iPad is a game changer

[polymerase]

A game changer or a clunker? I think it fits the mold of the iPod and iPhone and is a remolding game changer. No one remembers when the iPod showed up and it was all WTF? There were mp3 players out there but they were toast. It was not evident until nine months later.

Same with the iPhone. Not secure, will not compete with blackberry. Really? Epic fail for sure.

The iPad is on the same trajectory but might actually become the de facto new thing everyone needs way before Christmas.

Downloading photos direct from camera through wire or through USB. Do you know anyone with a camera that doesn't download their photos? I actually know some people like that. Computer phobes. They exist. Maybe not in your computer literate world but they are out there.

What am I buying? I have an iPhone and an MBAir. This niche I can wait a bit for second gen possibly even third gen.

What I want:
1) a true AGPS chip on board. Do I have to get the 3G model to get that or wait until 2nd gen? Can't really tell. (AGPS is a chip which will use 3G and real GPS satellite signal and compass to make the best locator ever.)

2) Tethering of my digital camera. Set up my camera and while I am on the other end of the wire I can change focus, temperature, shutter and F-Stop while viewing what the camera sees. Oh and a shutter release button too. Why not? And not with some honking DSLR but with some nice pocket Panasonic with a Zeiss lens and 12 MB or so of CMOS chip.

The first gen is cool but the third gen is going to be the instant chubby. Steve Jobs does it again. He has so many cards yet to be played on this it isn't funny. My two wants are just tip of the iceberg.

On Steve Job's Tombstone (may he live to be 104) "The Man Who Saved the Publishing Industry". The iPhone and the iPod will be forgotten compared to the iPad. You can repost this claim in Spring 2011 and beyond but I think I will be the one doing the happy dance (complete with iPad). So will the New York Times because they are granted a new lease on life by Steve Jobs.

Why? Because I could not watch the announcement live. I was getting a first look at the next DNA sequencer. My eyebrows went up a tad when I was shown an iPhone app to monitor the 800,000 dollar instrument. That was kind of weird. When someone in my group mentioned the iPad the company said they have already written the app. They have had the SDK and APIs for some time. How does Apple do that and keep everyone's mouth shut? Because Steve Jobs is Steve Jobs.

[starmillway]

(01-28-2010 08:07 AM)polymerase Wrote:  Why? Because I could not watch the announcement live. I was getting a first look at the next DNA sequencer. My eyebrows went up a tad when I was shown an iPhone app to monitor the 800,000 dollar instrument. That was kind of weird. When someone in my group mentioned the iPad the company said they have already written the app. They have had the SDK and APIs for some time. How does Apple do that and keep everyone's mouth shut? Because Steve Jobs is Steve Jobs.

I hope it finds a place in business with new apps to check inventory, follow building projects, mobile checkout registers in furniture stores, etc. Selling insurance, real estate, factories, and a lot more.

My Kindle has a nice leather cover to protect it. I can see the iPad with one too! If it isn't already on the market.

. . .

[Michael-Adams]

Definitely a major game changer! It fills my wants/needs perfectly since I have neither an iPhone/Touch nor a laptop. This fits nicely at its price point and capabilities. Down the road? It can only get better and more versatile. Can you see a bunch of these all networked together in a hospital environment?

[Alias]

(01-29-2010 11:05 AM)Michael-Adams Wrote:  Definitely a major game changer! It fills my wants/needs perfectly since I have neither an iPhone/Touch nor a laptop. This fits nicely at its price point and capabilities. Down the road? It can only get better and more versatile. Can you see a bunch of these all networked together in a hospital environment?

The price is good, and with 3G I'd thought these would work pretty nicely for us, but for me it would be a cloud/web device, and on second thought it doesn't look like it would work out for that.

No Flash, Silverlight and Java support, so no Hulu or Netflix streaming. Flash and Silverlight might have some (arguable) reasons for walling off, but they don't apply to Java, and the only thing Java has in common is that (like Flash and Silverlight) apps can install over the web and circumvent Apple's storefronts.

And with no chance of another browser ever showing up on the iPad (as with the iPhone), it's doubly crippled as web/cloud device, as the useful authoring apps (well, useful apps in general) have Firefox plugins or extensions, or have trick client-side stuff going on that Safari can't do, so any non-Apple extensibility via the browser is out.

