Tag Archives | Tablets
Dell's Streak: Is It a Huge Smartphone or a Tiny Computer?
The time I’ve spent with Verizon Wireless’s Droid X has made one thing clear to me: I like great big smartphone screens. As impressively elegant as the iPhone 4’s 3.5″ retina display is, the X’s 4.3″ superscreen makes for larger type and easier tapping. It’s like the difference between a highly refined sportscar and a roomy SUV. I hope phones in both sizes flourish.
And then there’s Dell’s Streak…which makes the Droid X look like a pipsqueak. At five inches, its screen is so expansive that it’s not clear upon first glance whether this device is a phone. It is. Or at least it can be one: The Dell executive I spoke with at a demo yesterday described the Streak as being “capable of making phone calls.” In other words, Dell sees it as a data device that does voice rather than a phone that does data.
22 comments
Pressure-Sensitive Drawing on the iPad
If you like to use the iPad to create art, you want this.
2 comments
HPalm is Official
HP’s bid to acquire Palm is now a done deal. It still isn’t willing to talk about the fate of its Windows 7 slate, though. Stay tuned…
No comments
The State of iPad Satisfaction
Long before anyone knew much of anything about the iPad, people were expressing strong opinions about it. But the opinions that matter most didn’t begin to get formed until April 3rd, the day Apple’s tablet finally went on sale. That’s when teeming masses of consumers spent their own money on iPads, took them home, and put them to an array of utterly real-world tests.
We gave those folks a few weeks to explore their new gadgets. And then we fielded a survey earlier this month to gauge the satisfaction level of some of the first iPad owners. More than six thousand people responded, the largest response to a Technologizer survey to date.
Executive summary in case you don’t feel like reading the rest of this article: They like it. A lot. Ninety-eight percent say they’re satisfied with their iPads overall; ninety-six percent think it’s a good value. In category after category–3G service, most of the individual bundled apps, battery life, speed, the absence of Flash–a majority of respondents are pleased.
103 comments
Origami Remembered
Good story by Cnet’s Ina Fried: Microsoft figured out that something sort of like the iPad would become important years before folks started to talk about an “Apple tablet,” but failed to build it with its hardware partners.
I think it’s hard to overestimate just how much Microsoft’s tablet strategy–slightly modifying Windows to run on radically new types of hardware–damaged its prospects over the past decade or so.
One comment
Report: Tablets Will Outsell Netbooks By 2012
Forrester Research said Thursday that it expects netbook sales to fall behind tablet sales within two years, having a lot to do with the dramatic success of Apple’s iPad device. While only 3.5 million are expected to sell this year, that number will jump to more than 20 million by 2015 and become nearly a quarter of all PC sales at that point, Forrester predicted.
7 comments
HP's Windows Slate PC: Not Officially Dead, But Dead
I’m at The Big Money’s Untethered conference–an event about tablets and the future of publishing–in New York. One of the speakers this morning was Phil McKinney, CTO of HP’s Personal Systems Group. The Big Money’s James Ledbetter interviewed him about tablets, and he talked about the downsides of using existing operating systems for new types of devices. (He didn’t mention Windows explicitly, but I’m pretty sure he wasn’t talking about OS/2.) He also extolled the virtues of WebOS, which HP will own assuming its acquisition of Palm goes through.
50 comments
In Search of the Ideal iPad Office Suite
Venerable mobile office suite Quickoffice has landed on the iPad. Quickoffice Connect for iPad carries an introductory price of $9.99, does Microsoft Office-compatible word processing and spreadsheets, and sports a user interface designed with the iPad in mind. (For instance, if you touch and hold the right side of a document, you get thumbnails of all the pages.) It also has built-in support for document sharing via Google Docs, Dropbox, Box.net, and Mobile Me, plus simple file transfers to and from your computer over Wi-Fi.
10 comments
AT&T's iPad E-Mail Breach
The most fascinating thing about the case of a hacker group downloading 114,000 e-mail addresses of iPad 3G owners from AT&T’s servers–other than the confirmation that a lot of high-powered people bought iPads–is the fact that it’s a major security breach involving one of the most locked-down products on the planet. And there’s nothing iPad owners could have done to prevent it, since the data was swiped from AT&T, not individual iPads.