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Comment Re:"No ecosystem" (Score 1) 280

I keep all of my O’Reilly books and my company’s own documentation on my iPad. Very handy in my line of work (I’m frequently onsite with customers and need quick access to technical documentation, and I often don’t have access to the Internet from a customer’s network.) Yes, I could use my laptop but the iPad is simple much more convenient in a lot of situations (e.g. I’m sitting at someone else’s desk and can comfortably read from it without having to clear any space on the customer’s desk)

Comment Re:"Flash" (Score 1) 235

Depends on what those “Flash” elements were. If they were h.264 videos from YouTube, Vimeo, or a few others with smart embedding fallbacks, they'll just work. If they are actual SWF embeds, then your users were probably confused.

Comment Re:Half baked (Score 1) 235

Forgive me for feeding the troll, but what?

rendering web pages and navigating the web 10x slower than the cheapest netbook running Windows7

Do you realize how often an iPad crashes? iPads crash on average more than once a day, which is worse than Windows7 and even worse than Vista. They are inherently buggy and glitchy, as any review you will find on them has to admit.

Anecdotes aren't evidence, of course, but I haven't had a single OS crash on my iPad in the two months I've owned it, and for browsing performance it roundly trounces my Acer Aspire.

Do you have anything to back these two howlers up?

Comment Re:They all have it wrong... (Score 1) 178

It's just that your fundamental premise about what Apple did is so totally wrong it actually makes everything else you said seem more wrong than it would otherwise.

I elaborated above. CocoaTouch != Cocoa.

Uh, dude? You do realize that the iPhoneOS running on your iPad is a scaled down version of OSX, which is a desktop OS, which is a scaled up version of NeXTStep

Yeah, in 1992 I was doing my emailing and Usenet reading from a NeXT box, so I kinda get it. :)

Comment Re:They all have it wrong... (Score 1) 178

Guess what? iPhone OS is OSX scaled down.

The APIs that people actually code to, CocoaTouch, are completely new. They resemble the Cocoa APIs, and even share a few method names, but they are not the same, which is one of the first things OS X programmers realize when they try to just recompile something they’ve written for the desktop. The kernel is the same, but I think we can agree that kernels are pretty much commodities at this point.

No, you have no idea what you're talking about, as we've already established; Windows CE is its own OS and not based on another Windows, so it's not scaled down from anything,

The HP device I thought we were discussing here was demoed as a Windows 7 tablet, which, as you note, has nothing to do with WinCE. Why are you moving the goalposts? I may be mistaken here, but does the WinCE family support multitouch at all?

More products are probably cancelled than actually brought to market. Microsoft cancels things all the time. WinFS anyone?

One big way Apple’s been kicking people’s butts is by only showing things that become real products. It’s a lesson the rest of the industry should pay attention to.

Oh wait, you're ignorant of history, sorry about that. Or are you being deliberately obtuse?

Cool, that was pretty much the Elvis Presley of ad hominems. i salute you.

You are the typical happy iPad owner, using a revisionist view of history to "prove" your point, and justify your purchase. Too bad you're 100% wrong.

Well, I might as well just go home, then.

Comment Re:why don't you have a tablet PC? (Score 1) 178

Honestly curious (not trying to be snarky), but how many truly tablet-centric applications did you regularly use? What proportion of the time we're you using applications that were really optimized for the form factor?

My (admittedly biased) experience has been that requiring developers to really think about the platform results in ultimately more satisfying applications.

Comment Re:They all have it wrong... (Score 5, Interesting) 178

It’s become pretty clear at this point that scaling a smartphone OS up, rather than scaling a desktop OS down, is the better approach. Someone had to stick their necks out and try it. Microsoft tried and failed to scale Windows down, but Apple has apparently succeeded going the other way. Let’s not forget that the outcomes were far from obvious even as recently as a few months ago. HP getting on stage with Microsoft in January was their throwing in their lot with the desktop approach. I think they’ll ultimately come out happier having reconsidered. It actually took corporate chutzpah for them to cancel the Windows 7 Slate after showing it.

It is a stopgap, at best. Someone needs to take the time, do the research, and do the work to write an OS for these devices instead of trying to patchwork add and remove bits and pieces of systems clearly designed for other purposes.

You may be right, but remember: shipping is a feature, and, IMO, the most important one.
(disclaimer: happy iPad owner here...)

Comment Re:26% of the planet connected (Score 2, Informative) 1067

Just because someone checks Facebook using their iPhone doesn't mean that things have really changed, mobile devices are still crappy for doing just about anything on the internet. Yeah, I might read a blog or two, check the news, etc. but its painful to do so, even on the best devices.

Not trying to be snarky here, but have you actually spent any real time browsing on an iPad? A couple of months ago I might have agreed with you about the quality of the web browsing experience on mobile devices, but now I've owned an iPad for a month and use it full time at night and on weekends. The big reveal is with a fast browser on a large enough screen, mobile browsing really isn't painful. Browsing on the iPad really is a desktop quality experience for anyone who can't be arsed with Flash (I use a blocker on the desktop)

Comment Re:Watch the messenger (Score 1) 457

The iPad is not sold as a standalone computing device -- it's plainly stated that iTunes running on OS/X or Windows is required for syncing. My media server (which is also the system that handles video downloads for the house) has an instance of Air Video Server running.

I should state that I have a netbook running Ubuntu as well. I nearly never used it for video playback except for files I'd preprocessed on a beefier machine, anyway, as it labors mightily when dealing with video that hasn't been downsampled. It's a much less pleasant video consumption environment than the iPad (less portable, runs hot, has noisy fans, and an inferior display.)

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