We have written repeatedly that Windows itself is one of the main reasons why touchscreen computers have never caught the general public’s attention. The interface just wasn’t designed for finger input. Like it or not, that’s the truth. Windows was designed to be used with a mouse, and to a lesser extent, a pen or stylus.
That’s fine. Windows 7 works great. I’m writing this on a Win7 machine. But I hate Windows on my tablet computers for the aforementioned reason. It’s also the reason I’m very apprehensive of the upcoming onslaught of slate computers. I’m afraid that wonderful hardware will be passed up in favor of the disappointing iPad because of the interface. But Adobe gave me hope today in its demo of Flash and Air on the HP slate device.
The first minute or so of the demo is Adobe’s Flash Product Marketing manager talking about this and that. The real fun comes at the 1:30 mark. That’s when we get a glimpse of what appears to be an HP app manager that has clearly been designed for a touch interface. The buttons are large, uses stars to mark favorites programs or Internet shortcuts, and seems responsive enough. It’s probably safe to say that it’s an Adobe product seeing as it makes an appearance in this demo.
Even the browser seems to have been made over for the touch interface, which seems to be a custom build of Firefox. Of course it has all the multi-touch goodies like pinch zooming and two-finger scrolling, but it also feels different, too. That’s just as important as using standard Firefox or Chrome on a touchscreen is a drag without a bunch of plug-ins. And of course, Flash is fully functional, which is a clear shot across Apple’s bow.
You notice a few times throughout the demo that there are a couple of different user notifications to compensate for web’s smaller buttons and higher-resolution interface. There appears to be a small water ripple effect at 1:42 when the user hits the play button for the online video and then a dramatically larger one at the end of the Photoshop.com demo at 3:45 when he presses and holds. These effects are not shown during the HP Home demo or NYT Air app lending to the thought that they’re a browser-only effect, designed to assist browsing.
Now Adobe wouldn’t show off Windows in its demo. This was strictly an Adobe demo, but that’s fine. It answered a lot of questions about HP’s upcoming slate device. First, Windows is very much present, which is awesome. None of us wants a watered-down OS — except for iPad buyers, of course. But the demo also shows that there will be a versatile, touch-friendly interface for everyday use and multi-touch capabilities to exploit all the potential uses.
Hopefully HP, Dell and all the other mainstream tablet makers are on the same page with Adobe. They have the ability to stand up to the monstrosity that is the Apple App Store if they agree to slate standards, which will allow app developers to code one version of the their program and not worry about various screen resolutions and hardware variations.
Devin adds: This is an improvement on the smaller tablet we saw at CES. It’s about iPad-sized, which is to say a little smaller than a sheet of paper. I’m guessing an 8″ screen is what they’re working with there, though who knows what the final hardware will be. I still think that shrinking Windows is a bad start for a tablet device, as much so as puffing up the iPhone in the case of the iPad. The only device that may actually hit with a truly tablet-only OS seems to be the Courier, and that’s why I’m genuinely excited about it. The slate race does appear to be hotting up, though, and that’s a good thing.
DaringFireball’s John Gruber claims hearing from “well-informed little birdies” that the iPad will ship without some apps that were included on the iPhone.
In his blog post today, Gruber responds to a question I posed last week about iPhone apps that appear to be missing from the iPad. Apple’s iPad press materials suggest the device will ship with 12 built-in apps, and noticeably missing are a few wares that came with the iPhone: Stocks, Calculator, Clock, Weather and Voice Memos. So what exactly is going to happen to them when the iPad launches in April?
Gruber, who’s accurately leaked some Apple rumors in the past, cites anonymous sources who say Steve Jobs scrapped the apps in question because they didn’t look or feel right when refitted for the iPad’s bigger screen.
“Ends up that just blowing up iPhone apps to fill the iPad screen looks and feels weird, even if you use higher-resolution graphics so that nothing looks pixelated,” Gruber wrote. “It wasn’t a technical problem, it was a design problem.”
