F1technical.net

This analysis of the iPad by Anand is balanced and without the emotions and hysteria. It's not current, but it describes this new device well. I suggest reading it.

http://anandtech.com/gadgets/showdoc.aspx?i=3729

This is the worse thing Apple has ever produced. It's a 10 inch iPod Touch, and the price is laughable compared to the amount of disk space you get. The massive amount of wasted homescreen space screams 'we rushed this.' The ONLY way I would get one of these, and despite the drawbacks I am interested, is if it's able to be jailbroken. That's the only reason I have a 3GS. Without jailbreak the iPhone is a joke of a phone as far as making it 'your' device rather than what Apple wants you to have. Contrary to the way it may sound, I'm a newly turned Apple fan, got my unibody 17 incher just under a year ago. Paid $3,008.23 for it and it is worth every single penny. Yet I know garbage when I see it. And the iPOS is just that, overhyped junk that will only become decent in the second or third generation. The iPad was made so that Apple could lock people into their ecosystem of content for those who can't or won't buy a MacBook or an iMac. Apple is second to none in terms of design and user-friendlyness, but this thing is very disappointing. My feelings may change once I actually use one. Would be neat at races, but another monthly bill for the 3G connection is too much nickel and dime for me. And I'd rather watch the cars and use my phone for live timing.

yeah, even I am disappointed. i am a big Apple guy, but the tablet does not do it for me.

I wanted a scaled down version of a laptop, not an up-scaled version of an iPhone.
I had hoped for something like Modbook, but from Apple.

Personally, I'm wishing WinMo7 or LiMo or Chromium or whatever-comes-up-for tablets can be everything apple is and isn't: instantaneous switch on/off, desktop-like web surfing (with flash), proper office suite, full email and exchange integration, simple and efficient media player (hate iTunes), with all the codecs around. And, why not, a decent ebook reader with no DRM.

Also an Apple fan and I am meh over the iPad.

However, the big bezel makes a lot of sense. You need the bezel to grip the screen. If it was edge to edge, and a touch screen, you simply could not hold it and use it unless you held it like a dinner tray.

I see the iPad as being useful. As a presentation tool, in a meeting. One at evey chair instead of a folder with paper in it, or everyone sitting in the dark trying not to sleep looking at a power point clud fugger. Some airlines supply small rentable media players to watch movies on, or pre recorded TV shows.

This would be a better replacement. I think it has a place, but it's not going to run away and not look back like the iPhone did.

nearly forgot...

That storage space is a joke! I have that much in music alone. And the screen is great, but not to read ebooks - too much strain on the eyes

Maybe, maybe, someone someday will understand what users really want, and not what is best for the company first - apple is an excruciatingly bad example of that, because Steve Mob...Jobs keeps trying to patronize everyone and preaching what they want. Really wonder how they managed so many fans...

If you own a Mac, you immediately 'get it'. That is why most people are instant converts. But this is not a convert worthy device. I sold my $1000 year old mini for $800. Good luck with any other brand doing that.

Local storage is sooooo 2005.

Networked storage is where it is at, and where it is going, and where you want it to be.

I have a low end, 8gb iPhone 3G. I have more than a terabyte of media I can access with it anytime, any place. I have network connectivity everywhere. If I find myself in the country, and can't get the service, maybe I need to rethink my priorities, or 'live with' just 6-8 gigs of music. A few hundred hours of music is enough.

I run a tiny app called Simplify, and I can access my iTunes library on the fly, or I can stream any of my movies through a simple html server.

In the future, you won't take a picture on your digital camera, you will snap and it will go straight to your cloud, or right into your photo library at home.

Local storage is both inefficient, and makes the data easier to be destroyed. There is no backup of your precious photos until you get home and plug your camera in, with a wire.

Wires are sooooooo 2009 Magnetic charging, wireless USB hubs, bluetooth and internet on phones faster than many dedicated home connections is changin the pardigm.

I have always been a good tech predicter, and have been right trend wise since about 1995.

Speed, miniaturization, integration, connectivity has been the focuses.

Connectivity while place and time shifting your data/media is the next big trend. Slingboxes PVR's and the like are just the icebergs tip.

You've got me confused there:

There are different types of what can be called "network storage"

If you want remote access to data, then all you need is a pretty dumb terminal with a with a fancy remote desktop software and a good wireless connection

Yes, cloud can be the future, but for personal use. Still, there are issues with data privacy since big brother is watching everyone.

Local storage is as efficient as it can get. The only problems have to do with size and file corruption - a good RAID solution usually does the trick, but with a considerable cost.

