Microsoft’s Best Buy-exclusive Arc Keyboard still won’t be hitting stores for another couple of weeks (February 21st, to be specific), but we were lucky enough to get our hands on one a little early, and figured we’d share a few impressions with you, the keyboard-using masses. The first thing you’ll notice when seeing the keyboard in person is that it’s smaller than even the press photos suggested — basically the same size as your average 15-inch laptop keyboard, with a glossy bezel just big enough to let you pick it up without pressing a key. It’s also undeniably eye-catching, with an “arc” that actually more closely resembles Apple’s Magic Mouse than Microsoft’s own Arc mouse.
Of course, most folks will choose function over form when it comes to a keyboard, and in that respect the Arc Keyboard is a bit of a mixed bag.
Tablets today are thought to be made in one of two ways: Upsizing a smartphone or downsizing a laptop. Many of these new tablets are decent, but both methods render something less than the perfect tablet.
These tablets—not the convertible laptops of the past decade, but real single-pane slate-like ones—are in various stages of development, and have various operating systems. You have your iPad, JooJoo, a bunch of Android tablets, HP’s slate, the as-yet-unseen Chrome OS tablets, the equally mysterious Courier, and the Microsoft-partner tablets that currently run a reasonably full version of Windows 7. You can easily categorize nearly all of these into two basic design philosophies: The iPad and Android tablets come from platforms originally designed with smartphones in mind; the Windows 7 tablets fully embrace the traditional desktop-metaphor OS; the Chrome OS and JooJoo strip out most of the desktop, leaving—perhaps awkwardly—just the browser.
But what about the Courier? If there is such a thing as a “third” option, it’s what Microsoft dreamed up over the last year. Microsoft, already has its fingers in both ends of the pie, but Courier represents a truly different envisioning. Could the tablet that we’ve really been waiting for come from Redmond? Maybe, but at the moment the fate of Courier isn’t clear at all.
Making Phones Bigger
First you have the method of taking a phone interface and making it bigger. That’s the iPad, the Android tablets and, in some modes, Lenovo’s Ideapad U1. Android tablets are basically doing an upscaling of the base Android interface, whereas the iPad also makes customized first-party apps to take advantage of the increased screen space. Both can theoretically run all the apps their little brothers can. Lenovo is also doing something very similar by creating a completely customized ground-up OS that’s sorta widget-based, which is basically a smartphone in everything but name. (When docked, the U1 tablet becomes a screen for a Windows computer, but that’s another story.)
So far, going up from a phone OS seems to be the better bet, compared to simplifying a desktop-style OS. But the phone experience is far from perfect.
When you work off of a smartphone base, you theoretically already have the touch interface locked in, because Android, iPhone, Palm and other smartphones now eschew the skinny stylus for your fat finger. It’s a more natural pointing device for a tablet, since you can hold the device in one hand while pointing at it with the other. If you were to use a stylus, you’d have to grip the tablet with your forearm, like a watermelon or a baby, in order to provide a stable enough surface to press down upon with a pen.
Also, because you’re working with a phone-up methodology, you get to sell a tablet relatively cheap by using high-end phone parts rather than low-end netbook parts. For example, you have Android tablets that are made from ARM processors and Nvidia Tegra graphics, which are basically meant to run high-end phones. Then there’s the Apple A4 processor, which is also ARM-based.
So for these manufacturers, they already have the type of modularized applications with minimal multitasking (in Apple’s case, basically none) that can run decently well on low-powered hardware. Plus, this type of system requirements basically guarantees that you’ll have a better battery life than the alternative.
Jesus already sung much of the praises of this approach when he correctly surmised that the iPad would have this style of operating system. But what about the negatives?
If you’re building a tablet from a phone OS, you would fail to have a completely stand-alone device, in the sense that a laptop is completely standalone. You couldn’t have file access to dump photos, video and other media onto, you’d have to sync it to something else once in a while to get everything you need. And you have to go through a marketplace instead of installing stuff like a computer.
