right now, HP is the closest to going their own way, thanks to grabbing palm for webos. Question is, can they handle it well.

thing is, apple may well have the lead right now, but their policies may have to change on app access, or some other company with a more relaxed policy may well get ahead.

And its not helping that until android 2.1, google was handling android as a pure phone os, meaning anything without phone capability was not given marketplace access.

End result may become a vicious circle.

What the rest of the press has been saying is that the competitors were caught by surprise by Apple. They didn’t expect the iPad to be so inexpensive or to have such a long battery life. That is why it is taking them a while to retool. The competitors will be there, just give them a year or so.

Regarding the iPad itself, this is just the first iteration. Apple has shown in the past that they are very deliberate in their product introductions. iPad 1.0 serves to introduce the basic technology of the touch screen, the software behind the touch screen, the file systems and so on as well as the hardware for the SOC and the provisions for getting better than 10 hours of battery life. Later versions will add the accessories. This may or may not be enough for the customers. The competitors may have their day. But don’t think that this is all the iPad will every be. This is clearly a moving target.

True, they use an Intel processor, but they could run Linux or Android on that.

Also looking forward to it.

http://wetab.mobi/en