This exists. Thinkpad X series tablets. End of discussion. Toshiba/Acer/Asus/Panasonic/Everybody/Their Dog also makes some version, or did in the past.

Mine has a Wacom Stylus, pressure sensitive, multiple buttons, actual keyboard, close(r) to 4:3 aspect ratio, (it's actually 16:10; 16:12 = 4:3), asinine long battery life, covered in USB ports, available with massive hard drive/RAM amounts, comes with a docking station, runs regular old Windows. (Also runs later versions of Ubuntu pretty good.) Mine is new enough to have a finger-touchable screen as well as the Wacom stylus. Physically punching the OK button on error dialogs is an experience that cannot be beat.

Used ones can be had with 4:3 screens, if you want to troll eBay for one. They're cheaper, too.

I dunno, somehow sub-$50 standalone GPS navigation devices manage to do this just fine, and have done for many years now. I don't see why a tablet couldn't do that, or come with the software to do that, or have an add-on SD card or something with all that map data on it you can buy for a couple of bucks. (Hint: That already happened. You used to be able to buy map cards for oldschool PDA's that had an entire continents' worth of road data, addresses, and POI's. You can still do the same with update cards for fancier standalone GPS navigators.)

Actually, your knee-jerk sarcastic comment isn't as far off as you think. If you discount the pictures and videos, and/or downsample the images to something suitable for a phone or tablet screen, the entire text content of the English wikipedia is only a couple of gigs; Easily small enough to fit on whatever microSD card you most recently lost between the cushions of your couch.

It also has a battery life best measured in seconds.

Almost all of the features in TFA are available one at a time spread across various tablets, but not all on the same device. Lenovo and Toshiba make tablets with full sized USB ports, most non-Apple and non-Nexus tablets have SD card slots, many have HDMI out. There is a map program that works pretty much as the author describes: NavFree is a free-to-use app that lets you preload maps on your machine that are pulled from the OpenStreetmap repositories to be used when you haven't got an internet connection available. It also has limited map editing tools built in to update/correct the repositories when you get back into wifi range.

High res daylight readable screens have been available for ages. I have one in my N900. The problem: You can't make them as thin as current tablet buyers for some reason demand. Personally, I'd be happy with a slightly thicker tablet with a metal alloy case that I can actually grip, and maybe not feel like I'm going to break in half if I breathe on it too hard. Having a sunlight readable screen bodged in there while we're at it would also be nice.

The Asus Transformer is another near-miss, as it has a card slot, HDMI, and you can get that groovy keyboard attachment that turns it into a mini-netbook (which even has a hinge on it so you can fold it flat). The tradeoff there? The machine itself costs $400, and the keyboard is not included -- That's an extra $149. Ouch.

Thus far, everything in this market is a game of tradeoffs. Eventually someone will get it right and include "all of the above" in a consumer device. It probably will not be cheap.

My solution for this is to just have two devices: I use a Galaxy Tab 2 (7.0) when I feel like being a media-consuming light-duty trendster. I have a Thinkpad X201T tablet when I want an outdoor-readable high powered machine encrusted with ports that I could use to kill a burglar if I hit him with it. I can fit my Galaxy Tab in the CD wallet section of my laptop bag.

If you can't stomach that multi-killobuck solution right now, then tough.

When I was in high school, I had sketchbooks that I filled to the brim with detailed drawings of planes, battlemechs, rockets, Warhammer dudes, and yes, lots and lots of weapons. Many of them attached to planes or in the form of swords and axes being held by fantasy roleplaying types, but also plain-old modern day guns. I think I turned out pretty well, and in my entire life I've never even so much murdered anybody. I was even still in school when the Columbine shootings went down, and even after that fact with all the paranoia swirling around, nobody cared about me or my notebook. Do you know why? Because it didn't fucking matter. It's what boys of that age tend to do, and back then people still managed to understand this.

