Ballmer, iPhone and the reality-distortion field

Marketwatch ^ | 1/17/2007 | John C. Dvorak

[jalisco555]

It is my opinion that within 5 years, Apple will be in position to knock Microsoft off their perch. I think.

Every time I think about Microsoft the letters GM pop into my head.

[jalisco555]

I'll dump my Treo in a second once the Iphone comes out. I'm sick of carrying this brick around on my belt. I also find the Treo keyboard a real pain to type on so the Iphones touch pad won't bother me.

[Golden Eagle]

Great, my Blackberry keyboard is definitely better than the Treo, with smoother keys that more easily depress, my point was small physical keypads are where the PDA smartphone market has progressed, Apple may be able to buck that trend but to some it is seen as a possible step backward. I don't discount the use of all virtual keyboards though, I predict future laptop design will be more tablet style design with slide out keyboards or near size ones displayed on a touch sensitive screen. Practicality rules, whatever makes it easiest to accomplish the most in the least amount of space, but for some of us with large hands small virtualized keyboards on a handheld likely = stylus, or little use at all. (sent from Treo).

[Golden Eagle]

Pluggable keyboards go against Apple's design.

And small virtualized keyboards go against the design of my large hand. Third parties will probably release one then, I think the ones for Sony's Palm device were third party, nothing wrong with options is there?

[jalisco555]

I've never used a Blackberry so I can't comment on it. For me the utility of having a cellphone + PDA + Ipod all in one reasonably sized device makes this a no-brainer. Add in the beautiful design (which my Treo sorely lacks) and I'm sold. I don't need to work on Excel or Word documents on a hand held but I doubt I could do it easily, given the Treo's lousy (for me) form factor. I have medium to large size hands (size 8 surgical gloves) and I'm constantly having to backspace and retype on the Treo.

As for laptops, I suspect the tablet will always be a niche product. We've all learned how to type by now. The advance I'd like to see is the replacement of hard drives with flash memory. Good-bye to scorched laps and short battery life.

[Golden Eagle]

Well I'm on the go all the time, actually on my second Treo and I'd buy my third tomorrow if I drop this one today. Hopefully Apple pushes capability even farther down the road, but when it comes to small virtualized keyboards my perspecrive is 'been there done that', unless it's somehow revolutionary, which I'd still have to try to buy, otherwise I'd probably require a small plug in thumbpad.

[jalisco555]

I'm on the go a lot too, I just never warmed to my Treo. Luckily the market is providing something for everyone, including me come June.

[Golden Eagle]

The one killer feature I'm looking for is real "windowed" multitasking. Other than listening to live streaming audio in the background, there's not much multitasking I can do. The iPhone apparently has a scaled down version of OSX, dependent on the processor it might be able to provide this, which I would be very interested in. If anyone else has details, please reply. Thanks.

[antiRepublicrat]

They were both eventually supplanted by the Blackberry, in great part because of the provided "thumbpad" that provided an easily accessible physical interface that significantly exceeded the virtual keypads on both the Pilots and CE devices.

I had a couple Pilot/Palms. The virtual keyboards sucked because they were very tiny and required the stylus. The strange handwriting recognition didn't work well. First, you had to learn their characters instead of normal writing. Second, after using them for years and having the characters down to motor memory, it still wasn't 100% accurate.

Given that, I can see why the Blackberry design ruled. After seeing everything I'm giving Apple a very tentative thumbs up on their design.

The keyboard looks big and usable, with the keys apparently expanding as you can see. I'd have to use it to be convinced it's better than a Blackberry/Treo.

And as you may have seen, I am generally against heavily multifunctional devices since they never seem to do any one of their functions as well as a dedicated device. This thing would have to be truly revolutionary for me to really like it.

[Golden Eagle]

One of the main issues I see is it is a flat screen that appears to be recessed, just like the pilots were. Treo and BB keys protrude, making them fairly easy to use even when driving, or in a dark room with the keyboard lights off to conserve battery.

[jalisco555]

I've no specific info but I'll second your request. One of my disappointments with the Treo is that I'd hoped to be able to stream XM Online through it to my office speakers but the signal dropped so often that it was basically unusable. I used Verizon's EV-DO and I've heard that Cingulars alternative isn't as fast so I'm not sure if the Iphone will have this degree of functionality. I hope so, but it won't be a deal breaker for me.

[antiRepublicrat]

or in a dark room with the keyboard lights off to conserve battery.

Now that is a strike against the iPhone. Apple had better hope battery or screen technology gets a lot better (maybe OLED?).

[aviator]

I now have both a Blackberry for work and a Treo for personal use, both of which have thumbpads, and often post to this site from my Treo, which unfortunately would appear to be more difficult from the proposed Apple design but otherwise appears exceptional with regard to both hardware and software technology.

........................................

I have a Treo 650 that crashes whenever I try to load up FR.

How do you get yours to work? TIA.

[Golden Eagle]

Does it crash immediatey, or only after loading up a portion of the site? I have lowered my thresholds in my FR profile to display less info so I don't overload the RAM, could that be it?

[GRRRRR]

Getting an iPod was the turning point for me.

I had an Archos 400 for playing MP3's and allegedly it would play TV shows I recorded on my PC. However, moving those TV programs to the ARCHOS involved all sorts of conversions and DivX stuff and half the time the audio didn't synch with the video...plus, Windows hated working with the Archos software...so synching music etc. was horrible.

So, I got the iPOD...then got into Rush's PODCASTS...then started surfing the APPLE website and in August, made the leap with an iMAC 20" dual core...it is truly amazing. Yeah, there have been some weird lock ups and the USB port kept insisting on starting the TV Tuner during the night, but those were easily fixed.

OS X and ALL the integrated software is very cool and they all work together seamlessly. THen I got the daughter a MacBook Pro, dual core 15" and now we can iCHAT video phone call each other while she's at University and we're at home...

IF you have some 'extra' $$$ and want to start having FUN on a computer again, just get one. They are simple and they DO work.