There is also no real way for apps to interact with each other. There’s copy and paste on smartphones, and certain apps can read data files from certain other apps (like the contact list), but there’s no way to interact like dragging and dropping files across applications. In the iPhone, you can’t even multitask to work on two things simultaneously. You can on Android, but there’s minimal interaction between applications. That’s not saying it can’t be done, it’s just not so entrenched in the base OS or the base philosophy that application developers don’t do it very often. If the OS maker doesn’t do it, developers won’t either.
Also, because phones are a very isolated experience, App Stores make it much easier to find apps that are both customized for your device and safe to install. This is great for phones, since stability is important, but when you’re getting into higher-performance devices, you want the ability to choose what apps you want, not just pick from the ones that Apple or Google deem OK for you to consume. And since this kind of tablet is adapted from the phone ecosystem, that’s the only choice you have.
To have a very good experience on any sort of serious computing device (not a phone), you need interactivity. An example on the Mac is the way your Mail application knows if someone is online in iChat, and shows a little light by his name, telling you that you can just IM him instead of emailing. Interactivity like this is part of the base design experience of Courier, judging on the videos we posted. You can move parts of each application easily into any other application, and each piece knows what’s being dumped onto it. The current state of phones can’t, and don’t this co-mingling philosophy engrained into it.
Peripherals is something else a phone-based OS can’t handle well. You’re limited to a specific number of device accessories that needs to be vetted in order to ensure compatibility. Even the iPad, which has a few more accessories than the iPhone (like a keyboard), doesn’t have nearly the amount of compatibility as a desktop. A tablet needs to learn this lesson from desktops in order to be truly useful. Plug in a keyboard? Sure. A firewire camera to have the device act as a target storage device? Absolutely. Another tablet, so you can have twice the amount of display area? Why the hell not. Print? Yes.
All this stuff is doable on phone devices, if developers wanted to. Hell, anything is possible if you want it to be. None of this stuff is against the laws of physics, it’s just a matter of wanting to put it in. There’s no reason why these phone-based OSes can’t accept peripherals, multitask, and do everything better than a phone. It’s just against the design philosophy.
But not all of this is software. There are certain hardware expectations that can’t be met with the current batch of phone OSes. If you’re looking at devices on a curve, you have your phone, then your tablet, then your laptop and your desktop. As the size of a increases, your expectation for power does too, and battery life decreases in accordance. So theoretically, in a tablet device, you’d want to have one significant step up in performance over phones, which we’re not seeing in these devices. I’m not talking just running the same applications faster, with upscaled graphics, I’m talking entirely new things you can only do with increased processing power. Stuff like true multitasking, games that are actually noticeably better than cellphone games, light media editing (not as good as a laptop, of course) and media playback of all kinds, handling all sorts of codecs.
That’s right, people expect more functionality and power with that bigger screen. Android’s tablets run Android apps pretty fast, but not so fast that they’re on an entirely new level. Widget-ized computing may prove to be practical, something people need as a second device. But for anybody in need of real heavy-duty computing, like Photoshop photo editing or Final Cut video processing, the design of a tablet simply won’t do.
Shrinking PCs Down
Then, you have the people who have taken a windows-style desktop-metaphor interface and simplified it for a tablet. There’s the HP slate, which runs Windows 7 but, knowing HP, will come with a friendly TouchSmart skin to hide Windows from sight while you’re doing basic media and (hopefully) social stuff. There are various other Windows 7 tablets, including the Archos 9, basically just Windows 7 machines stripped of their keyboard. (Some have styluses.)
