| I didn't mean to direct that at you personally; just that I heard plenty of sniffy remarks about the early netbooks. Tablets have been around for a long time, but there were many missing ingredients that are now present: - cheap and compact wireless networking
- relatively cheap and robust touch screen technology
- decent-capacity flash memory and low-power CPUs/chipsets I worked in hardware sales for several years the main obstacle to tablet adoption was poor interface and weight of 3-5 pounds, which is a lot to keep parked on one arm. As for uses, I can picture many (which is why I want the thing). Here's a few, all of which are predicated on the idea of something light, cool and with similar processing power to an Eee: - reading in bed. I like reading in bed, but not the weight or head of a laptop.
- casual browsing on the sofa when watching TV and I just have to have a snuggie or shamwow :)
- reading gmail offline or pdfs on the bus (~2 hours per day)
- working on a film or TV set, where it could replace a clipboard/binder with a full script, call sheets, contact lists yadda yadda (I hate the wasteful and time-consuming practice of dumping all that info out to paper when 90% of the time it's not necessary, and 95% of the time there is adequate power around to run a small server with wi-fi)
- weighs substantially less than a large textbook and fits in my bag more easily (I'm happy to have it in a binder like a pad of notepaper) The Kindle DX is much of the way towards what I want, but the screen is still small and I'd like color and some light functionality. I'll read off a magazine-sized screen for an hour or two. The rough size of a clipboard and weight of a thick magazine work just fine for me, I'm happy to lug that about. |