I made a quick guess last week that Apple would stick the missing iPhone apps in the App Store for a free download. Part of my reasoning was that Apple is already allowing the App Store’s 140,000 third-party iPhone apps to run on the iPad, so Apple could technically do the same with its own non-tabletized iPhone apps. But Gruber’s sources suggest we won’t see them at all. That’s believable, because it’s quite Jobs-esque to choose to hold Apple’s apps to a higher standard.
With that said, the missing apps won’t be much of a loss, because there are plenty of third-party apps in the App Store that we can choose from as substitutes. (Personally I’m glad I won’t have to see that Stocks app anymore, because I never, ever used it.) Gruber also shoots down blogger Kevin Fox’s speculation that Apple would introduce a “Dashboard” mode to run these missing apps in the background. That’s too bad: I thought that would’ve been a neat solution for multitasking.
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Image courtesy of Apple
It may be a little early to say this, but to me it seems like Microsoft took all the disappointment and fear resulting from Apple’s dominance of the mobile devices category over its own products through the years and used that energy to create the Courier. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen another company’s product and thought “That seems like something Apple would’ve made.”
Engadget posted more details about the device late last week, including two lengthy HD interface videos. Microsoft isn’t yet officially saying anything about whether or not this will become a production device, but Engadget seems very confident in its sources, and I’d be inclined to believe them since it seems more than likely Redmond is taking a page out of Apple’s marketing playbook by keeping things somewhat hush-hush but using “leaks” to steal focus.
Microsoft gets a lot of flak for doing a tablet the wrong way, as demonstrated by the HP model it unveiled ahead of the iPad to grab some of the attention away from that spotlight hog. But the Courier doesn’t have the same shortcomings. For one, it’s not based on Windows 7, but on a version of Windows CE 6, which also provides the basis for the Zune HD’s interface and the upcoming Windows Mobile 7 OS. It also runs on the Tegra 2, an impressive mobile processor.
It also has some considerable advantages over its Apple rival, especially if the hype is actually representative of what a production version will look like. First, there’s the size. The clamshell design allows it to be smaller than the iPad, while providing more screen real estate. Closed, it’s said to measure five by seven inches, and still remain less than an inch thick. It should also weigh less than a pound. It should take up just a little less space than the Amazon Kindle, for reference, which goes a long way toward making it truly, conveniently portable.
The Courier’s big advantage over the iPad, for me, isn’t the dual-screen design (although that helps), but the combination of pen and touch input. If I had to choose one, I’d go with touch, as Apple’s done with the iPad, but the opportunity to have both is a major selling point. Viewing the UI videos emphasizes why, and if you’ve ever used a tablet with a computer, especially those with a built-in display, you’ll know why a pen is a much better option than trying to learn to write or draw with your clumsy finger.
Microsoft’s notebook tablet is also refreshing because of its emphasis on interactivity between components and hardware features of the device. The software seems designed from the start to work perfectly not only with the specific features of the device, but also with every other software component of the OS, and all through a brilliantly intuitive UI. Nor is it a closed system despite this sharp focus, since the sharing features appear to be rich and varied.
Apple, for its part, emphasizes the apps. Apps are great, and they provide some pretty useful functions and terrific distractions, but they don’t really seem to work as well or with the same degree of interconnection as the Courier’s software promises to. Even Apple’s own built-in apps don’t have anywhere near as much potential for communication between and across each other.
In my opinion, where Apple got lazy with the iPad, Microsoft is throwing its entire mobile future behind the Courier. Not only that, but these previews are emphasizing the Courier’s strengths over the iPad without addressing things like media playback. The impression I get isn’t that the Courier is bad at those things, just that they’re taken as given. Instead, Redmond’s project is all about what a tablet can do that a media player can’t, something I’ve yet to really see illustrated by Apple regarding the iPad.
Related Research from GigaOM Pro:
Looking to get your slate fix on but don’t want to watch the first iPad television commercial on Apple’s web site or your DVR? HP is happy to oblige with two new videos showing off the HP Slate that was first introduced by Steve Ballmer at the Consumer Electronics Show. Both vids are worth a look in order to get a feel for the device thickness, ports and such, but they also show the custom user interface on top of Windows 7 — can you say Origami Experience, part III? — as well as some applications.
