But I do think Apple could do it.
This guy assumes way to much. I have an iPhone and I can’t use it except for the most casual browsing.
If the tablet is nice and thin and very portable it will find a wide market for the millions of us who can’t use small devices but don’t want to keep hauling out a notebook-type PC.
Steve Jobs may have a real winner here.
Thing is, Apple’s got experience with how to do it. They got close with the larger Newtons of the past, but the hardware really wasn’t up to it.
One of the keys is going to be handwriting recognition that doesn’t suck. Apple is in possession of what is probably the most effective handwriting recognition anyone’s ever seen; lots of people have been wondering why Apple’s been telling literally everyone that they wouldn’t license the tech despite the fact that it was ‘dead’. Apple has licensed discarded tech in the past to others, but Newton tech (specifically the Apple handwriting recognition software built off of ParaGraph CalliGrapher) has been in the “no, you cant have it” category since the Newton was killed.
More info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_OS#Handwriting_recognition
The first hint of what it was going to be used was when Steve Jobs pointed out the new Asian character interpreter that came with iPhone 3.0. You simply drew the ideograph on screen and it recognized it. The render process looked identical to how the Newton did it. Looks like CalliGrapher’s offspring is back.
One of the problems with tablets is that they do not lend themselves well to on screen keyboards, so you want to use some sort of handwriting recognition. Well, Microsoft’s offerings in this department are truly abysmal and most people give up and go to pecking with the stylus on a virtual keyboard, something that takes forever due to the form factor. The Linux/FOSS community has come up with nothing to compete with it. So tablets haven’t taken off because they are difficult and clunky to use. Hmmmm..... Now where have I seen that scenario before... maybe in the smartphone market, few years back? How was that resolved, again? :D
Today, the only use of the parent tech that Apple built Newton 2’s handwriting recognition off of is in custom Lockheed Martin (and other) tablets used by package delivery services like UPS or FedEx and some other similar custom applications. For some reason, nobody else has seen fit to use the tech in their tablets. And given Microsoft’s glacial pace (because, let’s face it, Linux tablets aren’t going to fly for average users any time soon), that probably won’t change for a while, if ever. For that matter, Microsoft hasn’t seen any reason to do any real work on their tablet OS variants in years.
I love my iphone, think it is genius but at my
middle-age eyesight level it is too small to work
on. i would buy tablet.
I’m reserving any judgment until Apple finally unveils the thing. It depends on whether Apple builds in some unknown that practically creates a new product category everyone will want to copy, as the iPhone and iPod did.