More Apple Tablet Rumblings

[bokdol]

http://www.palmone.com/us/products/mobilemanagers/lifedrive/

dont know if anyone posted this already.. be nice with a mini osx installed
😛

 

[bikertwin]

Size matters

http://www.palmone.com/us/products/mobilemanagers/lifedrive/

dont know if anyone posted this already.. be nice with a mini osx installed
😛

Nice link, but Apple needs to create something larger for showing movies and high-resolution photos. Widescreen, between the size of an iBook screen and the LifeDrive screen. It would be perfect.

It needs:

Music (iTunes)
Movies (QuickTime Player)
Photos (iPhoto)
Mail
Safari
Address Book
iCal
Preview

Then we need an "iLife Store", which is the iTunes Store + movies + eBooks. Sony had the beginnings of this with their Clié line, but dropped out before they were finished. I'm looking to replace my Clié now. Tungsten E2 is too expensive for what it does; very uninspiring. LifeDrive is too small.

One more thing. If it has a 16:9 HD screen, it can play back HD content created in DVD Studio Pro, even before HD/BluRay drives are out.

 

[emotion]

interesting

http://www.nokia.com/nokia/0,1522,,00.html?orig=/770

 

[GregA]

Come on guys. Seriously, what does a tablet do that your great powerbook doesn't already? Tablet PCs always seemed like a tech demo rather than usable solution. Big "so what" if you ask me.

Personally I think if they release a tablet at the same cost as a laptop, there just isn't much point.

The question is is there a market for something of far lower power but that's also far cheaper, AND useful.

Maybe you could consider it an iPod photo with a big screen - you can look at photos, read notes, listen to music, look up contacts, check your calendar. Not really enough is it?

Or consider it as a Newton modernised.
Or a remote terminal to something else.

If iTMS was selling eBooks (electronic books) I'd load them on a tablet to read - but iTMS doesn't sell electronic/digital books.

I don't think there's a market there for an ultra simple device until the tablet can replace a normal notepad in every way, a book in every way, and a diary in every way. Every way INCLUDES size, weight, and loooooong battery life. Perhaps if it replaces those closely enough, and adds another function like email, web, and iChat via 802.11?

 

[Lepton]

I'm tellin' ya' - Apple Remote Monitor

A small flat screen display with stylus, WiFi, Apple Remote Access and virtually nothing else is an ideal device. No hard disk, no big memory, no I/O but the WiFi and a USB for optional keyboard, mouse, printer. Minimum screen 640x480, but sizes from shirt pocket to laptop are possible. With an OLED display you can get really bright images in a tiny, thin case with an all-day battery. You can get Star Trek DataPad-y with a little work..

Small. Light. Cheap. Long battery life. 95% as useful as a laptop at one third the price. Most computers are on the Net, and Tiger is all ready for this as it has the ARA client and Inkwell built right in.

WiFi has plenty of bandwidth for this. I run Timbuktu/ARA all the time hooking my 12" laptop 1024x768 to my main machine and most of the time you hardly notice. You can run ALL the programs you have at home, you can roam anywhere there is a WiFi on the Net, you can tell your home computer to print, EMail, fax, file transfer anything, you've got all your data with you and up to date. Or you can roam an office floor linking to various computers on the fly.

The concept deserves very serious thought..

 

[intlplby]

that's exactly what i am saying lepton....... all you need is the degree of communications ability and that seems like the future to me...

it'd be the power of the desktop in the laptop..... examples

you work with final cut pro, motion and shake..... you shoot out on location. upload all the footage to your desktop workstation overnight...... all your work is then located in a safe place and you can then harness the power of your desktop machine out on location. editing with FCP, creating particle systems with motion and compositing with shake without having to carry around bulky large FW800 drives (which are more prone to failing when you travel with them, plus your data could be saved on a redundant system where size and weight are no issue) you can have as much ram as a desktop will hold (8 gb currently) utilize the dual 2.7s you have or even better yet a cluster of remote machines. all you would need is the laptop, a fast mobile wifi connection and a harddisk big enough for a days worth of information.

example 2

you are a DJ and you are traveling... you can have access to your entire library of MP3s at home without the need to carry around a harddisk with everything.... vinyl, turntables and laptop are enough equipment to carry without adding more to the mix.... plus when you arent playing you can harness all the ram and processor speed when working in logic or DP4

example 3

you are a photographer out on location.... same deal as the above two.... you got all the photos backed up and you don't need to worry about loss, theft, damage, or other mishaps since all your work will be safely secured back at home or in the office.... you can then utilize desktop power and lots of ram to work quickly in photoshop or batch processing your raw files

 

[cr2sh]

A small flat screen display with stylus, WiFi, Apple Remote Access and virtually nothing else is an ideal device.
The concept deserves very serious thought..

