Say the words “tablet computer” and ten bucks says it’s Apple’s iPad that springs to mind. But that doesn’t mean other companies aren’t busy building their own version of a touch-enabled, multimedia-sporting, slab of portable computing goodness.
Dell’s first effort at a tablet will be the Mini 5 (a name that is still in beta) — a slice of plastic and glass with a 5-inch capacitive touchscreen that according to Michael Dell will debut “in a couple of months.”
The Mini 5 will sport a 5-megapixel camera on the back, a separate front-facing camera that can be used for video conferencing, a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity and a Qualcomm Snapdragon 1-GHz processor. The 5-inch screen also means it will be be closer to the Sony PSP in its form factor than the longer legal notepad design of the iPad.
The Mini 5 will run the latest version of Google’s Android operating system, version 2.0 or higher. And instead of the 4:3 aspect ratio of the iPad, Dell’s tablets will support the 16:9 ratio. Widescreen films anyone?
“It’s a device optimized for media consumption,” Neeraj Choubey, general manager of the tablets division at Dell told Wired.com. “It will offer the full web-browsing experience so you have something that you are holding in your hand that replaces everything the smartphone does and takes on quite a bit of the features of a laptop.”
The Dell 5 Mini will also just be the first in a series. “We are going to have a family of tablets,” says Choubey. “The first one is a 5-inch screen but we want to scale that up to a variety of screen sizes.”
That means future versions of the Mini 5 could have larger screens that will be closer in size to the iPad.
Dell wouldn’t comment on pricing, beyond saying it will be “competitive,” or when it will launch this year. Apple’s iPad ranges from $500 to $830.
With the launch of iPad in January, the tablet PCs are going through a renaissance. Though PC makers have offered slates and convertible notebooks for nearly a decade, consumers haven’t bought them in droves. With its 9.7-inch display, sleek design and Apple’s relentless hype, the iPad could alter the way we experience mobile computing. And Dell knows this.
Three years ago, Dell started expanding its product line to include mobile products. Dell smartphones are now sold in Brazil and China and it hopes to bring a version to North America. Meanwhile, the company set up a tablet division, and three weeks ago Choubey joined Dell from venture capital firm Venrock.
As he sees it, the Mini 5 will offer the apps that are available on smartphones, a set of specialized tools and programs for business users, a strong movies and music experience and web surfing — flash and all included. Take that, iPad.
Along with the apps on the Mini 5 users will have quick access to e-mail, YouTube, Amazon’s MP3 store for music, as well as spreadsheet, presentation maker and documents. It will also support voice recognition. And these are characteristics that will be common to all tablets from Dell.
Still it will be a hard sell to consumers, says Van Baker, an analyst with research firm Gartner.
“If all you are bringing to the market is another media-playing or handheld-gaming device, then it’s not going to work,” he says. “It’s all about the services you have behind the device.”
And that’s where the iPad scores, with its strong developer ecosystem and 100,000 apps, along with iTunes and iBooks, says Baker.
Dell is betting it can offer that and add a compelling value proposition for business users: a promise that its tablet won’t just be a coffee-table device but instead a powerful productivity tool.
“There’s no reason why you can’t use the tablet to take notes in class,” he says.
Dell will also offer services such as syncing that will allow users to move music, documents and other data between their PC and tablet easily.
“At a very basic level, you would have a service that will share content across the devices seamlessly and have it in the cloud,” says Choubey.
Dell also hopes to draw on the Android ecosystem by offering developers the opportunity to port their Android apps to the Mini 5 and its successors.
For the Mini 5, though, its PlayStation Portable-like form factor could be a big drawback, says Baker. The Dell Mini 5 is closer in its looks to gadgets better known as mobile internet devices or MIDs, a category that has been languishing despite products from companies such as Lenovo and Archos.
“If the Dell Mini 5 is this small and it is pocketable, then why isn’t it a phone?” asks Baker. “If I am going to carry a second device, it better have something that’s a significant advantage over what I can do with my phone. With the iPad, the value proposition is a much larger display.”
But Choubey says the innovation is not just in the form factor but also in the business model. Dell will work with carriers to bundle inexpensive data plans for the Mini 5 and other tablets.
