Tag Archives | Tablets

Google/Verizon Tablet: A Quick Wish List

Posted by Harry McCracken on May 11, 2010 at 5:18 pm

Google and Verizon Wireless are working on an tablet together. That bit of scuttlebutt comes from a pretty well-connected source: Verizon Wireless CEO Lowell McAdam, who spilled the beans to the Wall Street Journal today. The device will run the Android OS, and that’s about all we know about it so far–but Verizon says it’ll have more details later this week. (And maybe Google will have something to say at its I|O conference next week.)

This gizmo will, of course, compete with Apple’s iPad. It joins the land rush of  would-be iPad killers that don’t actually exist yet (and, in some cases, may never exist). I’d like to see something emerge as the iPad’s most formidable archival–and here are a few features that would help Google and Verizon’s tablet get there.

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President Obama, iPad Skeptic

Posted by Harry McCracken on May 10, 2010 at 12:22 am

As politicians go, President Obama has a reputation as a reasonably tech-savvy guy–or at least one with a deep-seated appreciation for his BlackBerry. But during the commencement speech he gave on Sunday at Hampton University in Virginia, he sounded more like a technophobic old fogy:

You’re coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don’t always rank that high on the truth meter.  And with iPods and iPads; and Xboxes and PlayStations — none of which I know how to work — (laughter) — information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation.  So all of this is not only putting pressure on you; it’s putting new pressure on our country and on our democracy.

Class of 2010, this is a period of breathtaking change, like few others in our history.  We can’t stop these changes, but we can channel them, we can shape them, we can adapt to them.

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BlackBerry Tablet Rumor Roundup

Posted by Harry McCracken on May 7, 2010 at 11:59 am

Is BlackBerry Maker RIM working on a tablet? Lots of rumors say so. But so far, it’s hard to construct them into a logical picture of what might be in the works, or even a coherent rationale for RIM getting into the tablet business.

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Are These Microsoft Research Demos the Future of the Tablet PC?

Posted by Harry McCracken on May 7, 2010 at 9:45 am

Maybe the Tablet PC isn’t dead. Maybe it’s just resting.

If the marketplace is your yardstick, the machine Bill Gates once predicted would become the world’s dominant computing device by 2006 definitively flopped  years ago. But a few days ago during a Fox Business News interview, Gates said that Microsoft hadn’t given up on Tablet PCs and stylus-based input. Yesterday, I attended TechFair, a event the company held at its Silicon Valley campus to show off lab projects from Microsoft Research, which employees 850 researchers in eight locations around the world. Among the demos I saw was proof that it’s still investing in the idea.

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The iPad vs. Everything Else

Posted by Harry McCracken on May 2, 2010 at 9:56 pm

Photographs by Robert Cardin

(Note: This story is republished from PCWorld.com, with permission–and is also in the June PCWorld print issue.)

What, precisely, is the iPad? Compared with its iconic ancestors, the iPod and the iPhone, that’s a surprisingly tough question to answer. It runs the same operating system as the iPhone–but you can’t make phone calls on it. It has been hailed as the gadget that may save the publishing industry–though its e-reader software, which isn’t preinstalled, does not display magazines and newspapers. It features a bevy of games–but it’s neither an Xbox 360-killer nor a handheld device like a Nintendo DSi.

Most paradoxically of all, the iPad takes on the Windows world of netbooks and even more full-featured PCs, though it doesn’t run all Web apps. Or print. Or provide a file system that lets you get to all your documents in any app. Those shortcomings would make the very concept of competing with PCs laughable, if weren’t for the way its small size, touch interface, and impressive battery life add up to one of the best devices ever built for consuming content of all kinds, from Web pages to books to feature films. It’s both more fundamentally limited than a PC and an exciting sneak peek at where interfaces are likely to go–which is why it makes much more sense as a supplement to the other computers in your life than as a replacement for any of them.

In short, Apple’s tablet competes with an array of existing devices without mimicking any of them. And the best way to figure out whether it’s a plausible alternative to a PC, an e-reader, a game console, or any other better-established gizmo is to give it a whirl. So we did–read on to see what we found. (For more coverage, browse to go.pcworld.com/ipad.)

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iPad 3G Ships, Has Gotchas

Posted by Harry McCracken on April 30, 2010 at 6:51 pm

Apple started selling the 3G version of the iPad today, and folks are discovering that some apps behave differently on 3G than Wi-Fi. YouTube, for instance, delivers lower-quality video, and the ABC app won’t play at all. Presumably somebody’s still worried that AT&T’s network won’t be able to handle the deluge of data.