The first video is more promotional than anything else, but for me it does raises the following question: Will the device be this peppy in terms of performance? My concern is that it won’t, but that’s purely speculative on my part. Well, maybe not “purely” speculative — I’m basing the thought on several years of UMPC ownership as well as on the performance of today’s netbooks.
Why compare the HP Slate to a netbook of today? While there’s no official announcement on what’s powering the HP Slate, we know several things that tell us what’s likely powering it. Given that the device runs on Microsoft Windows 7, I’d guess that like new netbooks, it runs on an Intel N400-series Atom CPU with integrated Intel graphics in addition to a hardware accelerator solution — that last bit is mentioned in the second vid, as pointed out by Engadget. Could HP surprise me and use a different x86 processor? Sure it could — at the cost of battery life — something I don’t think will happen.
The second video focuses on a key differentiator to Apple’s iPad — the ability to run Adobe Flash. I’m still wondering if Microsoft is skating to the puck while Apple skates to where the puck will be on this one. I believe that Flash and HTML5 can easily co-exist in the world, but Flash won’t control nearly as much of the video and gaming web that it does today. And Flash isn’t the only big function difference here — Apple’s iPad won’t natively handle inking and handwriting recognition, although some third-party apps can help out that deficiency.
I’m excited by the HP Slate simply because it appears to be the closest product yet to the exciting and original Project Origami vision from 2006. Once the device hits the market later this year, there’s bound to be plenty of buyers who need that full desktop computer compatibility with a mobile device. I’m just not sure that I’m one of them, given my reliance upon the cloud for nearly all of my work activities — a full desktop operating system on my mobile device adds overhead that I don’t think I need for a device in this class. I’ll have to ponder that a little bit more though. Thoughts?
Image courtesy of HP
Related research on GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):
Handwriting Recognition: A Killer App for the iPad?
HP has put up a new video (seen below) of its Windows 7 slate in a direct jab at the iPad. The clip shows the tablet running Adobe's Flash for sites like Hulu as well as AIR for out-of-browser apps like Pandora radio. The presenters add that Flash on the tablet is boosted by hardware and should support HD video for "hours and hours" on a battery charge....
HP has put up a new video (seen below) of its Windows 7 slate in a direct jab at the iPad. The clip shows the tablet running Adobe's Flash for sites like Hulu as well as AIR for out-of-browser apps like Pandora radio. The presenters add that Flash on the tablet is boosted by hardware and should support HD video for "hours and hours" on a battery charge....
Brian X. Chen at Wired, on the default iPhone apps that aren’t present on the iPad:
But if you recall, the iPhone ships with some apps that appear to be left out from the iPad: Stocks, Calculator, Clock, Weather and Voice Memos. What gives?
Apple didn’t respond to a request for comment, but I’m willing to guess Apple will just stick those apps in the App Store for a free download, and they’ll be the same apps as they were on the iPhone. After all, it’s unlikely there’s much to do with those particular apps to make them visually special for the iPad.
Actually, it’s sort of the opposite problem. It’s not that Apple couldn’t just create bigger versions of these apps and having them run on the iPad. There were, internally to Apple (of course), versions of these apps (or least some of them) with upscaled iPad-sized graphics, but otherwise the same UI and layout as the iPhone versions. Ends up that just blowing up iPhone apps to fill the iPad screen looks and feels weird, even if you use higher-resolution graphics so that nothing looks pixelated. It wasn’t a technical problem, it was a design problem. So they were scrapped by you-know-who. Perhaps they’ll appear on the iPad in some re-imagined form this summer with OS 4.0, but when the iPad ships next month, there won’t be versions of these apps. At least that’s the story I’ve heard from a few well-informed little birdies.
(There is, alas, no secret “widget” mode for iPad in OS 3.2, either.)
Some (maybe even most?) iPhone games will work well as-is, on the iPad. Not just technically, but in terms of being fun and feeling right. But non-game iPhone apps that are just upscaled on the iPad are going to feel weird. And the run the app in a little iPhone-sized rectangle in the middle of an otherwise black screen mode is even weirder, I think. A 3.5-inch screen is just totally different than a 10-inch screen.
