And you immediately highlight that you don't understand the difference at all. Try watching the User Interface instruction videos I mentioned in the above post. They'll outline the very real and very significant differences in how you have to design and work with a UI on a desktop and a touchpad.
The iPhone's differences are entirely because you've got to use something as inaccurate as a pork sausage (your finger) on a screen as the size of playing card.
I personally think it was genius on their part to get rid of the stylus that everyone else was using on their smartphones beforehand to get pixel perfect access to tiny scrollbars. Before switching to a Nokia I was a longterm user of Sony Ericsson UIQ based phones such as the P910i. UIQ was much better than Nokia's S60. It was however a pain in the the rear pulling out the stylus to use those. You could 'get by' with your finger most of the time - or the jog wheel which was great when you got it, enabling you to use a UIQ phone one handed. The virtual keyboard was impossible though, pecking away with a stylus.
Apple must have had a moment of clarity realising that the stylus was the problem and then crafting a whole UI around a fat finger pointer with big buttons and no scroll bars.
It has its limitations though and those I think will become much clearer on the iPad which has a screen the same size as a laptop screen.
No, available storage for a small portable unit will always lag behind that available to a larger notebook, or a statically located desktop.
It need not and the iPad is far from being small. There's no reason I can think of to not include a USB port in the iPad. I've a couple of USB sticks for transferring files over sneakernet that are 32GB each. Good luck transferring large files over 3G if there's no wifi network.
Dare I suggest that the iPad gets a lot of that 10 hours of battery life *because* it uses a different software model than a desktop so needs to use less resources.
That's just plain wrong. The example Jobs gave was playing straight video for 10 hours. It's still running tasks in the background - just the Apple ones mind. Stick a Macbook into single user mode, kill off all the tasks you don't need and you'll not get 10 hours to play video. The software model isn't the difference - the iPad just has less hungry hardware than a MacBook.
So, it's a hardware difference, way more than software. The software differences are marginal to battery performance.
Your Nokia E71 is also very different to a desktop computer too. And does even less than a desktop.
It's not so different. It has a screen, a multi tasking OS, has a full wordprocessor, spreadsheet, browser, skype, twitter client, maps, email, a bluetooth keyboard, file system, icons, windows, etc. It's not a touch screen at all. I can even run a webserver on it. UIQ was even closer to a desktop. If I'd said I had an N900, it's pretty much Debian Linux and has an 800x600 screen.
Both are of course much closer to a desktop than the iPhone and I think Apple is making a poor choice positioning the iPad closer to the iPhone than to a Mac. I want to use the iPad for Mac style tasks, not iPhone style tasks. I already have a phone for those.
I think you're wrong. The iPad does not need to be more closer to the desktop model. Because you *can't* make a small long battery life portable multifunction device that does everything a notebook can do and do it well. Apple understand this, and make a portable multifunction device that does what a portable multifunction device does best and does *not* try to be an ultra-portable desktop.
See Nokia N900 or OQO even. The iPad is larger than both of those but has less functionality. I don't see why the iPad needs to exclude multi-tasking or allowing 3rd party apps to be installed without Apple approval.
This is why 'tablet PCs' never took off, but the iPad looks set to be a big hit.
Tablet PCs never took off because they weighed the same as a laptop, ran the same crappy OS and required a pointy stick.
Apple again has worked out what was wrong with Tablet PCs and played a blinder with the hardware and UI. The only things wrong with the iPad are Apple's policies on letting users run whatever software they want on it - the same limitations they've imposed on the iPhone and also why I do not have an iPhone.
Will it be a hit. Of course it will. It has an Apple logo on it.
This is not a move to an App Store. No one from Apple has mentioned a Mac App Store. This is not a move to required app signing on Desktop OS X, no one has mentioned it, *and* it's be suicide for Apple to do it.
Of course it's suicide for the Mac if Apple did it. It follows the traditional free model of letting a user do what they want. But why on earth do people bend over and accept restrictions for Apple's iPhone and iPad???
It's not just Apple though. It seems to be a growing trend that computing platforms are becoming less open and more controlled by companies such as Apple, Facebook, Google... What we think as suicide now seems to be the norm for emerging platforms.
When Nokia went 'Symbian Signed' for it's apps, it killed off a lot of developers that couldn't afford to be developers anymore and made developing a bit more of a chore. Nokia/Symbian realise it was a mistake and are now opening up.
Apple would do well to open up more.
