What an engineer! The pragmatic appeal of his actions is incredible:
By the way, I solved the problem of battery life and [the lack of] multitasking on the iPhone.
Really?
Yeah. I just have two iPhones, so if the battery runs down on the first one, I can use the other. And if I'm talking on one, I can use the other one to look something up. You would not believe how much use I get out of that.
This totally cracked me up. It reminded me of this guy I know who wanted a computer to take with him when he visits his lake cabin up north. Laptop you say? No no no. He only wants to use it IN the cabin, where He already has an old monitor, keyboard, and mouse. So he bolts a metal handle to the top of his mini-tower. "This is my portable!" He was so proud.
The Apple //c was pretty much made for that purpose, though it seems that with the advent of affordable real laptops, nobody makes the luggable-with-a-handle form factor anymore.
Ha! A while ago I suggested on Twitter that the solution to iPad's lack of multitasking is buying multiple iPads, but people thought I was joking. Maybe it wasn't such a bad Idea after all. :)
It makes complete sense to me—remember the scenes in Star Trek where someone is sitting at a desk absolutely covered in PADDs, each doing one little thing? We just need to wait for the price to come down :)
That's nothing new ;-) By the 80's, when I was developing courseware for Apple IIs I had 2 on my desk. The development environment (GPLE + somehting else I don't remember now) took very long to start and having a second computer to reboot every time I had a testable disk multiplied my productivity by more than 2.
I remember I used a row-optimize function (&ROP) to compress the program so that it would fit in the memory of the target machine (it had to fit under Take 1 Programmer's Toolkit)
My boss does this. Sounds fairly sensible if you often talk on the phone (and don't have a headset so you can talk on one and look at it at the same time).
Would be nice if you could tether an iPod touch to one as a cheaper sidekick for data while talking on the phone one. I guess that will be less desirable with a 3G iPad as sidekick.
> Think about students going off to college. They want an Apple product, but their parents don't want to spend that much. Now they have the ideal thing. They can go to college and someone may have a whacked-out $6,000 laptop, but the guy with the iPad will get all the attention.
Good to know that the main reason for having a computer in college now is about showing off a gadget with a known logo. And not about silly things like reading, writing coursework, sharing information, taking notes, communicating with others... (where iPad is almost useless in most of these cases)
Are we seriously at the stage where people want "an Apple product"?
> Are we seriously at the stage where people want "an Apple product"?
Hahaha, way past it. Computers are complex products, and optimizing your purchase when there is variation among 30 different features (ram, CPU, screen size, screen resolution, OS, price, etc etc) is daunting. Shortcuts are taken, one of the most common no doubt being approval from peers.
one of the most common no doubt being approval from peers.
Another is buying an Apple instead of a PC. I recently replaced one of each, and the difference in the quantity of decisions and amount of technical knowledge required to make them intelligently was staggering.
Once I decided to buy the Mac, the whole purchase took about 5 minutes. The PC took hours. Once again, choice was a nifty double-edged sword.
> Are we seriously at the stage where people want "an Apple product"?
In my experience, yes. My younger sister recently decided that she wants to buy a new mp3 player, and she asked me for advice about which one to buy. It very quickly became obviouse that she only wanted me to provide validation for her decission to buy an ipod nano. I showed her several other brands (sansa, creative, etc.) that were about half the price for the same specs, but she would only say that those brands were not 'cool enough' and that she wanted an ipod.
Ya, I felt the same thing with my younger cousin. I was using my sansa clip and he was convinced the iPod shuffle was superior, but couldn't explain why.
My college had plenty of 'proper' computers that students could use 24 hours a day. If I was in college now I could easily see myself using the iPad for reading and note taking in class and then going to one of the workstations when I had to do more demanding work.
Yeah... there are schools that have all the equipment you need. But you can consider yourself lucky. In the first place I went to, there were probably 10 computers available for students in total. In the second place there were 3 floors of library full of computers, but it was still very hard to find a free one during exam weeks. It would be a mistake to rely on them being available every time you need them.
Depends if your doing something with comsci classes in it to. There has never been a time I couldn't get a computer at uni but if you didn't do comsci classes you can't get into those labs and the library has a lot but usually all being used around peak times.
my school has a 24 hour computer lab, but due to the budget cuts in CA, the library is closed twice a month, so the computer lab is always packed. I know (hope) that this wont last long, but it has been a problem this whole school year for me.
It was somewhere in the blog of Sun's former CEO: "all technology ultimately becomes a fashion item. It has happened to timekeeping, it is definitely happening to computers and telecom"
No, he said that even if you spend that much, nobody will think "hey, that guy has a cool machine". If you want people to think that, a "cheap" iPad will do the trick.
Writing coursework - do you really want to write more than a couple of lines of text on a device that doesn't have a physical keyboard? (you cannot rest your fingers on the screen without causing "touch") Same argument works for taking notes. I cannot possibly imagine working with a spreadsheet or graphs on the iPad.