What makes no sense about the new crop of Windows-powered tablets is that they are based on a design concept that is already proven not to work. You’ll recall back to the first time Microsoft tried these tablets, with Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, around the turn of the century, and you’ll remember that although the premise was neat, the execution had no unique functionality, no specific base of great apps, from Microsoft or anybody else. It was just a regular laptop with a stylus interface thrown in. What has changed? Now you can use your finger, instead:
There are benefits: Excellent peripheral support, the ability to install custom applications, true multitasking and cross-app interactivity, enhanced media performance, etc. In short, everything you expect from a low-powered Windows laptop, you can more or less expect here. But that extra boost of juice, that ongoing background chatter, demand more on the system. The downside is that battery is never remotely as good, and you have to deal with old-world Windows issues, like slower boot times, sleep issues, and, yes, viruses.
HP has worked hard to sell the concept of the touch PC with their TouchSmart platform. We have seen the desktop all-in-one TouchSmarts running multitouch Windows 7 but there wasn’t a lot of software for them. Now, HP appears to be pinning its hopes to the slate, presumably giving a nice “tablet” interface on top of Windows 7 when you need it, but with the ability to pop back into desktop mode when you don’t. That’s fine, better even, but it’s not a coherent computing experience.
Since it’s ultimately a desktop OS, it’s not designed for the type of input schemes you have on tablets. Besides, what happens when something running in the background crashes or demands attention? Nothing will shake you from your tablet reverie like an unexpected alert from the good people of Norton that your PC is in grave danger of being violated. Unless the tablet-friendly environment is more than skin deep, like the ones phone developers now use to hide Windows Mobile, the whole thing is a wash. By delaying on the Courier and promoting Windows 7 touch tablets, Microsoft’s making the same kind of mistake that made WinCE devices (Windows Mobile) slow and clunky. They’re offering up their standard base operating system and just telling people to add a skin on top, which is not the way to a tablet revolution.
Desktop Lite: The Browser-Only Approach
Frankly, we’re not sure where to put JooJoo and the mysterious Chrome OS. Their philosophy? Why design a whole new OS when you can take the screen most people stare at most often—the web browser—and effectively limit your OS to that. Sure, web apps are only going to get better, richer. But this approach seems to take the limitations of both the phone and the desktop-metaphor OS, with almost none of the benefits of either.
Everything we’ve seen from the Chrome OS, both early on and more recently, suggests that it is typical white-on-black boring Google desktop style. We hope there’s a trick or two up its sleeve, because if it’s just a Chrome browser in a box, it might suffer.
We know more about the JooJoo. What’s nice about it is that, presumably like the Chrome, its browser is a real WebKit PC browser, not a skimpy mobile one, so it supports Flash and Silverlight, and therefore Hulu, YouTube in HD, and other great video experiences. It does have a 1MP webcam, as well, but it’s only for “video conferencing,” if and when a browser-based video Skype comes along.
What We Need Is a Third Approach
The tablet operating system problem is one that no one has actually solved in the thirty-something years of personal computing, even though tablets have been in the public’s imagination for at least that long.
The biggest players, Apple, Google and Microsoft have huge investments in both desktop and mobile software, and seem to attack this tablet problem from attacking with both Android and Chrome OS. They’re all using their previous knowledge to get a head start. This is bad. Neither of these two solutions is optimal.
Surprisingly enough, it’s Microsoft—preoccupied as it is with mobile and desktop—that’s perhaps closest to this golden mean of tablets.
If you watch the Courier video above, you’ll notice that it’s an entirely new class of interface. It doesn’t have anything reminiscent of applications, which are the way phones do it, and it doesn’t have the traditional windowing (lower-case) for programs, which is what desktops use. It’s kinda just one big interface where everything talks to everything else, where you can do stuff in a natural way that makes sense.
Or take a look at this video. Again, it’s neither phone nor desktop—it’s designed with finger pointing in mind, optimized for this middle-ground in screen size. This is just a concept render, but it serves the point: We’re looking for something completely new with an interface that “just works” for the device, giving you features from the desktop-side such as multitasking, serious computing and the ability to run any app without having to go through a locked-down application store funnel. But we also don’t want to sacrifice the gestures, fingerability or light-weightness that you gain from smartphones.