Why? Because its your concept?

I want to do email, I want to do iTunes, I want to do sketches, I want to do internet. I want at least 1280x800 reolution.

 

[dobbin]

Welli bought a 500 iBook so i could sit out side and read e-mail and surf the internet, now what i wanted was a smaller tablet, slightly bigger than the Palm Tungsten and smaller and lighter than the iBook.

-ray

Pretty similar here. I bought my iBook because I wanted to be able to carry my photos around with me to show people who don't have a computer like my mum and my gran.

Of course, the iPod photo came out 2 weeks later which I may have chosen instead.

I think its better to view on the iBook though, rather than having to plug the iPod into a TV.
So something in the middle - an extra large iPod photo - would have a market IMO.

 

[cr2sh]

you work with final cut pro, motion and shake..... you shoot out on location. upload all the footage to your desktop workstation overnight......

Wow. Upload video footage overnight. That is an impressive upload stream connection you have there... I mean jeez... the guy has a t3 connection in the field, but can't afford to bring his g5 with him. Dazzling.

you are a DJ and you are traveling... you can have access to your entire library of MP3s at home without the need to carry around a harddisk with everything.... vinyl, turntables and laptop are enough equipment to carry without adding more to the mix.... plus when you arent playing you can harness all the ram and processor speed when working in logic or DP4

What? You're not making sense. This DJ is going to carry around a laptop.... but not a harddisk with mp3s?

you are a photographer out on location.... same deal as the above two.... you got all the photos backed up and you don't need to worry about loss, theft, damage, or other mishaps since all your work will be safely secured back at home or in the office.... you can then utilize desktop power and lots of ram to work quickly in photoshop or batch processing your raw files

Ugh. Listen I'm not sure why he would need an elaborate system to connect him to his machine across the county... when a laptop in the field would do everything he needs. Half the hardware. No worries about not being able to get to his files. And if his connection ever goes down... he has somewhere to put his stuff. You guys seem to think that this tablet Apple might introduce would also include connectivity that never fails....

 

[bikertwin]

The New Look

Will it be shiny, glossy black like the edge of this screen?

http://www.apple.com/macosx/

 

[woodman]

What I'd like... since we're dreaming

I'd like a 12" PowerBook with no keyboard, no optical drive, and a shorter (wide screen) screen. I'd like it to have all the ports of the current powerbook so I could hook up an external keyboard/mouse and monitor. I'd like to to be viewable wide (for movies) or tall (for documents). I'd like it to recognize handwriting like the Newton or use its own alphabet like Palm. And of course it would have to save my handwriting as images, so i can jot notes without worrying about recognition.

Is this too much to ask?

How about if I ask it to be $799 ?

 

[poundsmack]

the lifedrives are really cool. i came really close to buying one but refuse to buy anything PALM untl OS6 is on them. but i think if we double the size of the lifedrive then it would be perfect. the problem is the hardd drive. while a micro drive would work. and i think thye have up to 10 gig microdrives (i could be totaly wrong in either direvtion) the fact that those drives were not ment to spin very fast or very offten without wearing down.

 

[bikertwin]

Yes, but no hard drive?

interesting

http://www.nokia.com/nokia/0,1522,,00.html?orig=/770

Yes! Nice find. Screen resolution is OK, but not perfect. 🙂

It doesn't have a hard drive, but does have an MMC slot (is that the same as SD?). Will that be fast enough to play movies?

The LifeDrive has a 4 GB hard drive, but soon SD cards will be available at 4 GB. So is the need for a hard drive all about speed? One review of the LifeDrive mentioned a 6-second delay as it spun up.

 

[Dr.Gargoyle]

I am sure someone else mentioned this before, but if not...
the only reason Apple could have to enter the dying tablet market would be if they combined a video iPod and a tablet computer. The fact that Apple seem to be selling movies through iTMS might open a market for a iPod video.
However, you need a much larger screen for watching video than the tiny one iPod Photo currently is sporting. Furthermore, it makes business sense to differentiate the different iPods in the iPod family. This might be one way of doing just that. That is, adding some basic emailing, webb browsing, etc capabilities would índeed help differentiate e.g. the iPod Photo from a possible iPod Video.
Regardless of which I doubt that Apple would market an ordinary tablet. It wouldn't be Apple's (Job's) style.

