The Magic Touch
Everyone has gone a little crazy recently about tablet.s Jono Bacon and Stuart ‘Aq’ Langridge peel back the hype and explore what different options we have available for tablets…not just the iPad…and what the opportunity for Open Source is for touch and tablets.
Of course, we are the very start of the conversation! What do you think? Do you think tablets are valuable? Do you think they are a fad? With the iPad’s success, should anyone even bother? Is Android going to cut the mustard for tablets? Share your thoughts in the shot comments!
14 Comments to “The Magic Touch”
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You mention of MeeGo and Maemo but don’t really “discuss” the Nokia tablet evolution from 770 to N800 to N810 to N810 WiMax to N900 and the huge community and applications already existing around the Maemo platform.
Mainly because the Maemo evolution has moved away from tablets to phones with touchscreens. The N900 isn’t like an iPad; it’s like an iPhone, no?
Why did moblin (a tablet os) choose to collaborate with Maemo to make MeeGo?
I am talking about an OS (Maemo) that has an evolution path, an active developer community, hundreds of apps and has been a proven, stable tablet OS
I suspect because Maemo had the fully-worked-out technology but no popularity, and Intel had the ability to give their thing (moblin) popularity, but didn’t have the requisite technology. So each gets something from the partnership,
I’m looking forward to the Android tablets, but I strongly suspect that, like the phones, the first generation is going to be more than a bit crap. The tablet that Google is reportedly working on is probably the one to wait for.
The iPad has a few frustrating drawbacks, but it’s really really good at a price that’s hard to beat. And it’s just going to get better and more useful in the coming months as more complex iPad-specific apps are released by developers who already have a potential market of 2+ million users.
Android also desperately needs to update its SDK for tablet purposes. It doesn’t have tablet-y widgets (like the iPad’s popup menu), the emulator works extremely slowly if at all at higher resolutions, etc. Google doesn’t seem to be doing anything to help the Android tablets that are coming in the near-ish future…just one reason they’ll fail.
I do not believe the tablet phenomenon is a fad. Tablets have always been a desirable platform for both creating and consuming things, but now we actually have the technology to make these devices useful.
I haven’t yet seen an iPad, but it probably inherits the same haptic feedback technology that many Android phones have begun to really take advantage of. With this, great touch-based UI design and the ability to tweak keyboard input to your liking, a tablet computer is finally something worth purchasing.
Regarding opportunities for open-source, we heard at Google I/O that we’re seeing 100,000 activations a day for Android, that’s some 3,000,000 new users of open-source software a month! That’s incredible!
What this means for us is that ISVs can see the huge Android adoption figures, and will want to be a part of the ecosystem which means more hardware, more software, and ultimately more people using Linux and open-source software.
What worries me a little however is that the shift to mobile computing devices and the success of Android (and perhaps Chrome-OS and GoogleTV in the future) will make desktop operating systems like Ubuntu and MeeGo less-important for commercial developers to target.
iPhone OS doesn’t do haptic feedback. The iPad and iPod touch don’t even have the necessary motors. Still, the iPad keyboard in landscape orientation with the clicky sound enabled is surprisingly nice to use.
Android is really exciting partly because there are a ton of users and not a lot of great apps. Check out the top paid games list for example…there are a lot of crummy games that have made tens of thousands of dollars. Lots of opportunity for developers in a market that, unlike iPhone, is nowhere near saturated. The iTunes charts are filled with games that are more sophisticated, polished, and/or unique than almost anything you can find on Android.
There was a few sessions at the UDS about this. Multi touch functionality can be built into the default stack but it will take a release or two to get it right.
I’ve just ordered a new generation Archos 5 which is built on Android…
Continuing from a comment I made on the Google TV shot (http://shotofjaq.org/2010/05/big-g-on-tv/comment-page-1/#comment-3598) , would a Google tablet run Android or Chrome OS?
In this shot Jono and Aq talk about Android being the potential open tablet platform of choice, but concept images and a video on the Chromium web site highlight the fact that Chrome OS could equally be run on tablet devices http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/user-experience/form-factors/tablet
Apple have been quite outspoken about their support for HTML5 on the iPad and the web is obviously a big deal for these devices.
It will be interesting to see whether HTML5 (via WebGL et al.) will be capable of producing the same quality of user experience demonstrated by native iPad applications. If it can then Chrome OS could be a good fit for these lightweight devices. http://tola.me.uk/blog/2010/02/06/iPad
Although I’m unlikely to buy one, I think the iPad represents a leap forward in interaction design and it’s going to set the standard for the tablet form factor. I’ll probably be waiting out for the open alternative to emerge, whatever that may be…
Previous tablets failed because they were running a version of Windows, which provides a shit UI for touch. Apple were successful with the IPad solely because they already had an OS designed for multi-touch, which was hacked up to work at a higher resolution. Clearly demonstrating that a phone OS is perfectly usable on this kind of device.
If Android is capable of working in a multi-touch enviroment, it will be a good OS for a tablet, if not, it wont. Porting existing desktop software isn’t going to work at all, I wrote a blog post about the issue of the poor usability of desktop applications on portable devices a few weeks ago: http://hessiess.com/2010/05/04/mice-and-laptops-an-anti-pattern/.
I agree wholeheartedly: touch apps, and especially multi-touch apps, require a completely different mindset for designing your user experience, so (multi-)touch-based widget sets will be an absolute must if Android is going to compete in the tablet space.
This is where I’m not certain Chrome OS is the best choice for the tablet: being based on the web it’s a lot more limited in its support for multi-touch. Apple has obviously started addressing some of that through supporting multi-touch through its Mighty Mouse and laptop trackpads, but to the greater extent web apps are bound to a single pointer.
PS See, Jono & Aq – this is why I kept banging on about Multi-Pointer X (yes, I know Android isn’t running X) when you were doing LugRadio.
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I think the biggest distinguishing features about the (possibility of) success of the iPhone OS and Android on tablets are these:
Something that I thought you didn’t really discuss in the shot was the fact that Apple and Google make it so frickin’ easy to install new applications. The old Microsoft tablets required typical desktop-based installations and I didn’t get the impression that it was that easy to add applications (if you could find them) to the old small Linux-powered tablet-ish devices.
Apple saw the success of Linux’s repository-based distribution mechanism (apt-get, yum, whatever), applied it to music first, checked that it worked, and now is applying it to apps and books, and that has fed back into the nice streamlined UIs in Ubuntu and the Android Marketplace for adding and removing apps.
Microsoft continues to be completely blind to this extremely convenient way of delivering content and still requires you to use CDs or download installers. No wonder Microsoft is increasingly irrelevant. Good thing they have all those stable MS Office sales contracts.
I, for one, welcome our new tablet-based overlords. I’ll buy one when I have money again, and I’m very curious about the forthcoming experiences of a mate who’s just ordered one of these: http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.39169
I think that the tablet format has been tried and failed a variety of times due to one major problem; we do not have a practical use for it other than a new gadget to show off.
It is not a replacement for a desktop computer or laptop, however a good notepad is smaller, causes half the price and does a lot more functions.
It is too big to replace our media devices (unless you wear parachute pants). I think we need a defining use and selling point otherwise the ipad and all the others will die off and go down as an expensive gadget gathering dust in most peoples drawers and cupboards.
Even the some of my more privaleged pupils who have got their hands on one via wealthy parents are admitting that it seems a bit of a pointless toy. I personally don’t see where they fit in, not a PC replacement, notepads are more cost effective and have more actions and uses. Too big for media devices, I think they will vanish into obscurity within the next couple of years.