“That type of model — the way iPad was able to do with AT& T — will become more prevalent with these tablet devices,” he says. “It allows the carrier to increase number of devices per user.” Apple introduced a $15 for 250 MB, or an unlimited $30 a month, no-contract data plan for use with the iPad.
Shipping next month, Apple’s iPad won’t include a camera, but a growing number of clues hint at future versions of the tablet gaining a webcam.
MacRumors received a tip regarding lines of code referring to camera characteristics in the iPad’s software development kit (screegrabbed to the right). The snippets of code allude to zoom, flash, and “front camera.” Added together, that sounds similar to the iSight webcams on MacBooks and iMacs.
Also hinting at a webcam, a job listing Apple posted earlier this month sought a quality-assurance engineer for the “iPad division” to test still, video and audio capture and playback.
The very first hint of a webcam was discovered in a demonstration unit of the iPad during Apple’s Jan. 27 event. The iPad’s Contacts app revealed a “Take Photo” button. However, developers tinkering with the iPad SDK say that button has since been removed.
Some have speculated that Apple could announce the iPad will ship with a camera before the device ships at the end of March. However, it seems unlikely that Steve Jobs would leave such a major feature unmentioned.
What I wonder is whether these hints of cameras appearing in future iPads will affect sales of the first-generation tablet. I would assume the average consumer will opt to wait for the second-generation of the device in the hope of it gaining a camera.
Updated 5 p.m. Wednesday PDT: MacRumors received the tip and screengrab of the code. Erica Sadun did not provide the code, as previously stated. Wired.com regrets the error.
Now that Apple has chosen the famously awkward name “iPad” for its tablet, the most obvious candidate “iTablet” is up for grabs. Sure enough, a UK company is leaping at the opportunity.
X2 is happy to announce it’s “hot on the heels of Apple’s latest product launch” with the iTablet, which will run Windows 7 and Linux. The iTablet will ship April in two screen sizes — 10.2 inches and 10.7 inches — with a 1,024-by-768 resolution TFT touchscreen (multitouch optional).
Other specs sound like the guts of a netbook: a 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor, up to 250GB hard drive capacity, built-in stereo speakers, three USB ports, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, HDMI output, a 1.3-megapixel webcam and 3G connectivity.
It’s good to see competition for the iPad (I did, after all, predict 2010 would be the year of the tablet), but it’s hard to draw positive impressions from a company whose website is practically impossible to navigate. No details on price have been announced.
Sony has long said it would cautiously approach the tablet market while it built up its Reader e-book line, but it looks like things are picking up a little steam: CFO Nobuyuki Oneda said the company is “very interested” in the tablet market during his post-earnings report news conference. Oneda said that Sony’s “confident we have the skills to create a product,” and that “Time-wise we are a little behind the iPad but it’s a space we would like to be an active player in.” We could certainly see a Sony device about the size of the Reader Daily Edition making a splash, especially if it’s tied in with Sony’s new push at a unified online experience — and dare we hope for tablet remix of the Dash Internet Viewer (pictured above) based on the Chumby OS? Time will tell.
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.
When I picked up my iPhone over the weekend, I had an epiphany. I was using the LinkedIn app to confirm an invitation to connect, and it hit me: This is the future of mobile computing, the mobile web — the mobile experience.
No, I’m not saying the LinkedIn app is the future per se (that’d be silly), but rather the overall concept of it. The LinkedIn iPhone app is, in my opinion, better than the actual LinkedIn.com website. Same goes for the Facebook app compared to Facebook.com.
Gone are their busy, tab-infested UIs. In their stead are beautiful bubbly icons screaming “Touch me!” We no longer have to squint or click around in search of the feature we’re trying to access: The button is right there in that simple interface for us to tap.
The Facebook and Linkedin apps are two key examples of popular services whose iPhone apps outdid the websites they were trying to “port.” They’re two gems glistening brightly for the future of mobile.
Now that we can have experiences like these on a bigger touchscreen, with the iPad and the horde of tablets that will follow it, we can expect computing to become much easier than what we’re accustomed to today.
