Posted on 07/30/2010 1:15:54 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Microsoft is hard at work preparing a Windows-based alternative to Apple's already-popular iPad tablet, the company's CEO Steve Ballmer told analysts on Thursday. Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Asus, Lenovo, and Toshiba are cooperating with Microsoft on such a device, expected later this year, in a bid to catch up with Apple and Google Android.
"It is job-one urgency around here. Nobody's sleeping at this point," Ballmer told analysts. The Microsoft CEO was also surprised to hear Apple sold more than 3 million iPads, since launched in April: "They've sold more than I'd like them to sell. We think about that," he said.
Ballmer's idea of an iPad alternative will use Intel processors and Windows 7, instead of its mobile Windows Phone 7 platform. Besides that comment, he offered no details on the upcoming Windows-powered tablets.
Apple, Android Have Head Start Microsoft underestimated Apple's flair for touch-based computers. Apple unveiled its iPad in January, and started selling it in April. Since then, the company sold over 3 million iPads, and expected to sell up to 10 million units this year.
Google Android, Apple's biggest rival in the mobile computing arena, also secured its spot on several upcoming tablets. Cisco, Dell, Asus, LG, and Samsung, to name a few, have announced Android-based tablets, slated to arrive this autumn.
(Excerpt) Read more at pcworld.com ...
Give Apple some competition.
Fire Steve "The Vanilla Ape" Balmer.
Ha-ha! Microsoft has been asleep for years, plaing catch-up to Apple by copying their ideas and putting them out as thteir own several years later! I won't believe they are awake until they come out with something first, and Apple copies them!!!
Microsoft, still following. There has to be someone in that company with some vision. Or if there is, it’s being squashed by corporate inertia.
The South will rise again too!
Will you be able to see the Blue Screen of Death in full sun?
MS had a great tablet implementation of it’s OS several years before Apple. The handwriting recognition was stellar - which is a huge hole in the iPad. If you could write on the iPad, I’d probably buy one. As is, they’re not really useful if you’ve already got an iPhone.
1 GHz processor - we can either have it putter around an OS that is approximately 6.8 GB big, or speed through an OS that measures a meager 0.307 GB. Hmmm, I wonder which will be more snappy?
Bear in mind that iOS4.01 doesn’t require a 2+ GB Paging file, or consume 1 GB of cache - Apple does everything it needs to do within that 308 MB.
MS has no business even attempting to put Windows 7 on a tablet, to even think this is a reasonable solution demonstrates that they do not even have the most fundamental grasp of the problem at hand.
Forget that they are proposing a product with a 2-3 hr battery life against an established product with 10-12 hrs. Forget that there are 250K cheap or free Aps for the iPad, forget the superior display, multiple axis accelertometers, forget the seamless networking capability.
Just focus on the user interface. Balmer doesn’t have a clue where to even start.
Yeah. Right.
Let’s see, the T91 was released for sale to the general public in June of 2009. The IPAD was April 2010.
The T91 has a keyboard, flash, a full OS, USB, Ethernet, pretty much what you expect.
The Ipad has none of this and is nothing more than a large screen Ipod. Yes, the Ipad has better graphics. If someone wants to spend their own money on an apple to subsequently spend money at the apple store to buy movies, plug in headphones and watch movies on a tiny screen, they should go for it. There are cheaper ways, but a fool and his money . . .
Oh, and I can boot in Windows 7 or Aurora. It’s a classic Apple scam. It’s excellent for what it can do, and that ain’t much.
So while the apple groupies repeat their instructed mantra of PC “catch up”, PCs were already there. Nice Apple could (finally) catch up.
. . . and my favorite Ipad review.
I have an ASUS EEE PC T91MT tablet netbook. Runs Windows 7 and works just fine. Just disable all the Aero "eye candy" (which I do anyway), and it's plenty snappy.
Here’s the issue; to compare a laptop against an iPad is like comparing a Garden Tractor to a Motorcycle.