It might never happen. It takes years and massive amounts of manpower to create a new operating system. Microsoft’s taking forever just getting Windows Phone into the 21st century. While we have faith (somehow) that Microsoft will revamp its mobile franchise in its 7th iteration, it’s unlikely that they would also then push out an entirely new operating system anytime in the next few years. More problematic is the recent insistence by Steve Ballmer at CES that Windows 7 tablets are the solution, when they very clearly are not.
If not Microsoft, then who? Apple and Google have already shown what they plan to do in the tablet space—and their operating systems may grow and develop in ways only hinted at now. The iPhone platform is not bad, and if they can break through the glass ceiling described above, it could be the answer. Google Chrome OS could also manifest itself in unexpected ways, even if we currently don’t have too much optimism. Until that day arrives—or until the unlikely event that an upstart designs a seriously revolutionary OS and accompanying hardware platform to deliver it on—we’ll have to make do with our big phones and keyboardless laptops.
This article was written on April 17, 2008 by CyberNet.
Last week we wrote about how you could avoid traffic jams with Microsoft’s new Clearflow technology, a project that had been in the works for over five years. It’s not even been a week since Clearflow launched and now Google has launched their own version of a traffic predicting system. After reviewing both, each has its strengths and weaknesses.
The nicest feature about Google’s traffic avoiding system is that there’s a drop-down menu for a day and then a slider for the time so that you can choose a day and time that you’ll be going through a particular area to see what traffic might be like. They use data from past conditions to give you a rough estimate. Choosing a day and time is something that Microsoft unfortunately does not offer. One point goes to Google here.
What Google doesn’t offer is a re-routing feature which is something that Microsoft does offer. Microsoft allows users to have the system choose a route or receive an alternate route based on four years worth of real-world traffic data. The Clearflow technology is available in 72 cities while Google’s traffic system is available in only 30 major US metropolitan areas and partially in others. One point goes to Microsoft here.
To use the traffic prediction feature in Google Maps, just click on the Traffic button (which has been there for a while in certain cities) and if you’re in a supported city, you’ll be able to select a day and time that you’d like to see traffic conditions for.
Overall I wouldn’t say that Microsoft’s or Google’s system is superior to the other. They’re both useful for certain things and it’ll definitely be interesting to see how traffic predicting technology improves in the future.
This looks like it may be more of a price war than an official price drop, but anyone in the market for a Zune HD may one to pay a visit to Amazon or Newegg fairly soon, as they’re now both selling the device for what appears to be the lowest price yet. While there’s no telling how long it’ll last, you can now snag a black 16GB Zune HD for $189.99 ($30 off the MSRP), or a 32GB Platinum Zune HD for $249.99 (a discount of $40). As of this writing, most other retailers seem to be offering nothing more than $20 discounts, though we have a suspicion that may change in the near future.
Sony Ericsson has unveiled the Aspen, a Microsoft-powered business smartphone with a full QWERTY keyboard and a 2.4-inch, 240-by-320-pixel QVGA touch screen.
The phone itself looks fairly unremarkable, but it turns out the Aspen is running Windows Mobile 6.5.3, which would make it the first handset to do so. Windows Mobile 6.5.3 includes support for glass capacitive touch screens with multi-touch–meaning that we could finally see some Windows Mobile phones that respond properly to finger touches instead of a stylus.
It’s finally here: Windows Mobile 6.5.3, the iterative finger-friendly Windows Mobile release that should have been wrapped into 6.5.0. The latest mobile wares from Microsoft come wrapped inside the Sony Ericsson Aspen (aka, Faith); a business-focused QWERTY candybar with 2.4-inch QVGA TFT touchscreen LCD, 3.2 megapixel camera, A-GPS with Google Maps, 3.5-mm audio jack, WiFi, and microSD expansion. This latest addition to Sony Ericsson’s GreenHeart portfolio comes in black or white silver and packs quad-band GSM/EDGE with either HSPA 900/2100 or 850/900/2100 radios (depending on region). Available in Q2.