Sorry to disappoint you, but I don't see the wireless networks getting faster than wired ones soon. LTE promises theoretical 1Gbps download (not yet there), however there's contention and load sharing. WiMax is still a quite far from it, also.


Hope you are right about those predictions -- they all seem very much correct to me. With so much processing speed in a desktop and wireless and internet connections getting faster, maybe not even the ipad makes sense, either: It's far too... 'local'.

P.S. - Since you mentioned slingboxes, maybe you should also consider two other concepts as general knowledge:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_of_Things
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web

I don't want a dumb terminal in my pocket I want it to be able to think and process.

You are overcomplicating what I am saying. Pretend the SIM card in your camera is a wifi (3g, 4g, BT, etc whatever you can afford and suits your needs) card instead, and instead of keeping those pictures locally, they will be stored and accessed from your 'networked storage,' ie your home computer that is on the internet, a cloud, or a guy in a jetpack with a wifi laptop that follows you around.

Whether you want to store it to a cloud or not is up to you, but local storage is and has been going the way of the DODO for a while (for portable devices). Synching was a tech that was developed to keep everything in synch, cuz there was no everywhere network to do so.

Right now there are hybrids. Phones that take pictures, but can immediately upload them to facebook, or flickr, or your home machine. Why have to tell it to do so. I want my picture to simultaneously stay on my camera, and at home. At the same time. If I drop my camera over the side of the bridge, all those photos are gone, unless, they were all automatically synched to a remote device.

We are talking about a portable device that has a dock at home. So, I get home, plug in my 'iPad', and I have to pull out the device, plug it in to a dock that takes up desk space, and synch my photos over, so I can view them on my big screen.

Think of a film camera and an album. You want to show people an album, not the negatives (or tiny iphone screen pics).

Wireless networks don't need to be faster to load pictures. I don't need to stream HD content to a 3 inch screen. Wireless N is over 600mbit. Fast enough for almost all network intensive activity.

Local storage is only efficient on a local device, ie home computer, otherwise every single piece of data needs to be accessed an extra time by you.

In short I am talking about accessing your data from anywhere, any time, with little effort on your part.

Synching is soooooooo 2001.

Oh yeah, the iPad doesn't take photos.

RAID is very efficient, I have a RAID 0 setup at home, just to speed up my data access on my OS HD. It's almost one 5th faster overall in access and throughput than a single one.

this is the direction the world is going:

http://www.eye.fi/

I'm not overcomplicating, it's just the way things are becoming.


I meant an ipad-like dumb terminal with a good network connection. And by dumb I mean that it doesn't store or process highly complicated stuff locally. Instead, it will use the desktop with its muti-core processor to sort out the heavy load and receive the result over wireless. It would also sort out the problem with the number, type and complexity of applications you can run.

Smart phones are not smart enough yet. I can't seem to find one that does all the cloud computing bits, be simple to use, have a decent internet browser and media player. The android terminals are getting closer to the cloud concept, but they can't match winMo for office productivity or iphone for the rest.

I've seen those eye-fi cards before. Pretty cool! Pity the UWB / wireless USB standard was delayed due to political issues, it would make things faster and smoother.

By far my biggest panic is to lose data from hard drives -- I can imagine how people felt when their time apple machines crashed). It happened before and I still have an external HD semi-crashed (can still read data with recovery software, luckily). Replication is the solution (that's another option for RAID), but I'm still very conservative when it comes to store private data on the web.


Anyway, it seems that we have the same idea, and the differences are in the details.

yes so true. It's about what we want personally from a more networked world.

If infrastructure of current wireless networks was more robust, there would be options to work as we want.

Google is going the next step as well with their ChromeOS. it will be so simple, that the device will need to be able only to run a browser efficiently. Everything else will stream or, as you sad, remotely process, and distribute.

We are both on the same page or chapter. The stronger the network, the less needs to be done locally.

Frack the Ipad, I want an iSniff...



I wonder if you can download 'fuel fumes', 'burnt rubber' and 'dirty paddock' odors. That would make watching motorsport on TV even better.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CrunchPad

crappy video, but anyway it has webcam, hulu, flash and linux, usb, reads cards:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-0t0UDQYlg[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-22EpQOm8c[/youtube]

Sorry for the zombie post, but this thread was linked to from another, and with two years of hindsight, the comments, well...

I especially love all the recommendations for alternatives to the iPad...Courier (doa), Maemo (doa), CrunchPad (doa), Windows Mobile 7 (doa, maybe 8? ), ChromeOS (doa)...