A laptop is a productivity device, essentially it’s a CHEAP display, with a cheap keyboard and marginally fuctional mousepad, tied to an Atom processor with either 1 or 2 GB of RAM, running Windows 7 Basic.
If one were to put numbers to it, it’s 95% productivity and maybe 5% leisure. Want proof? Do you own an iPod or other MP3 player? Most likely you do. Why? Well, because lugging the Notebook around to listen to music suck. Chances are you do not watch DVD’s on the laptop either, because the experience generally leaves a lot to be desired. How many books do you read on your laptop? Chances are the answer is zero.
Why? Because the laptop is cumbersome, has a short battery life and the display is miserable - especially when you spend time on a bus, or a train, or an airplane. If the guy in the seat in front decides to recline; you had better act fast or he will crush your laptop.
The laptop, charger, mouse and case probably weigh round 8+ lbs.
The iPad is a leisure device, can I do my spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations on it? Sure, but it’s miserable - unless I use a bluetooth keyboard/mouse.
Weighing in at 1.5 lbs, and about the size of a notepad, the iPad is no more cumbersome than a vanilla folder. But, reading books, watching movies, listening to music, surfing the web, writing emails, sorting pictures, editing pictures could not be more pleasant than what you find on the iPad. The OS is snappy, the battery life is literally 10-12 hrs of actual use. I fly a lot; I’m able to book my flight, hit this site, and once I’m at 10K ft I watch one of my 52 movies I have stashed in it. Or I play games like Plants vs. Zombies, Peggle, Shuffleboard or a host of others.
The iPad is a leisure device that is unrivaled by anyone to date. The iPad is unique in the IPS screen it uses; which gives a beautiful picture with a very wide viewing angle.
I own both an HP 17 laptop and an iPad. When I fly, I check the laptop and carry the iPad with me. When I need to do work, it’s time to break out the laptop. But for everything else, the laptop is no match for the iPad - it’s not even close.
If you get a chance, play with one - have someone who owns one let you borrow it for a few minutes. There is a reason that these devices are selling at the rate they are, they fulfill a niche that MSFT never knew existed (which is hardly a surprise).
You have hit on the specific issue that the MS-on-notebook advocates are missing: there’s a niche here that Apple has found and is filling.
The Microsoft marketing machine wants to see Windows shoved into every niche they can cram it. They can not conceive that there are places Windows won’t fit and doesn’t belong. A super-light, snappy little leisure-time browsing device is one of those places. The iPad is never going to be a notebook or laptop. I could see myself using an iPad-like device (at the right price point) for leisue browsing.
What Apple has realized, perhaps as a result of their work on AppleTV is that fewer and fewer people spend their leisure time just vegging in front of the TV. People spend an increasing amount of time surfing the web instead of watching TV.
So making a “Kindle Plus” device makes a whole lot of sense. There is obviously a market here because there are so many other outfits about to chase the iPad with the Android OS.
MS, however, keeps trying to cram Windows into these markets. This is just as dumb as when they were pitching Windows as an embeded OS for routers and switches.
Great analysis!
MSFT can’t figure out what it wants to be. I’ve seen the inside of it, and it looked to me like they were busy trying to count all the licenses so that they could figure out the difference between what they were getting paid, and what they were owed.
That’s fine, as far as that goes, but eventually you have to wake up and figure out what you want to do AFTER every desktop had a PC with Windows on it.
They never bothered really having another ambitious sort of goal beyond that first one.
I don't watch DVD's or movies on it, because I just don't watch much video on small screens.
Your points about NOTEBOOKS are valid, but this isn't one.
I have 65 movies on mine! Along with 9000 photos, 3000 songs. I took it on 4 flights last month, makes flying a delight. Used it as a gps to find my way around other cities and to find restaurants and stores. I find myself using my laptop less and less these days. Some of my videos are instructional videos I ported off DVDs, along with PDFs I loaded, so I have a huge mobile reference library with me. Apple hit the ball out of the park on this creation.
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