By Dave Adamson in Reader
Posted in Uncategorized on June 7, 2010 at 4:42 pm
I love the idea the tablet form factor. I like the idea of a device that I can interact with via a stylus or my finger, offering me all the functions of the device that I happen to be holding.
I loved my Toshiba Portege 3500, complete with Windows XP Tablet Edition. With its swivel out screen, allowing me to use it as a regular laptop, it was the best of both worlds…. except battery life was shocking and the device felt quite heavy (1.3kg, I seem to recall) when held as in its tablet form for any more than a few minutes at a time. Other than that, I could see a bright future for these devices, even when others scoffed and told me that they’d never catch on.
Inevitably, the love-in went away and the Tablet PC was, once again, relegated to the category of almost-ran.
Before that, my love of stylus driven devices was in the form of PDAs such as the Psion 5 (still amongst my favourite devices), my Toshiba e570 Windows CE PDA, my Palm III (which I still have somewhere) and a couple of other models that I can’t quite recall.
So, I’m quite excited that this new wave of tablets, with energy efficient CPUs and battery capacities that would put some laptops to shame, have started to appear en masse. It’s like a new opportunity for users to experience, following the success of touchscreen phones, technology that sheers away from the ‘keyboard and mouse’ into something that should be, in its own way, more intuitive.
Obviously, the must-have device at the moment appears to be the iPad. It’s selling at a phenomenal rate despite mixed feedback. It was always going to be so thanks to Apple’s way of creating a cultural phenomenon. It’s like the iPhone all over again.
However, there’s many other devices on the horizon - the JooJoo offers features that should stomp all over the iPad, but lacks the recognition of brand power and, by extension, the ‘coolness’ offered by an instantly recognisable gadget. Asus will be releasing their own product, the Eee Pad, standing a big chance of biting into Apple’s product dominance thanks to the brand recognition that Asus’ range of netbooks possesses. Obviously, large manufacturers will appear with their own products, ready to eat away at the Apple’s… apple.
Dell, for example, have released their Streak, exclusively on o2 in the UK. Okay, it’s not a Tablet in the same way as the iPad, sporting a 5″ screen and smartphone capabilities, but it’s definitely an interesting proposition and something that I’ll be looking at closely in the near future.
HP will unveil their Web OS based model sometime in the near future, following their acquisition of Palm. I was a bit disappointed that the whole Courier project didn’t evolve into anything more than a form of blue sky thinking and was officially killed by Microsoft, despite never being announced in the first place. However, I’m sure that HP will do what it can to come up with an interesting foray into this new, interesting market space.
Suffice to say, there are interesting times ahead. It would be nice to think that this will revitalise the portable computing market in the same way that netbooks did; after all, many IT professionals that I encountered claimed that there wasn’t a market for such devices!
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