That’s not to say everything will have to be an iPad app. iPad owners aren’t going to be the only ones to benefit from Apple’s invention.
The iPad opens a path for an improved web experience for everyone. As soon as the iPad and its competing slates are in people’s hands, we’ll see a host of websites tailoring their content for touchscreen tablet browsing, and it’s going to be far more pleasant than the web experience we’re used to today.
Have you seen Flickr’s mobile website lately? Or YouTube’s? They’re both far friendlier, simpler and to-the-point than their original websites, and they’re plenty functional.
I’m awfully jaded about monotonous browser tabs, puny headlines and boring boxes all over the place, aren’t you? The iPhone and the iPad give web developers an excuse to break free from traditional user interfaces.
As a side effect it’s also pushing developers to ditch old, outdated web standards, such as Adobe Flash, and embrace newer ones like HTML5. Thank goodness, because we’ve been needing a change.
Cleaner, friendlier, intimate UI may sound like a step backward, but it’s not. There are huge implications.
We all learn how to touch with our fingers before we figure out how to type or click a mouse. Often when we think about computing we overlook children and the elderly, and the iPad is going to be the first computer to eliminate the social divide.
The iPhone was the first phone that a Luddite could figure out in seconds and a hacker could tinker around with for endless hours. In an analogous way the iPad is going to be the computer a toddler can play games with and learn, and the same computer your grandma uses to send e-mails, browse the web and edit photos.
If you think about how a computer like this will impact people sociologically, suddenly the iPad is far more than a larger iPod Touch, as many have described it. It’s the computer for everyone: an idea Apple has been working toward for years.
That doesn’t mean the iPad will be the only computer for everyone and destroy every PC on the market, because that’s not even remotely likely. But it will introduce a significant new category.
For anyone plugged in to tech history, the idea of the child-friendly, super-lightweight computer is actually reminiscent of Xerox pioneer Alan Kay’s 40-year-old concept of the Dynabook (pictured in sketch above). I’ve been chatting with Kay about the iPad, but he’s waiting to provide his official comment on the device until he’s had a chance to try it out.
Tablet naysayers have anticipated Apple’s tablet would be a failure because of form factor, ergonomics and UI. But they missed out on the bigger problem: Nobody has cared to create content (be it web or native applications) for tablets — until now.
Say what you will about Apple, but Steve Jobs’ company is a market shaper, and the iPad is the only tablet that could shove the computing world in a new direction.
Content developers need to see these kinds of numbers to have faith in investing in a new platform. At this rate, we’re all heading with Apple into the future of computing, and it’s looking quite bright.
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.
Wacom’s new Intuos graphics tablet comes with something new, and something missing. The OG tablet-masters have launched the Intuos 4 with a brand new tip sensor in the pen, and at the same time Wacom has cut the cable, making the tablet completely wire-free, hooked up instead via Bluetooth.
The new tip sensor uses electro magnetic resonance (EMR) to do its business, and what that translates to for the artist is a smoother pressure curve, whichgices a more accurate rendering of how hard you press, and starts with almost zero pressure when you begin a stroke. Tablet users will be familiar with the difficulties of drawing very light strokes. In numbers, this doubles the resolution of previous pro-models, with 2048 pressure levels instead of 1024.
The $400, 8 x 5-inch tablet uses Bluetooth to connect, and charges over USB. As is usual with Wacom, you get a bunch of configurable hard-switches so you can stay away from the keyboard. Now these have little displays next to them to remind you just what function you set. There is also a “touch ring”, for scrolling or zooming. There is also a five button, wireless mouse that can be used atop the pad should you need it.
The Intuos 4 wireless will be available in “a few weeks”.
The iPad is a gargantuan iPhone, perhaps more precisely than many hoped. But, if you look closely, you can see hints of what’s truly coming next.
There are a few new scraps of gestures and interface bits, all thanks to the larger screen, which you can see sprinkled throughout the keynote video:
• True multi-finger multitouch Two finger swipes, three finger twirls—multitouch gestures that weren’t really possible on the iPhone’s tiny screen, unless you’re a mouse. This is what people were excited about, and we only get a taste. Though, the gesture Phil uses to drag multiple slides in Keynote, using two hands, looks a bit awkward and belabored.