This is knee-jerk paranoid reactionist ego-stroking BULLSHIT of the highest caliber. This poor kid's harassment and arrest is in no way, shape, or form designed to keep anyone safe or protect anybody from anything, but to intentionally scare people and stoke a bunch of "it could happen here" sensationalistic paranoia for the sake of inflating some school administrator's ego. The real intent of this, which is going to have real-world consequences of ruining this kids future -- Which, I hasten to point out, this superintendent and his cronies in no way care about or will show responsibility for -- is propaganda. To create the appearance that the school administration is "doing something!" and being "proactive and tough on violence!" to direct attention away from the fact that, back here in reality, this kid's school is undoubtedly zero percent safer today than it was last Friday.

This is why we are constantly blindsided by headline grabbing violence int his country: We are SO paranoid about not letting the imaginary "bad guy" in the front door that we're diverting all our attention to chasing shadows and tilting at these goddamned windmills. Meanwhile, the real enemy is free to sneak in the back door whenever he feels like it.

(Obligatory "that's what she said," by the way.)

The people who did this to that kid are the ones who need to be arrested -- every last one of them. Stripped of their ranks, stripped of their certifications, their badges taken away, and relegated to flipping burgers at McDonald's for the rest of their pathetic little lives, because people who straight-facedly make such poor decisions as these have NO BUSINESS BEING IN POSITIONS OF AUTHORITY, period.

I remember back when the TI-83 "boom" was happening in public schools around here and math textbooks were starting to show up with content in them tailored to TI-83 calculators. Suddenly, it was required that students have "a graphing calculator" for math courses, on pain of automatic failure. I'm not sure how this happened but I imagine it involved large sums of money changing hands: Somehow, every single published textbook was chock full of key-by-key instructions on how to solve problems that applied ONLY to TI-8x series calculators, and none other. Never were the concepts behind the button presses explained, it was just a matter of "press this button, then this button, then enter your value, then press this button..." So, while the schools were not able to admit that what you really needed was a TI-83 calculator and none other without exception, that's really what this new policy meant. In the early days, most primary school teachers didn't have much experience working with these "newfangled" calculators and were not able to offer assistance or background explanation about any of these button-pressing procedures, so the lucky ducklings with non-TI calculators (like me!) were basically shit outta luck. I had, and still have, a Casio CFX-8950GB Plus, which was at the time and still is superior to the TI-83 line in every possible way. It also has a color screen, but owing to the times it can only do four colors. Even still.

However the heck this twisted situation came about, it meant that TI wound up with a near-monopoly on the graphing calculator market, considering the lion's share of that market is mandatory primary education, most of it in public schools (this is in the USA, mind you). So, they've been able to churn out basically the same calculator pretty much without change or improvement and charge the same price for it at retail. I'll bet you a nickel it's a shitton cheaper for TI to manufacture a TI-83 now, with it's tiny simple processor and chunky low-rez monochrome screen than it was back in the early '90's. I'll bet the damn thing prints money for them.

Meanwhile, the rest of the market (and the world) innovates, improves, and moves on. This move to stick a 320x240 screen and a "whopping" 21k of RAM would be a bold and exciting one if it happened 15 years ago. Somehow, I picture today's students failing to get excited about a machine that's considerably less capable than a low-end current smartphone. Hell, I have a first- or second-generaton PocketPC PDA that's more powerful than that.

I predict that this machine will cost just as much if not more than the old calculators, the old style calculators will stay on the market as a "budget" option for poor kids but their price will not drop much or at all (especially if the zooty color model costs considerably more than the current price point), and nobody who isn't forced to buy one as the particular calculator for a particular math course will care; From a functional standpoint, as opposed to your specific "press this button" classroom requirements, better tools are already available elsewhere and will continue to be.

That sounds good. Would it have an actual keyboard instead of some stupid on-screen BS? I thought we left that behind back in the PocketPC days, but surprise! Apple made a bad idea "trendy" again.

I could do without, thanks.

(Spoken by someone who STILL has a Nokia N900, because nobody has yet made anything better running a decent smartphone OS that has an actual damn keyboard.)

I concur. The killer thing is, you USED to be able to get normal-sized, high density computer displays and not pay a whole hell of a lot more for them versus similar sized LCD's. But then the HDTV thing happened and went mainstream, and now it's next to impossible to find a monitor that's any higher than 1920x1080, and a lot of the smaller 16:9 ones are much worse resolution that that, and lower resolutions than they were 4 or 5 years ago.