So, after a hard look, it really doesn't look like much of a web/cloud device if it's going to wall off a huge portion of the web's/cloud's power and entertainment. And that's too bad, since the cloud is going to profoundly change computing. It begs a massive floodgate of devices, streaming content, and web-based applications (anything {ANYTHING} that has to happen locally can run on a web server). Eventually, with the massive parallel processing of the cloud, buffed application multi-tasking, things such as Intel's 48-core server CPU {with each core discretely programmable, and today it's 48 cores, tomorrow who knows?}, even workstation computing will seem quaint. Adobe needs to wake up and smell the coffee, but Apple does too.

Personally, for what I would have used it for, no Flash, Silverlight, or Java is immaterial (plan to do some stuff later, and wonk around CMF/CMS front ends, and it would work OK for that); but it's pretty useless for the family (well, doubly useless, with no multi-tasking and no camera, as my kids, like most, multi-task web sharing with Google Chat. So, it's still laptops, until Apple decides to wall off the desktop OS, too

Ed

Google has an Android for tablets, so hopefully that would show up soon (and hopefully they'd get it right), as I really like these things.

[polymerase]

(02-01-2010 01:51 PM)Alias Wrote:  No Flash, Silverlight and Java support, so no Hulu or Netflix streaming.

We're talking game changer here and Steve Jobs has his foot on the neck. OS9 was great and OS X is great because Steve knew and owned the software and hardware. He did the same thing to the iPhone. Play the game you get invited in. You're out you can go shrivel up and die.

Flash et al are going the way of the doo doo bird if they are not blessed by Steve and Apple.

Is it fair? Will good technology die if Steve pulls it off and the iPad is the de facto niche filler for the tablet? No and yes. But that is the way it goes. Betamax was far superior to VHS but one had to lose. Foot on the neck wins.

Hulu will reformat to suit the winner. So will Netflix. It might be messy for a bit but Steve does not like to have to run stuff on his hardware which is inconsistent with his view. (Command and run everything.) Now this might eventually be a recipe for disaster as Apple locks into certain pathways but they really haven't screwed up that previously. But hopefully Android gives them a run. Apple and Google might be the top of the heap of everything in ten years. But there is only room for one.

[Alias]

(02-01-2010 06:12 PM)polymerase Wrote:  Hulu will reformat to suit the winner. So will Netflix. It might be messy for a bit but Steve does not like to have to run stuff on his hardware which is inconsistent with his view. (Command and run everything.) Now this might eventually be a recipe for disaster as Apple locks into certain pathways but they really haven't screwed up that previously. But hopefully Android gives them a run. Apple and Google might be the top of the heap of everything in ten years. But there is only room for one.

Well, Android might give them a really good run. IIRC, Android sales were on pace to top iPhone's by 2012 (but at that time there were only a few HTCs), but with many more models out now, and the Droids and the Nexus One, I'm guessing it's more like 2011. Just the Nexus One alone is edging out the iPhone on wishlists.

It's about applications. That's what's killing RIM, the recent high contrast resolution of the mobile platform, that now casts it in a light of comparatively much fewer applications and a pretty weak browser. And it's really sad what happened with Palm - If they'd kept their eye on the ball, they'd have had tablets for years by now and had an exclusive lock-in with high revenue medical ecosystem apps (as well as a ton of consumer junk for phones). Mobile platform growth has done that high contrast resolution. Now, Android is a killer platform, and one with the better potential for developers ( and an easier friendlier environment ), so app growth should be pretty good. Several things will likely promote a web app renaissance.

Mobile device developers are on cue to abandon phone apps and convert them to web apps. I'm sure they recognize they'll have to keep pace with desktop web apps finally producing mobile versions of their websites (which is a huge mystery why they've been slow at that, as it's pretty simple, and most sites built on CMFs/CMSes have one-click plugins that automate that) along with the nice shiny buttons/widgets for a smartphone. Some experts cite the 'free apps' bit, but I think it's also just as much about convenience - I know that I much prefer not futzing with disks, costly fat client hardware upgrades, software upgrades, organizing and maintaining stuff, overrunning then expanding capacity therefore more stuff to manage - I like having S3, Google, whomever providing a web-thin-client server computing/experience/whatever, organizing my stuff, storing it for me, backing it up redundantly for me at the datacenter as well as across multiple datacenters, and the data is there somewhat permanently, for me to find or roll apps, whatever, to recycle useful stuff with XML, remashed and rehashed into often startling new derivative data.

