I don't own any sort of tablet or ultrabook (eg. mac air) or e-reader (kindle) because I don't like throwing money around. What I want is:
- Read ebooks/pdfs
- Browse the web
- Work (a text editor and git)
Ideally I would also like to:
- Download & watch videos/movies
- Something to hook-up to my TV
There is nothing in the market that can do these things. I could get a Kindle for reading, an iPad for browsing the web, and an ultrabook for work. This device is something I would buy (assuming a reasonable price) but the one drawback I see is Windows. Maybe Windows nowadays is a lot better than before and maybe it'll give it a chance. It all depends on the pricing.
I'm not looking to replace my primary computer. I'm looking for a secondary device (one device, not 2 or 3) that can do a handful of things that I most often need.
The main reason I want to hook a device like that with my TV is so that I can download and watch movies (from torrents). AFAIK you cannot do that on the iPad. I'm I mistaken?
You use a real computer to download the torrent. Then you use a real computer to transcode the movie for your iDumb device. Then you use real computer with iTunes to upload the transcoded movie to your iDumb device (you can skip this step and stream the movie to the iDumb device from your real computer which surprisingly is not called iAirPlay).
Either that or you purchase the movie in iTunes on your iDumb device and watch it there.
I'd be very surprised if Microsoft sold these under their own brand. Perhaps they're more like the Intel proof of concepts and "the real thing" will be announced by Nokia?
I'm actually a Windows user (although I own an iPad), but you have to be a bit humored by all this. As usual where Apple has used a feather Microsoft have used the whole chicken with keyboards, screws, different versions, the whole enchilada. I'm only surprised there's no stickers. "ClearType display"? really, you felt you had to brand it just to compete with "Retina display".
Despite all this the tablet might actually be good, and seeing another quality tablet contender is always good for competition. I am however getting a bit worried by Microsofts "me too"-attitude and the reek of desperation these days. They could be making awesome stuff but they lack follow-through and the finer points of taste
It's a pity they won't put their chips down on things that actually were original, like the courier or mainstreaming the surface (the table). In the end they didn't have any choice since they couldn't surrender their enterprise tablet/smartphone customers to Apple. The Courier was innovative but perhaps too niche so its not even sure that was a bad call.
I guess I'm just arguing about the finer points about their attitude and execution, with Microsoft I'm always afraid that in-company bureaucracy will manifest itself into some stupid decision on the consumers behalf. Apple are fanatics (and splending assholes in some cases), but atleast you feel they pretty much set the consumer first and have some taste
Having said all this I'm still kinda rooting for MS since they ironically enough seem to be the underdog nowadays, how the tables have turned...
ClearType has been around for a very long time. It's basically subpixel-rendering that improves the visual quality of text (sort of effectively tripling the LCD resolution). Last I checked, Microsoft had patented the hell out of it (and I last checked a few years ago).
I think they're right about touting a technology that effectively triples text-display resolution.
And for your other observation about the whole enchilada, look around you-- do you see people that use external keyboards with their iPad? These would be willing customers for a tablet that is actually is pen+touch+type (ditto with people who try and augment their iPad with screen pens, even on a screen that has trouble with palm touches).
Lastly, I'm skeptical about "companies-with-taste". Steve Jobs certainly had good taste, but I'm not sure the whole of Apple is comparably good. I think, sans Jobs, Microsoft is doing the best they can-- prototyping for months and trying to understand where they fit into a market.
I don't know how they're going to make subpixel anti-aliasing work if you can rotate the display. I wouldn't be surprised if they just are re-using the ClearType name and it's not actually sub-pixel anti-aliased, just regular anti-aliased (like the iPad).
The OS knows, at some level, the orientation it's displaying the screen in. So in principle, there's no reason it can't use subpixel rendering appropriately. Although it might be hard to achieve - I don't know how the graphics stack works.
Good point, since most pixels are taller than wide (it'd suck even more if they can't sub-pixel render in portrait mode, as it seems the more natural reading position).
Very true, big companies are usually as good as their despot. At least when it comes to taking risks and "saying no". Apple could go all-in because Jobs had the clout to give marching orders to the whole company. Microsoft has Ballmer, who is more of a salesman/business guy and probably with less clout (perhaps fortunately)
I too have a bit of worry for Apple now that Jobs is gone. Ive has taste and seems to have gotten some power to go with it. However, the next time it is time to go from evolution to revolution they won't have Jobs to kick them there.
If it makes you feel better, ClearType was a brand Microsoft has used since the late 90's/early 00's. I know it as some weird pixel display thing designed to make text look sharper in WinXP. But, it was a hidden option that required third-party software to reveal to me.
In Microsoft's world, they assume themselves to be the sun and thereby everything revolves around them and their cheesy need to synergize jargony things. Too bad momentum isn't in Microsoft's favor these days.
Thats what made it so funny. I can see the Microsoft meeting:
-Hey so everyone talking about this Retina thing how are we going to compete?
-Let's make up our own word! Do we have anything lying around we can use?
-Developer: Well, we have this ClearType thing but it's really more about software...