 

[Chaywa]

So I don't really care but...

I couldn't care less about an apple tablet. I'm sitting at a G5 tower editing, compositing and compressing massive amounts of video and loving it. But, here's something to add to the discussion. Perhaps this

http://www.samsung.com/PressCenter/PressRelease/PressRelease.asp?seq=20050523_0000123980

could be a solution to battery life and weight issues. Apple is an early adopter of new technology like this. Just my 2 cents.

 

[dizastor]

This would be a great solution for many artists out there. I for one would love a Mac tablet that I could draw on. I've been seriously considerering a tablet PC for my long train rides to and from work each morning. Bringing the 17" Powerbook and the Wacom tablet seems a little over the top to me.

That Nokia 770 looks pretty sweet, a slightly larger screen, a lite version of Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, and some Apple design cues and that would be an awesome solution.

Other things that I can see being the hit or miss keys to Apple's tablet success would be Apple software that adds functionality to the tablet right out of the box, a sketching app, a notebook app, maybe even a lite photo editor.

I think the thing that has been killing Windows tablet PCs is price. Tablets should be between $600-$1200, not the $1500-2300 that current tablets sell for. I think they are completely missing the point as to what people want a tablet pc to be. They try to make it a full fledged notebook with a fliptop touchscreen. I think they need to strip out the unecessary extras that make today's tablets more of a hybrid than a true tablet. A keyboard should be an add-on option. The screen should be somewhere between small laptop and a pda. (8 inches or so)

I can't stress enough how important I think the software is. OSX Lite, value added tablet apps, I'll take one, and I'm sure many of you would too.

😉

 

[Toe]

Instead of a tablet... howabout a sheet?

Flexible LCD technology already exists, and some flexible LCD products have already been produced.

I doubt it would be appropriate for a tablet until it is very, very inexpensive. But at that point, some really interesting products come to mind.

P.S. At that point, I'll bet we'll see LCD tattoos as well, both for fashion (animated tattoos that change all the time) and function (a small screen in place of a wristwatch that acts as the interface to your communications).

 

[peharri]

I need a keyboard

I'm more than happy with a smaller laptop, preferably with built in 802.11, and some easy way of having it go online via GPRS, but it needs a keyboard. It seriously needs a keyboard.

I know there are those who find keyboards scary, but frankly the numbers are tiny these days. If you have a job, then with some exceptions, it generally requires regular use of a keyboard. And even a one finger typist pretty soon ends up faster on one than using a pen on paper.

Most importantly, it's not painful. Writing is.

While I know that there's a strong minority that disagrees with the above, I genuinely believe that for a product to be useful to the vast majority of its users, a keyboard is necessary. That, above everything else, is why the PDA never seriously took off, and why the tablet PC hasn't either.

Yeah, I said it. The PDA never took off. It was an interesting toy for the vast majority of people I saw using it - some execs and the odd geek. Despite falling to a price level where it could become an impulse purchase, the devices simply never found mass usage the same way as, say, the mobile phone. Even in its heyday, there were less people in my US based office with PDAs (about three) than there were mobile phone users (before the great surge in demand around 2001)

What we're proposing here is a larger PDA. One with less portability. One designed to have all of the disadvantages of the laptop coupled with the disadvantages of the PDA. It's just not a practical proposition, it doesn't have a market. About the best I can think of is that it'd be a nice thing to use to surf the 'web while in bed, or control some sort of iTunes server from the living room couch, and that's only if I don't plan to type anything beyond the occasional password. And we're assuming Apple has overcome technological problems that have plagued other implementers - like Nokia's astonishingly poor three hour battery life on the 770.

I hate to be a naysayer, but I don't see Apple doing this. There were always good reasons to believe a well implemented hard disk based MP3 player would be useful to people. This doesn't seem to have that.

 

[intlplby]

i know that uploading uncompressed video footage overnight is not currently possible... i had mentioned in a previous post that it's all dependent on the communications technology.... but it seems more and more difficult to keep making a laptop better while still reducing it's size.......you always have the luxury of space and wall power with a disktop..... i can totally see a point where gap between the power in a desktop and the power available in a notebook starts to widen significantly

 

[madmaxmedia]

Yeah those tablet PCs have become such a colossol hit! I mean you can't go anywhere without seeing one.

I hope Apple doesn't waste its money developing a tablet PC when there is so much work to be done on making good value, fast ibooks and powerbooks. Something they apparently no longer have an interest in.