Anything that can happen locally, or intranets, with fat clients, workstations, enterprise servers, etc, can happen on web servers. Now, basically what happens with epic organizations/industrialists/manufacturers has been mashups with those tools and with CADCAM interactive modules and enterprise plugins to realtime link gazillions of datasets with each other and myriad applications (for production planning, time-motion-sequencing, kits, inventory, networked vendor applications, salesmen's laptop estimates/price quotes/simulations-previews/production schedule/etc, accounting, etc, basically everything) and mission databases - Full on automation is about as epic a local model as I can imagine, yet I can imagine all that can oneday be mashed, remashed and rehashed XML/whatever thin-client server with a lot better ROI and speed/performance with commodity multi-processor virtualized supercomputers parallel/grid crunching.

Anything that can happen locally or intranets can happen on the web and a coming wave of startling mashups and data (more and more data in the matriculation from the desktop to storage on the web), and that's really the great thing about any metamorphosis of it, but that becomes a lot more attainable with an open web. And that's the part I don't care for with Apple, especially with Java (and that's really funny considering the uncertainty is over with, with the relief over Oracle's legally auspiced takeover of Sun - green light, and around 40% of developers are now full speed ahead on rich media apps).

Well, this is getting long, but should mention that although the iPad's 1GHz CPU-GPU SoC is pretty fricking cool, Qualcomm has a nice 1GHz ARM 7-based, integrated 2D-3D GPUs, 720P HD encode/decode 30F/sec, 5.1 surround support, SVDO support, 12MPx camera support, integrated GPS, BT, FM radio, 802.11b/g/n, and this is for a phone . So, coming Android iterations should be pretty buffed, more feature-filled-out, as well as the incremental interfacing improvements.

After my initial enthusiasm for a tablet wore off, reality settled in, and so it's still fat client laptops used as laptops. For family entertainment, I think it's more about convenience, as my family never did get behind the Mini much, especially my wife, with her asking me to get a Roku. A streaming BD deck is of zero interest, as I mentioned I have no interest in honking around with a bunch of disks. No interest in honking around with media server tasks. Zero interest in gaming, so the streaming gaming decks are out. I don't like anything remotely approaching a task or work, unless it involves money, a greater good, hobbies, recreation, fun, etc. The less work the better. Computing is just a tool. In this case now, a writing tool, and this feels like fricking homework, thesis, whatever, blehkk .

I like entertainment to be just a few clicks (which is probably why I walk away from video quick as I click it on - easy on, easy off). So, that's why I'm going to try a Boxee Box - That sounds like the ticket for my family - Kind of a media center in a box. Point and click. Easy on, easy off, remote control simple. I think the Boxee Box will be a huge winner. Good pricing, under $200 (a little cheaper than streaming BD decks, but a media center and not a one-trick pony like a much cheaper Roku, and much less than a PS3-BD-streaming deck).

Anyway, later, gotta go. Take care and peace,

Ed

[polymerase]

When I put "game changer" in the title of this thread I was exaggerating. But Steve is on the cover of the Economist as a cartoon "the Book of Jobs" and he looks like Moses with the tablets. In the first paragraph, "game changer".

The only android I have seen is a friend on the floor. His battery is always dead when he wants to show me something. Doesn't have time to figure it out. It has everything blaring in network waves likely cooking it.

The android may be the superior technology. I am dealing with two companies right now and I like the superior technology. But the other one is blessed by the masses. The android might end up with the same fate. It will be betamaxed to oblivion.

[polymerase]

The one line out of the economist that I thought surprising. Netbooks tallied 11 billion bucks (with a B) last year. Where did that come from? People want cheap iSurfers? Obviously.

If people want cool iSurfers they be doing it on the maxi pad.

[Reboot]

(02-01-2010 01:51 PM)Alias Wrote:  No Flash, Silverlight and Java support, so no Hulu or Netflix streaming.

Read up on HTML 5. Jobs knows the future of media on the web, and it isn't CPU sucking Flash, Silverlight and Java. Vimeo and some youtube already are HTML 5.

[polymerase]

Quote:HTML5 is the proposed next standard for HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0 and DOM Level 2 HTML. It aims to reduce the need for proprietary plug-in-based rich internet application (RIA) technologies such as Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and Sun JavaFX.

Cool, in some things, like a universal language, there should be socialism by fiat.

Quote:The HTML5 syntax is no longer based on SGML despite the similarity of its markup. It has, however, been designed to be backward compatible with common parsing of older versions of HTML.

Also good since I still write straight HTML 3.2 code and never got the hang of frames.
Take a table and just fill the cells for super sophisticated formatting.

{tr}this is poly in a nutshell{/tr}{tr}poly in a box{/tr}