It truly, absolutely, makes no damn sense. Except that manufacturers just want to recycle cheap HDTV panels manufactured in bulk (often with lousy 6 or 7 bit color depth as well) and try to pass them off as "premium" computer monitors.

Check out the Kyocera Echo, then. It was sort of a flop, but it is a thing that exists pretty much exactly as you describe.

On the Apple vs. Samsung note, I went out and bought two Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 7.0's on the day of the verdict. The presence of that stupid-ass lawsuit did not have much impact on my eyeballing of a Samsung device -- Rather, that was more because Samsung currently has the best 7.0" device on the market -- But it did have plenty to do with my decision to go out, vote with my wallet, and spend that money right then.

My main gripe with Apple is that I would dearly desire both the company itself and all of its loser fanpeople to just shut the fuck up already. They have their iThings, and that's nice. I don't need to hear the marketing crap every four seconds about how Apple invented the smartphone (they didn't), the walled garden model (they didn't), the all-screen "slate" form factor (they didn't), and celebrations of the fact that the iDevices still do not have innovations like card slots, IR ports, USB host functionality, etc., etc. that have already existed for decades. I'm sure Apple will come along and "invent" all of those things later, in the iPhone 6, 7, 8, and 9. Don't even get me started on the goddamned "retina" display. Whoopy-doo, Apple made an iPhone with almost the same pixel density of my seriously unhip Dell Axim x50v, circa 2004. Maybe Dell could sue them for that.

You would think, but the Demon Cost Accounting sneaks up on you, there. Because it is a proven, off-the-shelf part that costs a manufacturer close to zero dollars, you can bet YOUR last dollar that if you are sitting in a car with a four speed blower control, it is driven by one of those multi-tapped four position varistors, virtually unchanged since the '50's or earlier. Even if the car is a brand spanking new 2012 model with the window stickers still on it. Because it's cheap to get out the door. It can blow up three years from now, what does the manufacturer care? You can drag it to their dealer shop to get it fixed for a boatload of cash, and even if you don't they already sold you the car and they already have your money.

No digital climate control? There's a resistor in there. My boss' 2011 Accord uses one...

The Hylux/Tundra had a generation run that was notorious for rusting out due to substandard undercoating. I don't have the details on hand, but apparently there was a fat class-action that resulted in Toyota (or Toyota America) buying a lot of trucks back. A neighbor of mine has an OLD Tundra (like, 1998) that was affected and just last month (here in 2012!) Toyota bought the thing back from him for more than 10k, a rather alarming amount given the age of the truck. Rust snapped the frame in half between the bed and the cab, and he had to drive it home one night folded up like a taco... He used the money as a fat down payment on a new (2011) one. I guess they're happy he didn't hurt himself or someone else and sue them.

Having done "simple" repair jobs on my Ford Focus like brakes and suspension replacements, I think the next metric isn't going to be "who makes a better car" but "who makes a car mere mortals can work on, without dealer-only tools." To replace a front strut, I had to remove the steering knuckle from the axle (there goes the alignment) and the axle nut is one time use, AND it's a dealer only part! And it costs more than $40! After I did that job, I sold the car straight away. There is a fine line between design flaws and apparent deliberate design stupidity, and I refuse to own something built of the latter. You should have seen the gymnastics I had to do to get the thermostat housing out, which some egghead deliberately designed out of plastic because "it's cheaper!" yet it bolts to an aluminum block and is expected to seal forever given the wildly different thermal expansions of both parts. (Hint: They fail about every 20k miles. Enjoy!) So you don't hand me this "but that's the price of the steady march of technology" crap, my Saturn from the very same model year (2002) has an aluminum housing that can be removed with a socket wrench and reinstalled inside of five minutes. Oh, and it was also a much cheaper car to begin with. Go figure.

