These wafer-thin devices are beautiful, light-weight, powerful, and have battery life in excess of 10 hours. They are objects of envy, but where are utility, functionality, and productivity?
The iPad is being designed and marketed as a novelty item. It’s a casual-gaming, app-downloading, media-watching device. And the Me-Too contestants in the market like Motorola, Samsung, and Blackberry are really following the blueprint that Apple has laid out. They are not meant to be mobile computers, or laptop replacements.
There are a bunch of basic things I can do on my laptop that I cannot do on our iPad. Open up Facebook or YouTube in my browser and upload a picture or image, for instance. I can’t install my favorite browser. I can’t drag and drop media and files from my device to a network or removable drive. My list of iOS gripes is too long for this post.
I was playing with the Xoom the other day, and wanted to close Firefox. I couldn’t find a ‘close’ option in the menu or anywhere on the screen. A fellow engineer here pointed out to me, “You are thinking about it wrong. That is NOT how they intend for you to use the device.” Apparently the Android paradigm is to allow you to open as many things as you like, and it will close them for you, magically, when you start to run out of system resources. That kind of magic I can do without.
The software that powers these devices is VERY different from the operating systems we run on our laptops and desktops. These tablet-only OSs are significantly less capable, but WHY? Is it the hardware? The CPU / GPU / Ram on the iPad2 and Xoom are easily as capable as some netbooks from 2 years ago. By the specs, Win XP or Ubuntu Netbook Remix should be able to run on these machines relatively well.
Who knows, maybe Windows 7 for tablets will come to the rescue. Apparently there are already tablets running Ubuntu spotted in the wild. This guy even got Ubuntu Netbook Remix to run on his Xoom. I would love to see that on an iPad2!
Until tablets run OSX, Windows, Ubuntu, or similar… my tablet purchase is going to wait. An iPad 2 would just collect dust on my desk, once I got over the initial, delirious joy of playing Angry Birds.
How long do you think it will take Canonical to put out a Ubuntu Tablet Remix? According to PC World, we will see a Dual-Boot Windows / Android Tablet, selling for less than $400, in October. Asus also has an interesting stable of devices in the pipeline too...
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