-Marketing Guy: Software Hardware, what's the difference. ClearType Display it is!
-Developer: I quit
All-in-all, it's a big, big play on Windows 8/RT. A kernel that can perform optimally on ARM/Intel on mobile devices and also support PC devices is a huge achievement - the entire thread-library would have to be one super-cool piece of software engineering. That and elsewhere within the OS, is where the innovation lies, in my opinion.
And now you can see why JavaScript was made a first-class language for the WinRT (not Windows RT) API - content-consumption via touch is now going to be a big feature for Win 8 and nothing serves this better than HTML5/JavaScript.
I'm kinda sad though, in a way, I always considered MS an engineering company - now it's gone the Apple way (which for all its merits is technologically ok-ish if not boring).
DOES it perform well though? And by that I mean things like native hardware video decompression without having too much impact on the battery, real-timeyness of the touch UI and overall low power consumption. These are IMO the underlying technologies where Apple innovated the most with their iOS platform and these metrics are yet to beat by others. Do we already have hands on tests with windows 8 on ARM? I at least haven't seen any.
"native hardware video decompression without having too much impact on the battery"
- that's actually where ARM and Intel innovated, not Apple - MS is probably mature enough to deal with processors at least as well as, if not better than, Apple.
As regarding tests, I haven't had access to devices running Windows on ARM - WOA is something of a mystery - they haven't released a full WOA SDK as far as I'm aware - although they do provide a cross-compiler for ARM in the upcoming Visual Studio. So yes, no concrete numbers here.
Yes, they're discouraging Win32 use overall (even in the x86/x64 space). But that does not mean you can't build native apps (ie non .NET) for WOA - you can use C/C++ out of the box. You are just bound to use MetroUI and WinRT as your primary APIs - both of which are native subsystems.
> And now you can see why JavaScript was made a first-class language for the WinRT (not Windows RT) API - content-consumption via touch is now going to be a big feature for Win 8 and nothing serves this better than HTML5/JavaScript.
I'm not sure how you reached that conclusion. I race for a native app when it comes to content consumption, and native is also required to provide the requisite stream DRM used by Netflix, HBO GO, etc.
Heck, I wish Netflix would hire a better development team and stop trying to do their app in HTML. It's poorly designed and frustrating to use.
It doesn't - it provides a perfectly equivalent platform.
In all cases, it will be the codecs registered with the OS that would be used - so the quality of the media cannot be better/worse.
Where this differs is from a developer perspective - you don't have to learn a non-standard UI API (XAML/WinForms/MFC/COM/ATL/Qt/Gtk/Swing/awt/whatever) or a language you're not familiar with (C#/C++/Java - pick any). But you can be sure that the experience will be precisely the same - no API hacks to achieve something specific, nothing at all.
What makes those platform APIs useful are all the tools they provide to simplify the creation of great, well-performing UIs that exceed the user's expectations.
It's an intriguing assertion, but there are too many variables. Which would really look better for rendering video or text at sub-optimal resolutions? 1920x1080 video or desktop stretched on the RD? Surface RT? It seems to me the safer bet would be that it depends on the task and the context. I'd bet money someone will do an appropriate comprehensive usability study within a year.
You mean a compact music player with a 2.5" HDD, room for 5GB of music, with 20 minutes of skip protection, a FireWire port for 50MB per second transfer, a click wheel for navigation, and a user friendly interface?
You're right! I remember it being one size smaller than the other HDD players at the time. I thought it was the 2.5" that had just come out, but it was 1.8".
I had an Archos before the iPod came out. A tiny bit bigger than the iPod would be, but a 30gb hard drive, usb 2.0, and a much better way to find music than a wheel.
Archos killed the iPod. The iPod was one of the first times I distinctly recall thinking that actual fashion (like Vogue magazine) could trump pragmatics and technology in the tech sector.
A lot of people try to compete against Apple in design. Wrong. Apple isn't doing design, as much as they're doing fashion.
If they were doing fashion, they would change to a new look every year. Remember the disappointment when the iPhone 4S kept the iPhone 4 design? Apple doesn't care about fashion, they care about good design.
I'm not going into an originality discussion, certainly that argument has been made thousand of thousand times on forums all over the internet.
Very few companies are truly original. Even fewer are successful while being truly original. But having the guts to go all in, be consistent and going that little extra mile will get you pretty far.
I agree with your thoughts about originality, but people always saying Apple does everything original is wrong. For both Microsoft, Apple and others they'll rarely ever launch something that's truly original.
Apple's timeline was iPod > iPhone > iPad
(You could even argue that without the theft of millions of songs aka MP3's Apple wouldn't be bankrupt).
Microsoft's timeline was DOS > Windows > Server Products > Dynamics etc.
I would say it's very rare that doing something completely different than your baseline business is going to work. For that reason and the fact that the shareholders want you to be profitable is why you'll not see very many established companies pushing the edge.
It was quite serendipitous how although Rocket jumping was "incidental" to Q1 most levels still played extremely well using that feature. Still level-designers who later knew about it and designed for it managed to (ab)use it even more. I designed a level where the entire layout was optimized around rocket-jumping being possible (and encouraged) as much as humanely possible, great fun!