Soon, things are going to be designed along the lines of, "To save on expensive metal and make the assembly cheaper, this critical part is designed such that the multi-jointed robot tool that installs it at the factory can reach the bolt, but you with your puny human hand and socket wrench can't. I guess you have to send it back to the factory for brakes/struts/gaskets/whatever!" Plenty of stuff is being designed that way already. Have any owners of post-2008 vehicles had a battery die in one of their wireless tire pressure sensors yet? I'm sure such a thing would cause you to fail inspection in plenty of states. Basically, the dingus attached to your tire stem needs a new watch battery put in it (or, more likely, you need to replace the dingus entirely). But even IF you have a tire mounting machine to get the tire off and the stem/pressure monitor out, now you need a proprietary tool to teach your car's computer the serial number of the replaced sensor so it doesn't freak out about it.

This is progress.

I think I lost my original train of thought. Maybe I'll just go back to riding my bicycle.

There are, will be, and always will be quality control issues as manufacturers try to race each other to the bottom on cutting corners and therefore costs. Recall, not long ago, that brand new Chevy Sonics were leaving the factory missing brake pads. (The Chevy Sonic itself, a rebadged second-generation Aveo/Daewoo Kalos that is already notorious for having a laughably flimsy "new, revolutionary!" type of paint job, and is also a proven unreliable engine and drivetrain platform.)

Until very recently, the Dodge Neon/PT Cruiser combo was probably the single lowest quality modern production automobile ever produced, and it is a boon to motorists everywhere that the entire platform finally aged enough that it got the ax. Now, at least, you are less likely to be behind one of these things when it decides to blow its head off into the stratosphere and grind to a shuddering halt on the road ten feet in front of you.

Lousy cars are still out there, even brand spanking new ones. The only problem is, so many platforms are changing, being reinvented, or dropped in favor of completely new ones coming out that we don't know where they all are yet. The manufacturers, of course, all have their glossy print marketing machines going full tilt to convince you how wonderful ALL of their shiny new cars are, with their fancy new technology and brand new engine designs and computers and whatnot. Yes, gone are the days of flooding engines and sawdust in the transmission and all that 1950's bullshit, but new cars with their new technology can and will develop new types of problems that people are only just starting to discover. That's the price you pay for driving a fabulously complicated mass-produced piece of equipment every day in all types of conditions. Stuff will break. Some stuff will have unforeseen flaws, and break frequently. The only difference between now and cars of yesteryear is the parts that will produce lemons will be different (I predict lots of electronics/electrical problems, transmission issues for the zooty new million-speed automatics and CVT's, and the sudden availability of turbochargers demonstrating to American numbskulls that such things are not maintenance-free), and every time some issue pops up somebody will try to sue somebody else over it.

...How about some retailers -- especially so-called "specialty" retailers -- actually keep some products in stock for people to buy? It's becoming ever more common now that "this 'online thing' is the hot new fad" that physical retailers don't actually have any of the items I'm looking for available to sell to me. The story is, "well, that's an online only item so we can ORDER it and have it shipped to the store by next week..."

If I wanted to order whatever item, I could order it my damn self. The reason I didn't order it in the first place is because I want or need it now. This is especially a problem with things like computer parts, connectors, and cables -- Things that aren't just some shiny tech object I want to have in my hands right now, but stuff I need to actually fix somebody's computer. I also have big problems with this with outdoor and camping equipment, and sometimes auto parts. Ordering in the product doesn't help me when there's a hole in my tent or the car's in pieces in the driveway.

Moreover, some places' websites are getting better about listing which items actually exist in their stores for you to buy (Target) but others are absolutely terrible in this regard (Sears, Kmart), and extra special hateful mention goes to Wal Mart, who have taken a step backwards and made it MORE difficult to use their site to figure out what items are online only or in stock in a store when you USED to be able to do so easily. (It also doesn't help that they removed SKU and UPC numbers from their website in the wake of the old barcoding scandal in the midwest last year or so, even though this information was often the only way to make select clueless Wal Mart employees reliably go in the stockroom and find the item you want which was inexplicably never put on the shelf.)

