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Microsoft Surface

Started by Jamie Oliver is fat, June 19, 2012, 12:15:28 PM

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greencalx

SNG, your extensive post from waybackwheneveritwas warranted a considered reply. I'm not sure this is going to be it, but I didn't want to smash one out in a frenzy. I should perhaps also say that as a Luddite, I haven't yet worked out what an iPad (or any kind of touchscreen tablet) is for. But then I never worked out what CD-ROMs were for, not even once no-one needed them anymore. Not sure what that tells us, if anything. There may be aspects of devil's advocate in the following, largely because that's the only rhetorical stance I know how to adopt.




Dare I be so bold as to bastardise your line of thinking into a two-parter: (i) people largely bought/buy iPads as a fashion accessory, not because they need their unique features, and might indeed be better served by a netbook or laptop for those features they do use; and (ii) this is a Bad Thing because Apple's unique approach to deciding how people are allowed to interact with their kit is having a deleterious effect on the entire computer industry. I think that's roughly what I took away from your post.

To (i) one might ask how new technology is supposed to get off the ground without early adopters buying stuff that they're not entirely sure they need. I'd like to know what went through the minds of the first people to get telephone lines installed, when there was literally no-one you would have been able to call on the thing. And telegrams and post were pretty good ways of communicating with people, particularly when there were over ten postal deliveries a day, so you could message back and forth quite happily without one of those newfangled devices listening to your every word. More recently we might look at the home computer boom of the early 1980s (which I'm intuiting both of us participated in at an impressionable age). I wonder how many were purchased with some vague sense of "being the future" or turning their home into a sci-fi paradise, in this country perhaps spurred on by the BBC's BBC Micro advertorials. What these computers were actually used for, of course, was games and (possibly something that no-one would have predicted) a single generation of unusually capable self-taught computer programmers. I guess the point I'm making is that without the "marketing" aspect, perhaps there would be never be any technological innovation at all (except that part of technological sphere that is designed to kill people).

None of this explains the mass appeal of the iPad on launch day, though, so the fashion accessory part is probably about right.

I'm not so sure that it's obviously true that netbooks or laptops are inherently superior to tablets for the vast majority of things that tablets are used for, though. The most obvious thing a tablet doesn't have is a keyboard, so for anything that involves lots of typing, a netbook/laptop would be a more sensible choice. I don't have much experience of using an on-screen keyboard - certainly the one on my phone I find slightly less productive than an old-skool mobile phone (which is a retrograde step) due to hitting the wrong key quite often (less severe in landscape mode, tho). Even if this went away, I can't imagine an on-screen keyboard being much use for anything longer than an average-length email - and I suspect I would have given up on this post by now if I weren't using a real keyboard. But for those people who never write anything longer than an average-length email, why not dispense with carrying a keyboard around with you?

Precision pointing is going to be a problem with stylus-free touchscreen devices too. I presume this rules out fine-tuned tweaking of images. Big deal? Not sure.

Plugging stuff into the damn thing, now there's a problem. I had thought an obvious use for a tablet is something to take on holiday with you when you don't want to lug a laptop around with you, but still want to be able to check the odd email, look at a few websites, have something bigger than a 2in screen to look at your photographs on, maybe transfer your photos across if you run out of space on your memory card. Except you can't plug your camera into an iPad (don't know about other tablets). Except you can, but you need an adaptor. Adaptors suck. You always forget to take them with you.

So that's the downsides. The upsides? Touchscreens offer plenty of ways to interact with the thing that look like they could be a lot more efficient than old-fashioned keyboard'n'mouse for certain types of operation. Being able to touch two places at once; dart between different parts of the screen very quickly; gestures, like pinch and twirl. Various direct comparisons I've found of netbooks and tablets suggest that the fact you can run a "real" operating system on a netbook is in fact their Achilles heel: the grunt of the device isn't enough to keep up. A couple of reviews I saw mentioned that being able to watch Flash video on a netbook (as opposed to not at all on an iPad) was a moot point, given that the movies wouldn't play without stuttering at full screen size. I also understood that to get the kind of battery life tablets give you, you need to spend serious money on a high-spec ultrabook. These reviews also suggested the iPad's screen was better than most netbooks (a fact that explained the typically lower price of the latter).

So, for a bunch of admittedly mundane tasks - browsing of websites, photos, PDFs, watching movies, blogging, Facefuck etc - a tablet is no worse than a netbook in use (possibly marginally better for those that work well with a purely touchscreen-based interface). Battery lasts longer. More portable without compromising on the screen. Cheaper than a full-on laptop, that basically adds a keyboard you're not going to use. Perhaps I should turn the question round - if there are people who don't need extended use of a keyboard, why on earth would you buy a laptop?


So as I note a slight change in temperature due to the impending heat death of the universe, I might turn to perhaps the more irksome issue (2), viz, the "infantilisation" phenomenon you identify. I'm afraid I don't know what you mean by that, because it could mean so many things, including but not limited to (i) making things easier to use for novices at the loss of some fine-grained control (perhaps at the level of automatic transmission in a car: you still get to decide where the car goes); (ii) restricting the set of things that can be done by a user to the point of actively stopping people from doing things they want to do (you can have this car in any colour, as long as it's black); (iii) preventing people from ever knowing what's going on inside their machine; (iv) making the machine say "fart! willy! poo!" at you every 45 seconds. Then there's the idea that the rest of the industry is following Apple's lead in this direction, whatever that is supposed to be. As I understood it, Apple seemed to be the only one diverging from the established "real computer" model for their consumer-oriented touchscreen devices. What Appleisms are creeping in elsewhere?

VegaLA

I got to play with this yesterday.
Sort of.

I was in the West coast Plaza Mall in OC and found my first Microsoft store, curious, I set foot inside and found a haven choc full of tech goodies, including a Vizio laptop and some rather sweet headphones for the 360. Anyway, no surface in sight so I asked the Sales Rep if any of the tablets available had the new OS and was told no BUt...the tablet he was usign does.

It was a prototype tablet by Samsung called the 'Series 7' (shouldn't that be 8?) and had the Windows icon on a single button similar to the iPads embedded curved button, except this one was not working, so in order to come out of an app, you swiped from just above the screen down and the app floats away.
He showed me a few apps and the OS is very fluid and visually pleasing to the eye. I was pretty impressed. He also showed me Notepad, which had not been rebuilt for the new Surface OS and told me that the tablet will open your usual Windows OS for apps that have not been specifically built for the new Metro OS, and sure enough, there was the familiar homescreen.
No word on release date but he did say he firmly expects to see these in stores by the end of the year. Errr...THIS year.

Something to keep an eye on but for now i'm looking for a second phone with GSM for travelling, and once the new MS phones are released come November i'm hoping the Lumia 900 comes down to a decent price.

Quote from: greencalx on July 01, 2012, 10:14:11 PMI had thought an obvious use for a tablet is something to take on holiday with you when you don't want to lug a laptop around with you, but still want to be able to check the odd email, look at a few websites, have something bigger than a 2in screen to look at your photographs on, maybe transfer your photos across if you run out of space on your memory card.

This. I have an iPad. It's a toy, and I use it to browse the web and watch downloaded TV in bed. But I just went away for two weeks, and the iPad was great for this. Fit in the missus' handbag, great battery life, and really useful. We looked up so many things, booked many train tickets and hotels, etc. One big bonus: keeps my 4 year old occupied on long journeys (he loves to play with it, I have many interactive books and apps for him).