Okay, Lenovo totally knows how to use Twitter. The company’s press account has punched out a teasing little note, inviting us to keep a close eye on the near horizon with the expectation of exciting new products to come. We’ll concede that aside from the leaked roadmaps, we have no real lead on where this might be heading, but if the video that accompanied the tweet is anything to go by, we can expect a device that (a) almost certainly has handwriting and touchscreen capabilities built in, (b) is extremely likely to sport the ThinkPad branding, and (c) may or may not have a physical keyboard. That is to say, we could just be looking at a quirky new approach to promoting the latest X-series tablet refresh (X201T anyone?), or maybe Lenovo is going way back to its roots and is about to shock and awe us with a ThinkPad slate. All we know for now is that the video is after the break and well worth watching.
It was just a week ago that the $599 8.9-inch ExoPC tablet came into our lives, but now we’ve been lucky enough to receive some shots of its internals. If tablet or netbook organs are your thing there’s plenty to see in the gallery below, including some photos of the fan, what appears to be a Ene memory card controller, and an open Mini PCI-Express slot. The Intel Atom N270 CPU, 945 Express chipset and 2GB of RAM are blurry, but ExoPC has been nice enough to confirm those specs for us. Though there’s not much in terms of the externals here it looks to be a solidly built tablet, and it does appear to have a free SIM slot on its edge. We’re itching to see some some more pics of the final multitouch units, including the finger-friendly ExoPC UI Layer which will run on top of its Windows 7 Premium, but in the meantime we’ve got the gallery below.
At the introduction of the iPad, Steve Jobs showed a simple slide illustrating one of the burning questions in the industry for many years. On the left was a smartphone. On the right was a laptop. And in the middle was a gap. Apple, like many companies in the PC industry, was seeking to create a product that filled this gap. Indeed, the iPad itself reflects elements of the Apple devices that flank it. Its enclosure resembles the silver metallic enclosure of a MacBook Pro, but inside, it has the ARM processor architecture and operating system of the iPhone.
But the iPad is but the latest in a long line of products and would-be general-purpose devices that seeks to fill this gap, most of them short-lived. Some of the more recent ones include the aborted Palm Foleo, the Sony Mylo, Nokia Internet Tablets, UMPCs, and MIDs. Why are so many companies convinced there is opportunity in these products?
Let’s turn back the clock to 2002, the year Handspring launched its first smartphone, the monochrome 160 x 160-pixel Treo 180. It was the year that Verizon Wireless launched the first 3G network in the U.S. and the year MobileStar declared bankruptcy after deploying public Wi-Fi throughout many Starbucks locations in 2001. In 2002, PC World awarded its World Class Award for ultralight notebooks to the Fujitsu LifeBook P-2000. It was less than three pounds and had a 10.6-inch screen, but was 1.6-inches thick and had a starting price of $1,499. And it couldn’t access Facebook, Hulu, YouTube or Engadget — because they didn’t exist.
That other tablet that was announced just a week ago sure doesn’t seem to be setting Fusion Garage’s Joojoo off course. Not only did it see an increase in orders after the iPad announcement, but Fusion Garage CEO Chandra Rathakrishna just told us that production of the 12-inch tablet has kicked off and that the product is on target to start shipping this month. And it doesn’t sound like legal fees from fighting the TechCrunch lawsuit over the product are depleting Fusion Garage’s bank account: Chandra told us it’s teamed up with OEM CSL Group of Malaysia, which will be footing the bill for manufacturing in exchange for a “low single-digit” percentage of product revenue. We have our doubts about the math, but we’ll see how happy everyone is if and when the Joojoo starts shipping. (We’ll also see if James Cameron notices that Fusion Garage keeps using unlicensed Avatar images in its promo pictures.)
Chandra still wouldn’t budge on revealing what’s powering the device, but he was more than happy to confirm that the tablet will support full Flash at launch, and HD Flash content once Flash 10.1 is officially released — YouTube HD will play right now using a separate player plugin that takes advantage of GPU acceleration. “We have a bigger ‘app store’ than Apple because we have the full Internet,” he told us. Nevertheless, Fusion plans to launch a “web store” that will allow people to find web applications on the Joojoo. Speaking of Apple, Chandra was quite blunt about the iPad: “Imitation is the greatest form of flattery.” No really — he told us everything from Steve Jobs calling the iPad a “magical product” to the couch being on stage during the keynote to the $499 price point was a nod to the Joojoo, since “juju” is an African word for “magical” and the Joojoo was positioned as a couch computer when it launched in November. Uh, sure. Trash talking aside, we’re very excited to see what this thing can do — a 16:9 720p tablet that can play Hulu sounds pretty interesting to us. Check the full press release after the break.
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.
We’re sort of loving Acer’s new bad-boy vibe — not only have company execs recently gone on record saying that US PC manufacturers will be dead within 20 years and that they want to “change the Microsoft-Intel environment” with Chrome OS, but now they’re standing firm while everyone else races to do a tablet. At least that’s the word from Acer Taiwan president Scott Lin, who told Digitimes that while Acer can certainly produce a tablet device, it doesn’t fit into the company’s business model. What’s more, he doubts that other companies can simply copy Apple’s hardware and succeed — instead, Acer’s going to focus on ultra-thin laptops, a category Acer expects to account for 20-30 percent of its business this year. Lin also said Acer will introduce some new models that are less then 2cm (.7 inches) thick — assuming there’s an ARM-based Chrome OS netbook in that mix, we can certainly see the super thin and light laptop category and the tablet category aligning as direct competitors in the near future.