I don’t have a 3G iPad and don’t expect to get one anytime soon. Clarification: I do use my iPad on 3G all the time, because  I have a Verizon MiFi wireless hotspot. As long as I remember to charge it, it works just great–and because it’s turning 3G into Wi-Fi, iPad applications don’t dumb themselves down. I also get to pay Verizon one price for Wi-Fi that works with all my computers, my iPad, and my iPhone. Recommended.

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Is HP's Slate Dead?

Posted by Harry McCracken on April 30, 2010 at 12:03 am

This is one for the “I Find This Rumor Extremely Hard to Believe” file: Michael Arrington of TechCrunch is reporting that a source has told him that HP has decided to cancel its “slate PC.” You know–the one that was the centerpiece of Steve Ballmer’s CES keynote and which HP was trumpeting as recently as three weeks ago.

It’s not implausible because deciding not to pursue the project is itself inexplicable. Arrington says that HP is killing the slate because it’s unhappy with Windows 7 as a tablet operating system. But it was obvious from the get-go that Win 7 as it stands really doesn’t make much sense for a slate–all the extra touch capability that Microsoft baked in still leaves Windows as a keyboard-and-mouse-centric OS with, um, a touch of touch. And there’s been no evidence to date that Microsoft is interested in doing the necessary work to make Windows a good touch-centric product. There’s no way that a Microsoft slate could have compete with Apple’s iPad unless someone put an immense amount of work into the user interface.

Back at CES, Steve Ballmer didn’t seem that interested in Windows on slate devices. The Windows product manager I talked to at the show didn’t seem that interested. I haven’t noticed a clamor among consumers for Windows slates. Really, most of the enthusiasm so far seems to have come from HP, whose seems to have found reasonable success with its TouchSmart machines. Could it have been so giddy over the idea that it had to build one before it figured out that the idea didn’t make a lot of sense?

And with other news today including the official termination of Microsoft’s “Courier” project, just where does would the cancellation of the HP slate leave Windows when it comes to untraditional PCs?

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Courier, We Hardly Knew Ye

Posted by Harry McCracken on April 29, 2010 at 2:27 pm

Just what is Microsoft’s Courier project? All we know for sure is that it resulted in a neat concept video, reminiscent of a modern take on Apple’s it-was-a-vision-not-a-product Knowledge Navigator. But I don’t know if anyone outside Microsoft has had a clear handle on whether Courier was an imaginary romantic ideal of a two-screen tablet or something the company was busy building.

And now maybe we never will. Gizmodo, which published the Courier leak in the first place, is reporting that Microsoft has killed Courier. It quotes Microsoft PR honcho Frank Shaw saying that the concept was one of many ideas explored by Microsoft that doesn’t result in a shipping product (at least for now). But it’s still unclear whether Courier ever existed except as a slick piece of animation.

Another question: Did Microsoft let the Courier video out intentionally, or was it a genuine leak? I hope it wasn’t the former: By getting people excited and then failing to result in anything, Courier surely hurts Microsoft’s reputation for creativity (albeit just slightly) rather than helping it…

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The iPad on a Plane: Success!

Posted by Harry McCracken on April 20, 2010 at 11:10 pm

This morning, I got on a plane to head for a conference in Alicante, Spain. Once we were in the air, I got online (via Gogo inflight Wi-Fi) with my iPad and checked my e-mail–and discovered that the event had just been canceled. So I headed home on the next available flight. (No, I didn’t get all the way to Spain–just to Dallas, which is where I was going to catch a connecting flight.)

The one positive thing about the experience is that it was my first time using an iPad on an airplane–and as I’d hoped, this gadget was born for air travel. I was in the back of coach on a crowded American flight; I also had a 13″ Asus laptop with me, but I had to angle the screen at a bizarre angle and it was impossible to type without elbowing the guy next to me.

My iPad, however, is so small and sits so low that it worked just fine–even when the lady in front of me reclined without warning. I browsed the Web, did instant messaging, tweeted, and caught up on e-mail, and was almost as productive as I would have been with a full-blown computer in less tight quarters. And the battery had almost 80 percent of its charge left after two and a half hours of work.

The on-screen keyboard turned out to be less of an obstacle than having to I hop back and forth between multiple full-screen apps. (I’m really looking forward to trying out multitasking in the iPad version of iPhone OS 4.)

I’m not quite ready to go on major trips sans laptop. (One of my major apps–Photoshop–still has no workable iPad equivalent that I know about.) But the iPad was so much better suited to the unique challenges of coach air travel that taking both a laptop and an iPad feels less silly and redundant than it should in theory. In fact, the iPad was so unobtrusive that I thought for a moment I’d lost it–when it was merely hidden behind a copy of The New Yorker in my briefcase…

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