On the whole, it’s actually rather un-Apple-like that they’re even allowing iPhone apps to run unmodified on the iPad. It’s a huge compatibility win, of course: an instant market of thousands and thousands of titles. Given the runaway success of the App Store and the fundamental technical similarities between the iPhone and iPad, it’s the sort of decision that most companies wouldn’t even think twice about. But it’s undeniably a sub-optimal user experience. iPhone apps on the iPad are a “good enough” thing, not an “exactly right” thing. Most companies — the ones that wouldn’t even see it as a tough decision whether to allow iPhone apps to run on the iPad — settle for “good enough” all the time. Apple, on the other hand, usually goes for “exactly right”.
I’ll go so far as to predict that by the time Monday April 5 rolls around, it’ll already be an established meme that non-iPad-optimized iPhone apps are to the iPad what Classic apps were to Mac OS X — something you’ll make do with “for now” but can’t wait to abandon for the real thing.
I’m not saying it’s a mistake that Apple is allowing the iPad to run iPhone apps. I’m just saying that the iPad is not a big iPhone.
In today's post, Gruber says that the little iPhone widget-type apps that shipped on the original iPhone — Stocks, Calculator, Clock, Weather and Voice Memos — won't ship on the iPad. And that blank key on the keyboard? It ain't gonna bring up no widget mode either.
So they were scrapped by you-know-who[Jobs]. Perhaps they’ll appear on the iPad in some re-imagined form this summer with OS 4.0, but when the iPad ships next month, there won’t be versions of these apps. At least that’s the story I’ve heard from a few well-informed little birdies. (There is, alas, no secret “widget” mode for iPad in OS 3.2, either.)
While this would be a bit of a bummer, it does give developers some freedom to build better apps for the iPad's screen without worrying about Apple coming in and destroying their market. Also, there's no shortage of apps that do these "default" functions already. The original iPhone needed a few apps. The iPad won't have any problems getting all of this functionality and more.
Image courtesy of Joystiq
I wrote about the speculation of a Mac OS X Steam release here. Now we have confirmation in the form of GameInformer article scans at PalGN showing that Steam is indeed coming to OS X, and that … [visit site to read more]
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A new slip today has reinforced beliefs that the iPad has room for camera hardware. Photos of a new, slightly modified version of the frame seen a month ago still show holes that mimic those seen for webcams on Macs. The only changes appear to be the placement of holes in the bezel and a more obvious space for the home button....
A new slip today has reinforced beliefs that the iPad has room for camera hardware. Photos of a new, slightly modified version of the frame seen a month ago still show holes that mimic those seen for webcams on Macs. The only changes appear to be the placement of holes in the bezel and a more obvious space for the home button....
If Courier is indeed on a development track, I suppose that Microsoft executives are waiting to see how the tablet PC market fares overall--not only in terms of Apple's iPad, which is due to hit stores on April 3, but also products such as HP's tablet that CEO Steve Ballmer showed off at January's Consumer Electronics Show. (Microsoft continues to not comment on rumor or speculation, even after I offered to take it to a really, nice swanky place for dinner and not order the cheapest bottle of wine off the list.)
Courier would look like nothing else on the market: two touch-screens that fold on a central hinge, like a paper notebook, and are capable of all sorts of nifty things: displaying e-texts, sketching and writing longhand, Web surfing, and viewing that Iron Man 2 trailer that debuted yesterday and is basically the most awesome thing, ever, period. The device shown in Engadget's leaked photos measures 5x7, and at least feels a little smaller than the images that leaked on Gizmodo all the way back in September.
It also feels a little something like a niche product--the sort of thing you'd see produced by a boutique manufacturer, in limited quantity, for a higher price-point than similar products on the market. Except that's not how Microsoft plays the game--as has been reinforced by executive from Ballmer on down over the past few years (particularly in the context of conversations about the company's competition with Apple), Microsoft likes to spread itself as widely as possible.
"You can't be high priced," Ballmer told a group of analysts at Microsoft's annual Financial Analyst Meeting back in June 2009. "That doesn't get us to the high volume that we aspire to."