Sharing information - you cannot run more than one non-stock application at once. I expect it's hard to share anything in that kind of environment.
Communicating with others - by default you're left with IM. Unless you buy an additional Apple-approved camera (cheapest laptops include webcams these days).
Doing any proper research - that needs at least a browser and text editor running at the same time. (unless you take notes on paper)
There are additional keyboards of course, cameras, etc. but why bother? Any half-decent netbook is much better suited for learning purposes than iPad. I can understand not being able to spend $6k on a laptop. Not sure what the situation is like in US, but in UK you can get both 3G dongle and laptop on a 2 year contract for £35/mth. That's just above $1k spread over 2 years (with internet included). Are we talking about education, or are we talking about expensive toys?
that needs at least a browser and text editor running at the same time
App idea: split pane browser/text editor. Automagically associate notes as they are written with the open web page. Bonus points: saving local copies of PDF's viewed with reference metadata.
Your other points are weaker - for long-form text, you can buy a hardware keyboard; not sure what sharing issues you have, I'm sure copy paste and email work; communicating with others - your phone still works even when you buy an iPad.
App doesn't exist in the standard browser. A custom app would probably conflict with the existing functionality of a browser (not allowed/not approved). Users will not be able to open other students' notes (.doc / .docx)
About the keyboard itself - if you have to carry your keyboard to a meeting with other people just to take notes quickly, I think what you need is a laptop/netbook really. (you also need a stand for the screen itself since you cannot hold them both)
I'm not following iPhone / appmarket news, but last I heard people had problems with (for example) camera apps rejected because they duplicate existing functionality. If it's not the case anymore, I stand corrected.
About .doc files though - I can also open them in OpenOffice on my box. But many lecturers sent me documents which were displayed completely incorrectly and contain auto-shape created graphs. Most students don't care either. That means I have to find MS Word to read them anyways. I don't expect this to be any better on iPhone/iPad, unless you can run OO or MS software on them.
Pages.app (for Mac, at least) can usually display most .doc(x) files properly. The only issue that I've run into is when a professor uses a font that doesn't come with a Mac. And, in that case, Pages defaults to Lucida Grande, rather then Calibri or whichever other font was used.
Gallery, in a box
Byline
Sharing widgets
First paragraph
SUBSCRIBE link
Rest of article
Maybe I'm being dim, but it took me a very long time to work out where the article text was. It's positioned where the comments are in every other article, and the gallery in a box at the top looks like the actual content of the page.
I would find it difficult to go back to using only one SmartPhone. I carry two phones (work/personal) and often use both at the same time for different reasons. Usually it's as simple as needing to look at one e-mail for reference and write another -- or I run IM on one and browse the web on another. Even though the Android phone multi-tasks it's too bulky and unusable to really jump between apps for multi-tasking mostly due to the lack of a taskbar or dock but also because the built-in apps simply aren't friendly to it. You can't "alt-tab" between two e-mail messages for example. The app simply isn't designed for that. Network redundancy has saved me a couple times too. I can be pretty confident I won't be without coverage anywhere I go.
I don't recall him saying that; I do recall him saying that he didn't know how to make a $500 computer that wasn't a piece of junk and that Apple doesn't do that.
I wonder if one could get away with playing WoW on the iPad. Tons of hotkeys but I could still see it happening with a custom UI add-on for simple things like grinding, etc.
It's like the space shuttle. They use three decision-making computers for redundancy. If two say "turn left" and one says "turn right", you turn right.
I'm not sure if you meant to say 'you turn left' or if you were just being funny. Coming from someone who just completed 10 hours of driving (and has another 6 tomorrow) while using GPS systems, I'm inclined to think you meant what you said. :P
I have two iPhones, a [Google] Nexus One, a [Motorola] Droid, plus a Garmin [GPS] and TomTom [GPS]. I turn them all on at the same time, plus the navigation system in my Prius.
"What's your favorite phone?
The iPhone, because of the apps. By the way, I solved the problem of battery life and [the lack of] multitasking on the iPhone."
My grandmother. She had asked about the internet and emailing and I decided to purchase one of these for her.
It was a tossup between a PC with all the peripherals or the ipad where she just touches the screen.
I thought the latter would be easier for her and a much less threatening.
(That being said, I haven't purchased one for myself. I already have enough devices that are adequate that perform the job the ipad does, so I don't see the need for one yet. Maybe in the future if I need to replace a few things)
I'm in pretty much the same position with my parents. The main issue as I see it is getting the thing to drive a printer since they will occasionally want to print documents or photos. Let's see what's in iPhone OS 4.0
By the way, I solved the problem of battery life and [the lack of] multitasking on the iPhone.
Really?
Yeah. I just have two iPhones, so if the battery runs down on the first one, I can use the other. And if I'm talking on one, I can use the other one to look something up. You would not believe how much use I get out of that.