Every time I watch an episode of House or read a story like this I think "Why isn't there an expert system for diagnostics". The notion of a person being able to manage such vasts amount of knowledge seems ridiculous and cost-ineffective.
If you could enter a bunch of positive and negative statements together with various medical records, and have the computer being able to ask additional queries, it seems a good system would be able to narrow down a list substantially. It would also side-step a lot of cognitive problems we humans face.
Now, I'm sure there are systems like this but they probably just aren't sophisticated , widespread enough or don't have large enough database. Or have they simply not yet reached widespread use because they cost too much, what's holding them back?
Obviously Eurovision is something of a subgenre which is more about its own "brand" of music rather than for established artists (otherwise we'd just send Robyn and win every year). If you see it as the Pride festival for music it makes a lot more sense. Feel free to vote this post UP-UP-UP-UP
The key is to combine "minimalistic living" with life hacks. Reduce your life down to the essentials, then use life hacks to go even further.
For example: you probably won't get away without paying your bills so a "life hack" that automates that process will take another load of your shoulders.'
On the other hand, a "life hack" for storing "all your stuff" might not be as good as simply "get rid of all your crap"
Also good point about life design, there's not much point in "saving x minutes" or earning "x dollars" if you don't do anything useful and worthwhile with it
All in all the most important thing is to have a process, call it kaizen, constant improvement, or whatever. Try different things, measure / see what works, learn from the mistakes, rinse - repeat
It's not so bad if your automation tools have a really long shelf life, and if the time that you spend learning to use them can easily be reused for other things. i.e. If you use Linux command-line tools.
I've been managing my email using mutt and basically the same set of procmail scripts since around 1999, and I'll easily get at least another 10 years out of them, as long as people continue to use email.
About 2 years ago when I got my smartphone, I installed an IMAP server (dovecot), configured it to use my existing maildir tree, and then pointed my phone at that. I'll probably get at least 10 years out of that, too.
All of this pre-dates Android, iOS, GMail, Evernote, etc., and it'll probably outlive them.
I find that once you realize there's a problem that can be solved it's often the case that a solution is available if you look for it. My bank for instance makes it easy to set up automatic payment of most of my bills. Yet if I never realize that this is an annoyance that could be solved I wouldn't have gone looking for that "feature".
I've had an ipad for a while, in the beginning I hardly used it at all, I read some books or watched some video/tv on it occasionally, but mostly at home.
But after a while I found what I think is the tablet sweetspot, and that is a "digital newspaper". Kindle is arguably better for reading books, a "ultrabook" is arguably better compromise if you want to both author and consume content. The mobile is best for taking photos/checking your email etc.
Nothing beats the iPad however when it comes to catching up with news on the train/airplane/café/sofa. Apps like Flipboard and Zite offers a better reading/discovery experience than even on a laptop I'd argue with interfaces free from clutter, magazine like layouts and personalization.
I have a hard time seeing me lugging around anything the size of the Note all the time...
I used to be a gamer but then I realized something. While gaming is fun, sometimes fulfilling and a source of "flow" it's ultimately without higher meaning. Imagine spending hundreds of hours playing WoW, DI:3 or whatever, now imagine what you could have done with that time.
It's better to game your life than spending your life gaming. I Enjoy gaming in certain amounts,prefer gaming over TV, but prefer creating, socializing and learning over gaming.
I've had a similar experience, in school I got hooked on chess. Having an unfortunate tendency to try to master anything I suck at that I find interesting I dedicated quite a lot of time to learning chess, playing in the swedish masterships and even attending a special high school with chess on the curriculum.
The thing is though with chess (as with anything I'd guess) the first 20% of skill can be really hard to acquire since you need to "get started". The next 60% is usually a challenge that's fun and stimulating. Going beyond that it gets rough (unless youre exceptionally talented). I think chess is especially bad from that aspect, at higher level the amount of pure database knowledge you have to memorize is tremendous and IMO takes some of the fun out the game. Fischer tried to solve this by inventing a version where you randomized the position of the pieces each time. Games like go also seems much better since it's more about skill and intuition than rote memorization.
A big part of becoming great at chess is actually retraining the part of the brain that remembers faces to absorb board positions. I'm not talking about absolute recall , but a grand master has seen so many games that he can "intuit" a board drawing from his experience.
"Good hobbies", IMO, form either new brain connections , improve body coordination or just generally improve mental or physical health. I'd be surprised if learning chess didn't change the brain pathways in some ways that are beneficial but it probably doesn't increase much after a certain skill level. Learning to play an instrument, juggling, snowboarding , meditating, jogging are probably all "better hobbies" quantiatively
Anyways, I realized that while playing at a top level was probably achievable, the effort wasn't worth it. Working with computers and playing chess is a little more sitting down than I'd like in my life and time was better spend moving around and enjoying the company of others :)
I wish I could spend chess "just for fun" but alas it's hard to do at that level. Better to play some of the more clever board games where memorization isn't such a large component and you actually socialize as well