So if Courier finds its way out of the lab, chances are Microsoft will want to make a substantial push behind it. But the success or failure of such an initiative depends on how much the public has gravitated towards the tablet PC form-factor, and how willing they might collectively be to try something other than the traditional tablet form.
Although I can't back it up with hard numbers, my intuition tells me that tablets will be a middling success, at least in the near term. Millions of marketing dollars will go to ensure a certain rate of adoption among the particularly tech-savvy and the usual first adopters, but penetration among the general public is a grayer proposition; particularly when you consider that discretionary spending on big ticket items is still fairly suppressed thanks to the aftermath of the global recession. If your typical family already owns a laptop, and a television, and a smartphone (or two), and maybe a desktop PC, then are they really in the market to own another computing device?
The answer to that may determine whether the iPad and its competitors will be the truly paradigm-shifting proposition that some analysts suspect. If the whole concept of tablets crashes and burns, though, expect Courier to stay firmly in realm of vaporware for the foreseeable future.
Giving away an e-book seems to lead to at least a spike in sales of the print version, Researchers at Brigham Young University have found, especially for fiction.
In research that monitored the sales of 41 print books in the eight weeks before and after a free version was released, study authors John Hilton III and David Wiley said they found “a moderate correlation between free digital books being made permanently available and short-term print sales increases.”
All 41 books in the study (via Boing Boing) were made available as complete PDF downloads (as well as other formats in some cases), including two by former Wired.com managing editor Leander Kahney that he distributed for free via bit torrent. Hilton and Wiley’s data showed that giving the books away resulted in higher print sales in the eight weeks following the giveaway than during the same time period preceding it for fiction (a 26 percent increase), non-fiction (5 percent) and Random House releases (9 percent).
The only category in which giving the books away for free digitally eroded the market for print books was for titles sold by Tor Books, a division of Macmillan focused on science fiction and fantasy titles. The study’s authors don’t know why that was the case, but they speculate on one possibility: Tor only made its e-books freely available for one week, whereas the others were available for eight weeks or longer, and it required users to register before downloading them. It’s possible that in order for e-book giveaways to boost print sales, readers must have easy, unencumbered access to the free version.
Of course, if most of the reading public switches to e-book readers like the Kindle or the iPad, this model would fall apart because, obviously, giving away an e-book wouldn’t cause people to choose to pay for the same. But that tipping point is likely still years away; as things stand now, this study indicates that publishers would do well to embrace the concept of “free” as a marketing tool while the getting is good.
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Photo: Flickr/salbug00
I already mentioned I’m on my way to GDC 2010 to cover the iPhone panel, and that iPhone gaming is getting big, so it’s interesting to see CNET reenforce just how big it’s getting:
strikingly absent among those 18 [Mobile Gaming] panels are any that deal with game development specifically for the iPhone. And why? Because for the first time, the GDC advisory board decided that Apple’s smartphone is an important enough platform to warrant its own summit. And it filled quickly.
Simon Jeffrey, vice president of social applications for leading iPhone game developer Ngmoco says:
“The iPhone is now recognized as a leading platform that’s independent from the mobile. People are specifically naming the iPhone as a threat to their businesses. Nintendo said the iPhone is taking customers away from [its popular] DS handhelds.”
The cost of entry is lower than Microsoft or Nintendo, and it’s getting more and more popular while still maintaining its cool factor.
While Android and Windows Phone 7 Series will bring the competition (and perhaps Palm as well), right now the iPhone is riding high on its head start.
iPhone No Longer “Mobile”, Big Enough to be Own Gaming Platform Now is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.
TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog
Steve Jobs has spoken: Apple's "magical and revolutionary" iPad will not allow iPhone-to-iPad 3G tethering.…
You know what stinks about the iPad? It can't run Flash, which means you won't be able to watch the large majority of video on the web.
Well good news, the HP slate -- remember when Steve Ballmer showed it off at CES? -- has Flash! So you'll be able to watch all your favorite videos on it, like Hulu, etc.
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Apple's iPad commercial during the Oscars generated a decent spike in buzz on Twitter for the company, but it was less than when the company put out a press release announcing the iPad's official sales date.