In many cases, I will happily pay a little bit more to A) have the gizmo, part, or repair item now, rather than next week, and B) have someplace to return it to without having to pay shipping, jump through the Flaming Hoops of RMA, and wait another two weeks if the item turns out to be FUBAR. I already refuse to buy hard drives mail-order from anyone, as it is such a pain in the ass to get the online retailer to authorize a return and cough up a working one when just one drive out of the batch is invariably dead on arrival. The computer parts chain stores around here will price match reputable online retailers on hard drive prices if the prices aren't identical anyway, so the difference is moot.

While I'm complaining, the final insult perpetrated by big box retailers that drives me nuts is putting away "seasonal" merchandise or, more commonly, sending it back to the distribution warehouse when they decide you don't "need" to buy it. Okay, I can understand the need to use seasonal shelf space for movers like Christmas items and so forth, and having worked in hardware store retail for years and years I had to do similar things. But in our case we put the current seasonal stuff in the prominent shelf location and just moved the out-of-season merchandise to a less prominent spot and probably shelf it in a much more compact/less appealing manner (to save space) because invariably someone wants to buy a heater in July or, (as I tried to do just a few days ago) buy a garden hose reel in January. I can, of course, buy either of these items any damn time of the year online if I want to pay to have a hose reel or whatever shipped to my door. I once had Target REFUSE to sell me a fan in the wintertime even though they had one in stock in the stockroom according to their point-of-sale system because it was "out of season" and might "complicate their inventory." I didn't need the fan to keep cool in February; I needed it for ventilation.

If retailers want online places to stop eating their lunch they need to get their collective shit together, not make up new and useless private label products. Private label products already exist, and already suffer from the phenomenon that's going to shoot this initiative full of holes wherein whoever is contracted to make the product (because Target/Wal Mart/etc. have zero manufacturing capability and will farm this task out to a third party, probably in China) will instantly figure out that the same private-label item can be called a different "brand" and sold online, minus the overhead, minus the middlemen and licensing costs, for cheaper than the physical retailer. If some contracting agreement legally prevents this, the supplier's uncle's cousin's bother's manufacturing plant over in the next province will copy the product and do so instead. Exactly as already happens today, with private label products that already exist. Surprise! This idea isn't new. The only difference is putting the new-and-trendy smartphone stamp on it, and people like me were comparison shopping on our dumb phones, PDA's, laptops, and (gasp) telephones via the yellow pages long before anyone in supply chain management had a clue what a smart phone even was.

I'm sure there's a lot more prior art even than that. My N900 can do this via the touchscreen. You can also switch apps any time when anything else is going on by pressing ctrl + backspace, which even breaks you out of things that are "supposed" to be full screen only. It doesn't predate the release of the original iPhone, but I think its release and certainly its development predates the filing of this patent.

Harken back to the dark days of the original Windows CE/PocketPC based smartphones, many of which had touchscreens (like the PPC version of the Treo) and all of which supported multitasking and had nothing preventing you from tapping Start and going on your merry way to do something else while in a call.

Even my old Samsung R450 let you do limited stuff while in a call, like get at your address book, notes, and calculator.

Beyond that, I have decided after the "we're going to try to prosecute people who watched the Geohotz video" episode that Sony would get no more of my money. I've bought a lot of stuff from them brand new -- PS1's and 2's, multiple, games, controllers, two PSP's. Then this is how they treat the people who pay thier bills. No thanks.

I'll buy a priced dropped PS3... a used one, after the price drop makes them even cheaper still. I'll buy my games used, and if Sony goes download-only with the next thing (or this one -- you know they'd make a pach that disables playing game disks and force you to go download-only if they could get away with it) they'll count me out.

The fundamental difference between your movie theater analogy and everything else is that nobody in their right mind goes to a restaurant or bar just to listen to the radio. They go a a restaurant or bar to eat and/or get drunk. You aren't charging people to get in just to listen to the radio; If you ARE charging a cover for your bar for people to get in, it's for the DJ or band you've got live in the building.

Nobody pays a trucker to sit in a cab and listen to the radio. They pay the trucker to drive the damn truck. Whatever he listens to in the process is his own damn business, especially considering the trucker has no audience other than himself.