Agree 100% -- ubiquitous tablets will cause some really interesting changes in society. It's illuminating watching a novice user use an iPad; I've seen both young kids and senior citizens become proficient with it in an amazingly short amount of time. You can take pry my terminals and Emacs windows away from my cold dead fingers, but for 90%+ of the population, something like an iPad / Android tablet (with perhaps an optional keyboard for writing) is really just about perfect.
I mostly agree, and believe tablets (iPad /honeycomb) is what would suit the majority of consumers -- with one glaring exception: typing. I've had iPad since release and I still loathe to type anything more than a ssntnece or two on the thing, then again maybe twitter and fb updates are teaching us to type in short bursts which is tolerable using current tablet keyboard inputs. (I don't consider 3rd party keyboard HW a viable large scale solution)
Isn't the form factor just terrible for that tho? It always seemed to me that Tablets are an excellent form for consuming information. Content creation, on the other hand, is best left to our laptops and keyboards that we already have.
So a docking station for a tablet makes sense (effectively changing the form factor back to something more traditional). Holding the thing with one hand while typing with the other really doesn't so much. I think that's ok, the context dictates how you use the device.
People have been using paper as a content creation medium for millennia; there clearly isn't anything inherently anti-creation about the tablet form factor. Tablets are only bad for content creation if you consider 'content creation' to mean traditional creative computer software. Photoshop CS5 would be terrible on an iPad, yes, but that doesn't preclude the future existence of equally deep and compelling tablet image editing software (for example).
I class things like "writing an email" as content creation too, and it doesn't look like a pleasant experience on a tablet. You could write a sentence using one hand whilst holding it in the other, but if you want to write a paragraph or two, you really need to put it down on a surface and then hunch over the device to type down on it. I say "hunch", because the screen is flat rather than at an angle when you place it on a surface, unlike a laptop.
I'm not considering the fact that you can plug a tablet into a hardware keyboard because if I had a tablet I certainly wouldn't want to carry a keyboard round with me just in case.
I'd rather just carry my laptop around for content creation, and use a combination of my laptop and mobile phone for content consumption.
I really hope somebody comes up with an innovative solution to add a hardware keyboard to a tablet. Something along the lines of a very thin hidden internal keyboard which you can pull out of the bottom, and then bend to an angle so you can place it flat on a surface with the screen angled towards you. I'd barely need a laptop anymore then.
Have you played with the latest version of android's voice tools? They're amazing. Content creation should only be regulated to existing modes of input (keyboard) only if we don't come up with better input
methods.
I agree completely. New inputs beyond QWERTY need to be developed. The tricky part I think is getting people to use new methods. I think things like 8Pen are a good start, however.
It's still obviously far slower than an actual fullsize keyboard , but for a smaller form size hardware keyboard (such a phone), I've actually found Swype to be faster. It completely blows the on screen keyboard out of the water, but I was never that fast at that. I was a major fan of hardware keyboards before swype (in fact, it's why I got a Droid instead of another Android phone), but I'm beginning to find myself becoming faster on Swype than an actual phone keyboard, and that's even with a 2+ year headstart of using hardware keyboards.
However, this all depends on the size of the tablet. If it was laptop sized (with Fn keys to allow for slightly smaller size even), I'd probably take the keyboard over Swype, but it would really depend on where I was typing. Swype is designed to be used one handed, and would be perfect for when you can't just set your tablet down. If the keyboard would be netbook sized, I might actually take Swype over it most all of the time.
To followup: today multi-touch tablets are primarily consumer luxury devices (toys if you will). But as mobile OS's mature and move into the business market this will change. Tablets and tablet OS's will be used in businesses. And yes, this will expose some of their current weaknesses, but there are straightforward solutions to many of them.
For example, a docking station in the form of a monitor stand which turns a tablet into a monitor for a traditional mouse & keyboard. Or, laptop/netbook form factors with attached keyboards (this is not a new form factor, there are already touch screen tablets of this sort).
What makes the new generation of tablets novel is not merely their particular physical characteristics today, it's the method of interaction, the simplicity of the interface, and the simplified and streamlined methods for managing applications. All of those things will still be relevant if you add a mouse and keyboard.
The implications on current work environments in almost any business might be profound. Enterprise Software design, Work desk architecture, cubicles, 9-5, are all but symptoms of a industrial era work culture.
While effective (indeed there are jobs i am hard pressed to imagine another model) this work environment is long in the tooth, and shows significant strain in knowledge and creative workplaces.
The current batch of smartphones, and pad computing had a profound effect on my life, and on the life of everybody I know who uses them, the lines between work and pleasure are blurring, you can only imagine when hi-res kinect like interfaces will be integrated into them. whats more, IT managers (myself included) are easing control over these systems, permit them and encourage them, it is cautious, but it will be a sea change.
Small "enterprise" apps, that do simpler tasks, might become more and more prevalent, The disparity between the desktop environment and pad for some tasks (like reading for instance) is getting bigger, and makes the older one seem outdated. The coming workforce shouldn't be expected to perform to the best of its abilities with outdated tools, or stay in their chair all the time for that matter.
There are many clouds I personally see in this horizon, DRM for one, the disappearance of material from a cloud resource (ala wikileaks) without any due process another. But for me, especially in the US, and here in NY, where the last mile everywhere is owned by Verizon, bandwidth, its cost, and control over it, is the biggest concern, these technologies are stymied by the draconian control of Telco's.
We are on the verge of another giant leap in computing, this one, apart from new usability paradigms differs from the previous PC revolution on its reliance on connectivity and bandwidth, without them, the devices are a poor experience.
Something got to give, Telco's cannot be allowed to control this future.
