Tag Archives | Tablets

Remembering 9/11, on the iPad and on the Web

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 11, 2011 at 4:27 am

Steve Rosenbaum's The 9/11 Memorial: Past, Present, and Future

On September 11th, 2001, the Web basically consisted of words, images, murky RealAudio sound, and a smattering of video that was a hassle to deal with, especially if you were still on dial-up. And tablets, in their modern, iPad-era form, didn’t exist at all. But a lot has happened in the past decade–and the tenth-anniversary coverage of the attacks and subsequent events include some remarkable creations which make use of today’s technology to do things that TV, books, magazines, and newspapers can’t.

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Me, Elsewhere

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 8, 2011 at 1:51 pm

I haven’t written as much here recently as I like to, but I have a good excuse: I’ve been hard at work writing for other sites. Three new stories are up today:

* At TIME.com, I reviewed two new Android phones from Motorola: the potent (and battery-hungry) Droid Bionic, and the basic (and thrifty) Triumph.

* TIME also asked me to try and make sense of the drama going on over at AOL and TechCrunch. I’m not even sure if that’s possible, but I tried.

* Over at AllBusiness.com, I wrote about a newish gadget that small businesses seem to be snapping up with the same zea they once adopted IBM PCs and PalmPilots. It’s called the iPad.

Whew! (And stay turned for another bit of related news in the not-too-distant future.)

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Sony’s Tablets: They’re the Sonys of Tablets!

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 5, 2011 at 2:00 am

Sony had already sort of announced its new Android tablets again and again, but at the IFA consumer-electronics show in Berlin, it did the job officially . The 10.1″ model is the Tablet S, and will ship on September 16th for $499.99 (16GB) and $599.99 (32GB).  The folding one with two 5.5″ displays is the Tablet P, and will be sold with bundled AT&T wireless service at an unspecified date (“coming soon”) and price.

I got some hands-on time with both Sony tablets, and don’t expect either to be the Great iPad Competitor that leads folks to conclude that it’s possible to compete effectively with Apple’s tablet. (In the phone world, the original Verizon Droid accomplished that, even though its reign as the iPad’s archrival was brief.) But neither one feels generic, either–they’re the sort of tablets you might expect Sony to come up with, and I mean that as a compliment. (If Sony had branded them as VAIO tablets, they would have felt right at home in its lineup of desktop and laptop PCs.)

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Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 7.7: Now You See It, Now You Don’t

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 3, 2011 at 9:58 pm

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On Friday morning here in Berlin, I headed to the IFA electronics show. My first stop was Samsung’ ginormous exhibition, where one of the biggest sections was devoted to the upcoming Galaxy Tab 7.7. I played with one, admired the amazingly vivid Super AMOLED Plus screen, and snapped the photo above. Then I left.

Turns out that I was lucky. Samsung later removed all the Tab 7.7s from the show, presumably for reasons relating to Apple’s ongoing patent case over the Galaxy Tab. Here’s FOSS Patents’ Florian Mueller with some details. (In Germany, Apple has an injunction against Samsung that prevents it from selling the Tab 10.1 here.)

Samsung apparently doesn’t plan to sell the 7.7 in the U.S., a move that Mueller speculates could be spurred by the Galaxy Tab line’s legal woes. I’m not a patent lawyer and am not taking a stance on the case, but I’ll be sorry if the 7.7 can’t make it into the market. From a hardware standpoint, at least, it’s the nicest 7″ (or thereabouts) tablet I’ve seen. I’d like to see consumers get the chance to embrace it or reject it as they see fit.

[Full disclosure: I spoke on a panel at IFA, and the conference organizers covered my travel costs.]

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Samsung’s Galaxy Note: The Return of the PDA

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 1, 2011 at 4:00 am

“If you see a stylus,” Steve Jobs famously said at the original iPhone launch, “they blew it.” Here at the IFA show in Berlin, Samsung just announced the Galaxy Note, a new device that’s got a stylus–and which revels in that fact. Samsung is calling it “a new category of device,” but to me, it feels like a 2011 take on an old idea: the PalmPilot-style Personal Digital Assistant.
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The TouchPad Lives! Momentarily! Or Eventually! Possibly! I Hope So!

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 30, 2011 at 4:32 pm

Not too long ago, HP was laying out its vision for its then-new TouchPad tablet. It involved the company’s dedication to making the TouchPad a success, and–everyone at HP who I spoke with repeated this word until it rang in my ears–the “scale” the giant company could being to the effort. The strategy was ambitious and clear.

Then, week before last, HP abruptly responded to disappointing initial sales for the new tablet by killing it. That was depressing. But clear.

Then it decided to blow out the remaining Touchpads for $99 apiece. Poignant. And understandable, at least. I mean, it’s better than dumping them in landfill.

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The Trouble With Touch Screens and Old-Fashioned Windows 8

Posted by Jared Newman on August 30, 2011 at 3:00 pm

I’m optimistic about Microsoft’s tablet plans for Windows 8. The idea of combining a touch-optimized layer for tablet apps with the familiar mouse-and-keyboard interface for legacy software seems to me like the best of both worlds, at least in theory.

But Microsoft might run into trouble by trying to shoehorn touch screen support into the traditional version of Windows, which will remain accessible on tablets even though it’s not designed primarily for them. Exhibit A: Windows 8’s redesigned Windows Explorer, which will bring the ribbon interface of products like Office and Paint into the operating system’s file manager.

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Amazon Tablet: How Low Could It Go?

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 26, 2011 at 12:33 pm

The New York Post’s Garett Sloane is reporting that a source tells him that Amazon.com will start selling an Android tablet for “hundreds less” than the $499 iPad in late September or October. “Hundreds less?” That’s both a specific claim and a vague one.

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