Back to Windows Mobile 6.5.3 for a second, although this is a .dot.dot update it’s actually a fairly significant move for Microsoft. For starters, this release now includes a more finger-friendly layout (no stylus needed even when digging deep into the OS), support for capacitive touchscreens (huzzah!), and acts as a platform to enable multitouch. Microsoft has also improved browser performance with faster page load times and better memory management while improving the pan and flick gestures and zoom and rotational speeds. Sounds like somebody is getting ready for Mobile World Congress.
This one’s for the PC gamers, especially those who have trouble with multi-button key presses. With some keyboards, pressing multiple keys at one time (to execute a special move, perhaps) causes a problem where not all the key presses are recorded. The unreported key presses are called “ghosts,” since the computer doesn’t see them. The just-announced Microsoft SideWinder X4 is built differently, so that gamers can press up to 26 keys at once and the computer will recognize each key. Now that’s a move I’d like to see.
Besides anti-ghosting, this SideWinder lets players manually toggle from standard mode into one of two gaming modes, automatically switch profiles, program macro keys (up to 18 per profile), and record macros during a game. It also offers backlit keys and quick-access media keys.
The SideWinder X4 works with Windows 7, Vista, and XP (excluding XP 64-bit) systems. Look for it in March with a list price of $59.95.
Microsoft’s just outed a new gaming keyboard — the SideWinder X4 — which promises to hold up in even the most intense situations. Boasting what the company says is the “most advanced” anti-ghosting technology around, the X4 allows the pressing of up to 26 keys at once for the ultimate gaming moves. Other features include macro recording and auto macro repeat functions, plus profile and mode switching allows your ‘board to remember all your moves for different games. So, you probably want it right now, but you’re going to have to wait a little longer — the SideWinder X4 will arrive in March, and it’ll run you $59.95. Full press release is after the break.
I wasn’t going to write about this today, but I sort of have to. Gizmodo is reporting today that the “Zune Phone” … no wait, there is no Zune Phone.
Everyone is pretty secure saying that Windows Mobile 7 will debut at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona in about two weeks. This isn’t inside knowledge; Microsoft executives have been dropping broad hints in public conference calls. We’ll be there, of course.
But using Zune as a component service in their new OS doesn’t make Windows Mobile 7 a “Zune phone” any more than it is anticipated to be an “XBox phone” or a “Windows Live phone” or, for that matter, an “Exchange phone.” (And no, there’s no inside knowledge there either, except for common sense.)
Here’s what Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said in 2007:
“It’s not a concept you’ll ever get from us. We’re in the Windows Mobile business. We can put Zune into Windows Mobile, we can put Xbox into Windows Mobile. We can pour everything in.”
“It’s the hyperlink in the physical world” says a Microsoft PR man, giving us the most succinct definition of what Redmond’s Tag initiative is all about. Having announced its alternative take on the barcode at CES 2009, Microsoft has been working behind the scenes on proliferating the use of these multicolored Tags, which are designed to be snapped by nearby cameraphones. Once the pattern is recognized, you can obtain digital content directly on your phone — whether it be a website link, YouTube video, or whatever — and the uses are pretty much limitless: business cards, product packaging, magazines, anything that can benefit from supplemental online content and has a flat surface is a candidate to be Tagged. Such is the theory anyhow, and Microsoft’s doing all it can to make it happen, with software for most mobile platforms, including the iPhone. Video demonstration after the break.
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To have a very good experience on any sort of serious computing device (not a phone), you need interactivity. An example on the Mac is the way your Mail application knows if someone is online in iChat, and shows a little light by his name, telling you that you can just IM him instead of emailing. Interactivity like this is part of the base design experience of Courier, judging on the videos we posted. You can move parts of each application easily into any other application, and each piece knows what’s being dumped onto it. The current state of phones can’t, and don’t this co-mingling philosophy engrained into it.