Trendrr, a firm that tracks brands on Twitter, found iPad mentions spiked to 8,876 per hour on Twitter at their peak during Sunday's Oscars telecast. On Friday, when Apple announced the iPad would go on sale April 3, the hourly mentions peaked at 9,902.
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Cameron Daigle’s “is the iPad just a big iPhone” user interface presentation from PodCamp Nashville. Note, the second slide is a gigantic “NO.”
[via Daring Fireball]
Cameron Daigle’s “Is the iPad Just a Big iPhone?” UI Presentation from PodCamp Nashville is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.
TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog
Well, well, seems Apple wasn’t the only company showing off their flashy slate this weekend. HP managed to sneak a couple of videos into their YouTube channel as well. The first is a demo of Adobe Flash and AIR on the slate running Windows 7. The second, uh, reminds me of something else I’ve seen recently.
So let me get the grumbling out of the way: I am never going to like cursor control and scrollbars on a touchscreen interface. Throughout the whole Flash demo, all I could see were slightly askew cursors, loathsome scrollbars, and other desktop-specific UI elements. Popping the Windows 7 TIP manually was a clear sign that text boxes in Flash still won’t be automatically recognized as text boxes.
That said, like what we’ve seen for the iPad, these video demos should impress folks who don’t know tablets. Sadly, this could lead inexperienced users to discover for themselves the pitfalls of running desktop-designed apps on a tablet. It looks like HP will be offering a custom app launcher for easy access to apps and perhaps a custom version of Firefox which hopefully is pre-loaded with add-ons like Grab & Drag to make it decent for tablet web browsing.
However, it doesn’t look like this slate completely avoids the issues we Tablet PC users have seen for years. I suspect the excitement for a slate that runs Flash will fizzle as users discover that their favorite Flash apps work great when they have a mouse (or active digitizer) for cursor control but not so well without it. The silver lining is this may force HP and others to finally get serious about tablet-specific app development. Perhaps an updated version of Ink Crossword.
Via Engadget
Wired noticed that there are some notable exceptions among the announced iPad apps, including Stocks, Calculator, Clock, Weather and Voice Memos.TUAWWill iPad be missing some iPhone apps? originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 08 Mar 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Wired noticed that there are some notable exceptions among the announced iPad apps, including Stocks, Calculator, Clock, Weather and Voice Memos.TUAWWill iPad be missing some iPhone apps? originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 08 Mar 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
There’s another tablet set to launch here soon on the market, but that doesn’t mean you should take your eyes off the competition just yet. With videos like this one after the break, we’re pleasantly surprised by what HP, Microsoft, and Adobe have worked together to create. Now, if the HP Slate can function as well as these videos showcase, our anticipation for this gadget will increase ten-fold. Plus, we love crossword puzzles.
The first thing to keep in mind when looking at the Slate from HP, is that the majority of specifications are still a mystery. While we can make a bunch of assumptions about what’s powering the tablet device, until there is any kind of official summary, that’s all they’d be: assumptions. It is running the full version of Windows 7, so that has a lot of people warming to the device, but also has the same amount of people running in the opposite direction. We understand that Flash Player empowers about 75% of the video we see every day on the Internet, but this video does indeed feel like a direct stab at Apple. HP/Adobe/Microsoft: “Look what we can do!”
In any event, it looks like Microsoft is starting to see that marketing their products, especially the ones that may not be as popular as some others, may be a good thing. The HP ad that’s posted below is one that makes the Slate look like a real competitor to the iPad, but there are some out there that may think it just makes the Apple-based tablet look better. Personal preference, we imagine. So, what’s yours? Are you awaiting the Slate? Or are your eyes looking at something else?
[via Engadget]
Relevant Entries on SlashGear
Answering the question, “Is the iPad just a big iPhone?” in the negative. Love this bit about the lack of hovering:
Here’s why this section is about Controls: every day, your cursor protects you from unclear UI. It helpfully turns into a text cursor as you hover over textboxes, or a hand as you hover over a link or action item.
iPad has no such thing. Bad UI will stick out like a sore thumb, both in apps and on websites. Your tappable areas had better look tappable. Your controls had better look controllable.
