Tag Archives | Tablets

Flipboard: A Great iPad App Gets Even Better

Posted by Harry McCracken on December 15, 2010 at 9:46 pm

Apple recently named the “social magazine” Flipboard as the iPad app of the year. That seems about right–it’s got an ingenious and addictive interface that makes reading stuff from Facebook, Twitter, and sites of all sorts relaxing in a way that the Web rarely is. Perhaps more than any single iPad magazine app from a traditional magazine publisher, it feel like a magazine of the future rather than a dead-tree product repurposed into digital form. (I also had fun nominating it for TIME’s 50 Best Inventions of 2010 and then writing it up.)

Tonight, Flipboard is getting even neater–the company is releasing a meaty new version of the app. For me at least, the big news is support for Google Reader. For the first time, it’s possible to read RSS feeds within the slick, browsable Flipboard interface. (Until now, the closest you could get was to find a site’s Twitter feed and plug that in.)

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Ballmer at CES: Windows Slates, Windows 8?

Posted by Harry McCracken on December 13, 2010 at 7:36 pm

The New York Times’s Nick Bilton is reporting that Steve Ballmer’s CES keynote next month will include demos of slate computers running Windows 7. Sounds like deja vu all over again: At this year’s CES, Ballmer did the same thing. The 2010 Windows slates failed to buck the long tradition of Microsoft products unveiled at Comdex or CES failing to change the world. (At least HP finally released its slate PC.)

This year’s slate PCs were basically Windows 7 laptops with touchscreens and the keyboards chopped off. Bilton’s story says that the 2011 versions are a bigger departure from Windows notebooks, and, for the that matter, from the iPad. They involve features like slide-out keyboards and user interfaces that differ depending on whether the device is held in landscape or portrait orientation.

I don’t wanna pre-judge devices that we don’t know much about yet, but if Microsoft figures out a way to make Windows make sense on computers that don’t have physical keyboards-or at least don’t assume you’ll use one at all times–I’ll be impressed. After all, it’s been trying for a decade and had made pretty much zero progress on the whole idea to date.

Meanwhile, the very end of Bilton’s article had a tidbit I’m more excited about: It says that Ballmer may also demo Windows 8 during the keynote.

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iPad Keyboards Get Physical

Posted by Harry McCracken on December 10, 2010 at 9:58 am

Last Gadget Standing Nominee: tyPad

Price: $99

“If the iPad only had a keyboard,” I’ve sometimes thought to myself, “I could take it on short trips and leave my laptop at home.” Enter tyPad, a leatherette iPad case that happens to have a built-in Bluetooth keyboard. Open it up and the iPad stands upright like a notebook screen. The keyboard is a one-piece design rather than one with discrete, desktop-style keys, but it has a home button and a shortcut for the iPad’s search function; it charges via USB. And since it replaces the on-screen keyboard, it leaves the entire display available for other purposes–which could be handy for word-processing documents, instant-messaging sessions, and other activities which involving both typing and reading.

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Chrome OS and Android: Questions, Questions, and More Questions

Posted by Harry McCracken on December 8, 2010 at 10:41 am

Google's Cr-48 Chrome OS notebook

 

It’s been an exceptionally eventful week for news about the future of Google’s operating systems. On Monday night, I attended the opening session of the Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital: Dive Into Mobile conference in San Francisco, cohosted by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. It featured a meaty conversation with Andy Rubin, the father of Android. Then yesterday, I took a side trip from Dive Into Mobile to go to Google’s Chrome event, which ended with details on Chrome OS’s rollout. (The Chrome OS notebooks that were supposed to go on sale this holiday season have been postponed until the first half of 2011, but Google is launching a pilot program based around a test Chrome OS device called the Cr-48.)

Both events answered some of my questions about what’s next for Google’s OSes, but they also left me asking new ones. Here they are–starting with ones relating to Chrome OS, since we learned more about it than we did about the next generation of Android.
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Anyone Still Want to Contend That the iPad Isn’t a Creative Tool?

Posted by Harry McCracken on December 5, 2010 at 3:59 pm

“The iPad is for consuming content, not creating it.” iPad skeptics have been repeating that mantra for months now. It’s become clear that the rap is a snippy, simple-minded exaggeration of two more specific facts about Apple’s tablet:

  1. After eight months on the market, it hasn’t yet matched all the creativity apps available for Macs and Windows (two platforms that have been around for more than a quarter of a century).
  2. Most writers aren’t going to be crazy about cranking out massive quantities of prose on its on-screen keyboard. (Even that is subject to debate: Macworld Editorial Director Jason Snell wrote this article entirely on an iPad, and it recently won an Azbee award.)

But while it’s true that the iPad can’t replace a Mac or Windows PC for every creative task, the evidence is piling up mighty fast that it is an exciting creative tool. Yesterday night, I dropped in on a San Francisco art show called Future/Canvas, and I can’t imagine any rational human being attending the event and continuing to maintain that the iPad is only for passive, sheeplike intake of content.

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Acer and Android Tablet News Fatigue

Posted by Jared Newman on November 24, 2010 at 9:02 am

Lately, the more I hear about Android tablet plans, the less excited I get.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still quite interested in Android tablets in general. But when Acer announced that it’s launching 7- and 10-inch tablets next spring, it might as well have been Asus, LG or Motorola. In my mind, they’re all the same.

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TiVo’s New Remote: The iPad

Posted by Harry McCracken on November 22, 2010 at 7:13 am

Okay, time for some good news about TiVo: The company is launching a free iPad app “in the coming weeks.” It’s a remote control for TiVo Premiere boxes (early ones, sadly, won’t work) that essentially puts a slick, touch-friendly version of the TiVo interface onto the tablet, so you can find stuff to watch and otherwise wrangle your TiVo without using its remote or interrupting whatever’s on the screen at the time.

And judging from TiVo’s demo video, it looks really neat.

Obvious question: Might TiVo tweak this app so it not only let you find shows but also permitted you to watch them on the iPad? It wouldn’t be an insurmountable technical challenge to do so, presumably. So why not make it happen–especially since TiVo to Go already permits TiVo owners to route video from the box to other devices?

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Waitaminnit, Maybe HP’s Windows Slate is Interesting After All

Posted by Harry McCracken on November 19, 2010 at 12:21 am

At first, HP’s Windows 7 slate was going to be a big deal. Then HP stopped talking about it and I declared it dead. Then it came back, but in a form that left me wondering if it was cursed. What a saga!

On Thursday afternoon, I saw the gadget–now known as the HP Slate 500, and aimed at business types rather than consumers–up close and in person. I tried it a bit. And while it may still turn out to be a train wreck, I’m now thinking it might at least be an interesting train wreck. Or even–just maybe–an interesting machine, period. (The 500 went on sale a few weeks ago, but is apparently a rare, back-ordered commodity.)

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