The iPhone has kicked off a technological revolution, and the world has grabbed hold with both hands and is embracing as if it’s the Holy Grail of the industry. The touch revolution has even turned this young blogger into a FarmVille player on steroids, and we will no doubt see the world succumb once the computing Pandora’s box is opened.
Apple are supposedly working on the ‘iSlate’, HTC and Google are working together on a tablet suited for Chrome OS, and no doubt Microsoft will throw something together to try and combat the competition.
But I can’t see it taking off in the academic community. If anything, I see at this point a device which would be smaller than a tablet PC, much larger than the iPhone but around medium-sized to that of the Kindle. So it may be large enough to browse on, but probably too small to hammer away on the on-screen keyboard without feeling like you’re going to break the damn thing.
Ergonomically, it’ll be a disaster. Just think for a moment, how would you type? Would you need to raise your knees and balance it as you tap the on-screen keyboard? Would it have something in the back to hold it at an angle to reduce RSI or even make it viewable? Will it be too heavy, or more realistically, will the weight distribution be way off?
The tablet is a stupid, stupid idea; I don’t even need to use one to know how I’d feel. The Kindle can get away with it as it is predominantly a reading device. You hold with two hands and you read with your eyes. The iSlate or any competing pure-tablet computer will have to be held with two hands and then somehow be typed on with the remaining hands of Shiva.
I can’t see academics using it, but students could buy it but only because it’s the “fashionable thing to do” while they slash away their money into technology they will barely use. We already know that students will buy anything they can get their hands on.
While personally I agree with Siegler when he says, “if Joe Wilcox ran the computer industry, we’d still be using typewriters”, but Wilcox makes a set of rare points I agree with about the tablet industry.
Off on a tangent for a second: could Apple be creating a tablet, something that we haven’t really seen before in mass production, just to prove a point that it can? There is no answer to this hypothesis, but it would add another notch to the bedpost of Apple to be “the first” at something else as well.
The tablet isn’t designed at anybody specifically and while Apple is convinced (and convincing others) that the future of computing is touch-based, I wholeheartedly disagree and will fight it to the last dying breath.
Frankly on this ending thought, a tablet without a keyboard - limiting the user to one awful method of input - is stupid, and it simply annoys the hell out of me.
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