Last time we saw the 10-inch EROS tablet it was powered down and pouting about its two hours of battery life, but the tablet’s pulled itself together and powered up to show off its skills. The performance is pretty much what you would expect of an Intel Atom-powered Windows 7 Home Premium netbook with its keyboard chopped off, and from what we’ve been able to glean from the 11 minute video below the touchscreen seems responsive to writing with a stylus and to flicks of photos and pages in a comic book. You’ll notice, however the reviewer only uses his fingers a few times, though he’s actually quite good at typing on the on-screen keyboard. The rest of the time he uses the stylus to move through those far-from-finger-friendly Windows 7 menus. If you’re wondering why Windows 7 still needs additional software tweaks to work on a purely finger-driven tablet device, spend 10 minutes watching the video below. Or just listen to The Weepies’ awesome “Gotta Have You” — which perhaps not coincidentally ends when the tablet’s done booting.
Yes, we realize that it’s hard to provide too much visual differentiation between tablet PCs with large, ebony bezels, but we can’t help but think that this 8.9-inch multitouch tablet looks a lot like another, recently announced 9.7-inch multitouch tablet. Nevertheless this one’s quite different on the inside, delivering “the web without compromise,” meaning full browser support with flash courtesy of Windows 7 on an Atom N270 at 1.6GHz, with 2GB of DDR2 memory and a 32GB SSD with SD expansion. Yeah, those specs are familiar too, and while we’re not thinking this will deliver the sort of snappy performance seen on the iPad, it will certainly be a lot more functional. Battery life is only four hours, but at least it’s user-replaceable, and a price of $599 matches the 32GB iPad. Likewise it will be available in March — or you can get a non-multitouch prototype for $780 right this very moment. If, that is, you speak enough French to manage the order page.
By now you’ve probably read more on Apple’s iPad then you ever dreamed possible. In the last few days we’ve covered a lot of angles on the tablet and compiled a lot of data. Still, we felt that we hadn’t given you clear hands-on impressions and collected the myriad details about the device in one, easy-to-reach place. So we’ve decided to bundle all of that info into a single feature, joining our first-hand encounters with the iPad together with all of the data and details you should be aware of — including specs, plans, release schedules, pics, and video. So read on for everything we know (so far) about Cupertino’s first tablet!
Apple iPad’s most striking feature, its gorgeous 9.7-inch touchscreen display, uses liquid crystal display technology — but with a few unusual twists — to present a vivid image and a wide viewing angle.
“The iPad’s display uses the same capacitive touchscreen technology as the iPhone and iPod Touch,” says Vinita Jakhanwal, principal analyst for iSuppli. “At the same time, it offers a better picture quality than conventional LCDs.”
After months of speculation, Apple launched its tablet, the iPad on Wednesday. The lightweight device (1.5 pounds) features a luminous touchscreen and a user interface similar to the iPhone. The iPad, which can cost $500 to $830 depending on the model, runs an expanded version of the operating system used in the iPhone.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced the iPad’s screen as a LED-backlit with In-Plane Switching (IPS). Jobs was referring to a type of LCD screen that is more often found in HDTVs than it is in mobile devices.
So-called twisted nematic LCDs have dominated consumer laptop and phone displays. The viewing angle on these screens is limited, ranging from 110 to 120 degrees. When the screen is viewed outside this optimal range, its colors can look “off” and the overall image is faded or invisible.
In-Plane Switching helps fix those problems. In IPS LCD screens, the crystal molecules are oriented so their motion is parallel to the panel, instead of perpendicular to it. For viewers, the result is a very wide viewing angle — up to 180 degrees — with brilliant color.
“TVs have always used some variation of IPS in their LCD screens but now we are seeing this move to smaller computing devices,” says Jakhanwal.
The iPad’s screen, though, doesn’t have a wide aspect ratio, which is unusual in the TV-display world, says research firm DisplaySearch. Instead of a 16:10 or 16:9 aspect ratio, the iPad screen uses a 4:3 ratio.
“Perhaps they were trying to find a middle ground between the requirements for books, magazines and newspapers and the requirements for video and gaming,” say analysts at DisplaySearch.
The iPad display has some other interesting features. It is arsenic- and mecury-free and has a fingerprint-resistant oleophobic coating, which Apple had introduced in the iPhone 3G S. The iPad’s 1024 x 768 display resolution, at 132 pixels per inch, has chunkier pixels than the iPhone 3G S, which has a smaller display but a resolution of 163 pixels per inch.
But that may not be a fair comparison, says Jakhanwal. “If you have a smaller form factor, you need a higher resolution to better read the information on the display,” she says. Also, she adds, “the iPad has a more vivid display than a laptop screen.”
The iPad’s display is likely sourced from LG Display and Innolux, says iSuppli.
The biggest disappointment for tech enthusiasts is the lack of an OLED screen option in the iPad. That should be no surprise, say DisplaySearch and iSuppli. Display manufacturers just don’t have the fabrication capacity to create large quantities of big OLED displays, says Jakhanwal.
“The single supplier for active-matrix OLED screen today, Samsung Mobile, [its] current production capacity is all taken up by the mobile phone market,” she says. That means large volumes of very small screens.
“It’s unlikely they will scale back on that to produce lower volume, larger displays for Apple.”
Sony also produces OLED screens but in limited quantities, largely for its own products, like the Sony XEL-1.
Though Apple showed the iPad’s potential as an e-book reader, iSuppli and DisplaySearch remain skeptical about it. LCD screens, even in black-and-white mode, get washed out in bright sunlight. And if users turn on the backlight to improve the contrast, they are likely to draw down the device’s battery. On top of that, reading on an LCD means you’re staring into a light source, which produces more eyestrain than reading words by reflected light, as you do with printed pages or E Ink displays like those used in the Kindle, Nook and Sony Reader.
“Ultimately, reading for a few hours on a handheld LCD screen can be quite a strain,” says Jakhanwal.
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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.