I think Apple can chew gum and walk at the same time...Besides, faster notebooks will come when IBM develops the CPU's for them. Apple is not the rate-limiting factor here.

The next huge product out of Apple will likely be another red-headed stepchild, that Apple is able to develop and fulfill its potential. The iPod drew a collective groan when it was first introduced. The Shuffle spec leak (no screen or click wheel) drew a similar response here, and it has become a huge success. Looking at existing products and markets is conventional thinking, which is not how Apple has succeeded.

I personally don't really see this tablet happening, but it's not like I've done a whole lot of work analyzing tablet and PDA interfaces and assessing whether they could be improved to make them truly useful devices for a large number of people.

 

[Dr.Gargoyle]

I hate to be a naysayer, but I don't see Apple doing this. There were always good reasons to believe a well implemented hard disk based MP3 player would be useful to people. This doesn't seem to have that.

I couldn't agree more...However, the circumstances will change if Apple decides to sell movies from iTMS. My guess is that then they will also be launching an iPod with video capabilites. Since the display on the current iPod is very (too) small, we should see the introduction of an iPod with larger screen with some additional PDA capabilities... adds up to a tablet.
I do share your doubts about wether it will become a success.

 

[madmaxmedia]

What we're proposing here is a larger PDA. One with less portability. One designed to have all of the disadvantages of the laptop coupled with the disadvantages of the PDA. It's just not a practical proposition, it doesn't have a market. About the best I can think of is that it'd be a nice thing to use to surf the 'web while in bed, or control some sort of iTunes server from the living room couch, and that's only if I don't plan to type anything beyond the occasional password. And we're assuming Apple has overcome technological problems that have plagued other implementers - like Nokia's astonishingly poor three hour battery life on the 770.

I hate to be a naysayer, but I don't see Apple doing this. There were always good reasons to believe a well implemented hard disk based MP3 player would be useful to people. This doesn't seem to have that.

While I completely agree with your thoughts on a keyboard (I need one too), to say this this is just a larger PDA is way oversimplifying things, since we have absolutely NO IDEA what Apple might be coming up with.

There were good reasons to believe a well implemented HD mp3 player would be useful, but almost no one foresaw how successful the iPod would be. It's way to easy to say things in hindsight, heck the iPod didn't even start taking off until after its first year.

My point is not that a rumored Apple tablet will be great no matter what, but that everyon here is naysaying it based on conventional, current form factors and interfaces. While we should all know that if Apple does introduce a tablet, it will look and work like nothing that is currently available.

 

[Dr.Gargoyle]

While we should all know that if Apple does introduce a tablet, it will look and work like nothing that is currently available.

THAT is something we all can agree with. Whatever Apple decides to launch it will not be what we have had expected

 

[madmaxmedia]

A small flat screen display with stylus, WiFi, Apple Remote Access and virtually nothing else is an ideal device. No hard disk, no big memory, no I/O but the WiFi and a USB for optional keyboard, mouse, printer. Minimum screen 640x480, but sizes from shirt pocket to laptop are possible. With an OLED display you can get really bright images in a tiny, thin case with an all-day battery. You can get Star Trek DataPad-y with a little work..

The concept deserves very serious thought..

At the very least, the concept is good enough that even a more fully-featured tablet (more than a thin client) should have this capability built-in.

You can do this with a regular PDA right now with PalmVNC and either a Palm or PocketPC. A more specialized device would be bigger though (bigger screen). USB for optional keyboard and other stuff would be key too.

If you had a good wifi connection, it would feel remarkably close to running your home Mac right there. Although the obvious question is then how is this dramatically better than a notebook computer? Anything bigger than a PDA is not pocketable, so 6 x 8 x .75 is not that much better IMO than 8 x 11 x 1 (or whatever my 12" PB is.)

The main negative vs. a notebook is that you have to have a relatively fast connection for it to work, otherwise you're DOA. I think that's why regular tablet/PDA functions would also be built in, not just the thin client.

 

[madmaxmedia]

THAT is something we all can agree with. Whatever Apple decides to launch it will not be what we have had expected

Yeah, my main point I guess is that it would be more fruitful and much more interesting to speculate on how such a device might actually be revolutionary. I mean it likely isn't going to happen anyway, but it's funner to brainstorm how an Apple tablet might be really useful and desirable, than talk about how crappy existing PDAs and tablets are.

I was completely surprised by the original Shuffle rumors. But after thinking about the possibilities for a few minutes was completely convinced that not only was such a device quite possible, but that Apple would really introduce such a product.