Tablet computers aren’t new. Windows notebook PCs with stylus-controlled touchscreens have been around for years, but the market remains a very small niche. The iPad, a tablet lacking many functions of these bigger, better spec’d machines, has probably sold more units in its first month (one million of them) than tablets have sold ever.
The response from computer makers has been more of the same old junk, hoping people will buy anything they call a tablet or a slate. They won’t. The public is sick of babysitting their computers. They want a gadget they don’t have to think about, something they aren’t scared of using. Manufacturers need to make a tablet that competes with the iPad not just in terms of hardware, but also concept. Here’s how to make one.
Hardware
Hardware is almost irrelevant, on the outside at least. The iPad is a slab of aluminum and glass with an absolute minimum of ports and buttons. Rivals counter this by promising USB ports, SD card slots and the like. The problem? Compatibility. If you include just one standard USB port, people expect it to behave like one, and they’ll plug in printers, mice and everything else. This requires drivers, which in turn adds complexity and eats into precious flash-memory space (a recent Epson printer driver update for the Mac was almost 1 GB in size).
The solution: Lightweight, low-powered hardware, designed not to run a full desktop OS but instead a purpose-made, tablet-friendly OS. It should be thought of as a big cellphone, designed for battery life and ease of use. It should be designed, most importantly, around software.
Software
A tablet needs its own operating system. This is an opportunity for companies to throw out legacy support for every previous iteration of their software (we’re looking at you, Windows registry) and start over. Start with a blank, ahem, slate and build from there. Forget about mouse and keyboard-based metaphors and start over. Design an OS that makes it easy to do what people actually want to do with a tablet. Most importantly, do not mistake this for a computer. You already sell computers. Let the people who say the lack of a Unix terminal is a “deal-breaker” buy one of those, and then ignore them.
HP gets this. It bought Palm because it sees the end of the PC market. PCs aren’t going anywhere soon, but like the laptop overtook the desktop, the tablet will be most people’s main computing tool. Building a tablet OS from scratch will take years if done properly. Palm’s WebOS is ready to be blown up into tablet form now, and if HP can manage the hardware side properly, it could have a true iPad rival up and running this year. Better still, it will own the hardware and the software instead of selling just another Windows PC, and competing only on price.
Apps
The success of Apple’s App Store isn’t about the sheer numbers. Most of the apps out there are junk. The thing that makes it work is the ease and safety of installation. Mac and iPhone developer Fraser Speirs puts it like this: “iPhone OS is the first mass-market operating system where consumers are no longer afraid to install software on their computers.” Daring Fireball’s John Gruber puts it more succinctly, saying that “the best way to think of iPhone OS devices [is as] app consoles.”
You see an app you like, you click it and you’re done. Payments are invisible, no application will infect or damage your machine and, if you don’t like the app, when you delete it it’s entirely gone. The suggestions that Apple should let users install apps from anywhere ignores this fact: The App Store is so successful because it is closed. Don’t agree? How’s the Android Marketplace doing?
Beating Apple
Apple has invented a device that normal people will use and enjoy and has shown us the future of computing. But there are some obvious areas where competitors can beat it. Censorship, for one. The App Store needs to be closed to work, but rejecting applications based on their content is wrong. The lack of clear guidelines for developers leads to more homogeneous applications, because programmers are scared to put a lot of time into an app that pushes the envelope if it may never make it into the store.
And remember, you don’t have to beat the iPad to win here. You just need to make something better than a personal computer. How hard can that be?
Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com
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