General Tablets Discussion

Imagine trying to fill out any kind of web form with radio buttons and check boxes. If you make a boo boo, you can't easily go back and edit as there are no cursor movements.

People said these things would be great for census takers and the like but I can't imagine the suffering.


Do you own an ipad? If so, listen up because you haven't learned how to use the Apple method of cursor placement yet. Yes, as a PC guy, I had to be shown by a MAChead the trick to it too.

All you have to do is touch the radio button you wish to be the correct one and it will select it. You don't need the up arrow 15 times and then left arrow 10 times to reach the position.

If you have a paragraph typed and you see an error you need to correct, just touch and hold near where you want the cursor. Then a little magnifier lens appears with the precise cursor position, Now rock your finger or slide it around without losing contact and the cursor moves into position where you can now hit the backspace key and retype the correction. The navigation arrows are completely unnecessary on the ipad.

Once you learn how to use the ipad, typing is faster and easier, especially making corrections than a hard keyboard and equally as fast using a mouse to select or deselect radio buttons.

Just to be sure I didn't miss anything, I went to Southwest Airlines | Book Flights, Airline Tickets, Airfare where making an airline reservation is a pretty robust use of radio buttons, typing and info entry. I had no problems, even with reselecting dates from the pop up calendar.

Understand- You can't play a violin when all you know how to play is a trumpet. Same with the ipad, don't assume something is difficult just because you don't know the tricks of using it.
 
Some clarification on Dell devices:
- the 5" Mini5, aka Streak, is actually in the tablet class although all specs are smartphone-like except screen size. Will have a WiFi version only!
- the 7" Looking Glass will run a Tegra CPU and have a tuner option. The rest - just like the Streak.

dell-streak-leak-02-gal.jpg


The whole Dell-leak is here
http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/22/dells-lightning-thunder-flash-smoke-and-more-a-roundup/

Diogen.
 
The Archos 7 Android tablet is up for preorder on Amazon.... $199.

Amazon.com: Archos 7 8GB Home Tablet Black: Electronics

So what flavor of Android is this running? No indication on the amazon site. Is it really going to be an Android-based tablet, with everything that implies, or will it be like most of their older "tablets," just bigger?

For a tablet, I want a device like the OS of the Nexus One or Droid on a big screen, optimized for that larger screen. Difference from the ipad being that it can run apps on the screen, and not just display icons.

Speaking of the ipad, was in Chicago the past two days, and everywhere i looked there was an ipad advertisement.
 
For a tablet, I want a device like the OS of the Nexus One or Droid on a big screen, optimized for that larger screen.
In a perfect world, things wouldn't be written to pixel-based screens. The would be handled with vector-based primatives that are scalable. This is what NeXT (and probably others) tried to bring to the party by using Postscript and similar vector PDLs.

The problem with the perfect world is that the least capable screens typically have the least amount of processing power behind them to "greek" the more detailed screens.
 
Here's another sub $300 tablet coming this summer, including Flash 10.1:

Velocity Micro Introduces The 7-inch Cruz Tablet | Android Phone Fans

These are the kinds of devices I am looking forward to... I wonder what it would take to stream media off of network devices to any of the tablets that are out/coming.

That one looks interesting. Since it is Android 2.1, I am assuming it will run widgets, and not just icons like in the images shown.

It will be curious to see how it fast the 800 MHz processor stacks up. I like the price, that is for sure.
 
Yeah, Slate got off to a hot start hype-wise, but then pricing and stuff came out and it was all down hill from there.

It sounded like a good idea, but it's from HP, guess that's what we get for getting our hopes up.
 
MS officially confirmed Courier, and that they aren't making it :(

Microsoft confirms, kills Courier in one fell swoop -- Engadget

At any given time, across any of our business groups, there are new ideas being investigated, tested, and incubated. It's in Microsoft's DNA to continually develop and incubate new technologies to foster productivity and creativity. The "Courier" project is an example of this type of effort and its technologies will be evaluated for use in future Microsoft offerings, but we have no plans to build such a device at this time.
 

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