• Popovers The most significant new UI element of the iPad vs. the iPhone are popovers, which you see all over the place when you need to dive further into the interface, or make a choice from a list (since blowing up lists to full screen size doesn’t make a whole lot of sense now). A box pops up, and has a list of choices or options, which might take you down through multiple levels of lists, like you see in the demo of Numbers, with selecting functions to calculate. Gruber has more on popovers, and why they’re significant, here.
• Media Navigator In some ways, the media navigator Phil Schiller shows off in iWork is the most interesting bit to me: That’s what Apple sees as replacing a file browser in this type of computer. It’s a popover too, technically.
• Long touches and drags Lots of touch, hold and drag, something you didn’t see much of in the iPhone. With more UI elements, and layers of them, you need a way of distinguishing what type of motion action you’re trying to engage.
These are all pretty basic, so far, building right on top of the iPhone’s established interface, but it points to the future: More fingers, more gestures, more layered UI elements and built-in browsers.
Everybody’s talking about tablets, especially those single-pane capacitive touchscreen ones more specifically known as “slates.” The iPad is the biggest newsmaker, but there are lots headed our way (most with built-in webcams). Here’s how they measure up, spec-wise:
Updated: We’ve added Lenovo IdeaPad U1 and Archos 9 Windows 7 edition—see below for more details.
Click on the image to view it larger
As you can see, they have different strengths and weaknesses, some of which will become more clear in the coming months as we learn more about each tablet. (That Dell Mini 5 is especially inscrutable right now.)
The iPad has the most storage, cheap 3G, the time-tested iPhone OS and its mountain of apps, and a serious amount of Apple marketing juice behind it. But it’s also famously lacking features common to the other tablets, such as webcam and multitasking (only first party apps like music and email can multitask). The Notion Ink Adam is perhaps the most interesting of the bunch, with its dual-function transflective screen from Pixel Qi: It can be either a normal LCD or, with the flick of a switch, an easy-on-the-eyes reflective LCD that resembles e-ink. Its hardware is also surprisingly impressive—but it remains to be seen if Android is really the right OS for a 10-inch tablet.
The Dell Mini 5 and forthcoming Android edition of the Archos 7 tablet are two of a kind, almost oversized smartphones in their feature sets. Is an extra two or three inches of screen real estate worth the consequent decrease in pocketability? Perhaps not. And finally, there’s the maligned JooJoo, formerly the CrunchPad, a bit of an oddball as the only web-only device in the bunch. It doesn’t really have apps, can’t multitask, and pretty much confines you to an albeit fancy browser, sort of like Chrome OS will. The JooJoo is also the only tablet here to have no demonstrated way to read ebooks.
Update: The two new additions in v.2 of this chart, the Lenovo IdeaPad U1 and Archos 9, are both unusual. The Windows 7-powered Archos 9 has been available since September, is the only slate here that lacks multitouch, and is the only one with a HDD instead of solid state memory of some kind. It’s more related to the older tablets, but there’s no keyboard, just a 9-inch touchscreen. It doesn’t even have specific apps like the HP Slate‘s TouchSmart, it’s just a Windows computer.
The Lenovo IdeaPad U1 is even weirder, in that it’s actually two computers—the specs listed in the chart are for the tablet detached, but when it’s attached to its base, it switches both hardware and software. In its attached form, it’s a Windows 7 laptop with a full keyboard and trackpad, Core 2 Duo processor, 4GB of memory, eSATA, VGA- and HDMI-out, and all the other amenities you’d expect from a modern thin-and-light. We just have see what it’s like when it ships in June.
A quick word about “slates” vs. “tablets”: These are tablets, and it’s a word we prefer. The sad fact is, it’s overused. There’s no way to say “tablet” without including every godawful stylus-based convertible laptop built since 2002. (Thank you, Bill Gates!) And even the new touchscreen tablets come in single-pane and keyboard-equipped laptop styles. So “slate,” good or bad, is the more apt term.
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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.
Cleaner, friendlier, intimate UI may sound like a step backward, but it’s not. There are huge implications.
