Makes me wonder who they are targeting? Will this be an additional item for iPhone users or are they going for the netbook market or internet market.
iSlate/iPad/iTablet?
- Thread starter Morrus
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nedjer
Adventurer
The price point for other manufacturers to hit and the Wifi are enough to make major changes to how we game, how we share games, the use of games in education and way more. For example, development costs for a 9" screen game are way down on HDTV resolutions.
Convenience, developer community, availability through public services, . . . did some of you guys spend Star Trek Voyager looking at Captain Janeway and trying to work out if the Doctor was deep and meaningful - when you should've been watching the touch interfaces?
Convenience, developer community, availability through public services, . . . did some of you guys spend Star Trek Voyager looking at Captain Janeway and trying to work out if the Doctor was deep and meaningful - when you should've been watching the touch interfaces?
Steel_Wind
Legend
Orius
Unrepentant DM Supremacist
The same interfaces can be observed just as well in TNG and DS9 and one has the benefit of not sitting through an episode of Voyager as well!
Aeolius
Adventurer
Apple has announced the iPad and McGraw-Hill mentioned their intention to supply their content as eBooks for the device ( Video - CNBC.com ). I assume schools might be receptive to the possibility of eliminating the 40-Pound Backpack in favor of a 1.5-Pound Tablet?
This article at PBS TeacherLine discusses the prospect of integrating the iPad into an educational format: How will the iPad change education? « PBS TeacherLine Blog . This article discusses how one Northern Guilford Middle School classroom has already taken the initiative to go “paperless”: One Guilford County Classroom Goes 'Paperless' | digtriad.com | Triad, NC | Local .
Imagine having all of your textbooks (iBooks for iPad), notebooks (Pages for iPad), syllabi (Calendar for iPad), and agendas in a 7.5"x9.5" tablet. I'm sure Apple could improve on the $499 entry price for the educational market and create a suite of iApps specifically for K-12 and college-level educators. Not to mention that by adopting a closed system with a simple interface and easy to learn apps, you might very well eliminate an IT position at a school.
How much does a school spend on the purchase of physical textbooks and the printing of syllabi? How much could be saved by adopting an electronic format for them?
Very good point.
nedjer
Adventurer
The same interfaces can be observed just as well in TNG and DS9 and one has the benefit of not sitting through an episode of Voyager as well!
Yeah, how Star Trek Wooden didn't get cancelled after 17 seceonds is beyond me.
I think schools would be receptive to tablets, but if we're talking about them being in the position to issue them, a question arises: how willing is Apple to open up the tablet so that another party (be it the IT guy on staff or a contracted local vendor) can configure and manage the tablets to suit an organization's needs once they exceed the baked-in limitations of iBooks and iWork (and once we see them, we'll know what they are)?
What you're describing is part and parcel of the direction IT has been going for a while using concepts like "cloud services" and "virtual infrastructure". I wouldn't be surprised at all to see tablets dominant in all manner of organizations, not just educational. But it can't follow Apple's current model of unilateral authority.
With my iPhone, if I want it to do something I take Apple at their word that there's an app for it. If I find out there is in fact no app for it, my option is to just sit and wait for someone to build one and then for Apple to approve it. If I want to reconfigure the UI, forget it. If I want to use a different data carrier, forget it. If I don't like getting capped at 10 MB downloads, too bad.
Now, a lot of folks just shrug at this point and figure "well, iBooks and iWork let me do what I need to do and the UI is at least easy to use". But an organization tend to rankle at incoveniences that individuals blithely suck up.
And Apple isn't the only company capapble of making a tablet. In fact, if they can't figure out a way around the Flash limitation, they're pretty vulnerable to getting upstaged in terms of utility.
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Aeolius
Adventurer
Lack of Flash is a feature, not a bug.
It was my impression that Apple was holding out for Adobe to make a version of Flash that wasn't such a resource hog. And HTML 5 is just around the corner. The iPad doesn't ship for a few months, yet. Perhaps between now and then, they'll iron a few more kinks out of the device. The iPad WiFi/GSM ships in April. The new iPhone will supposedly be announced in June. That gives Apple a little time to work on the iPhone 4.0 OS.
Googling something along the lines "adobe apple flash iphone" generates a lot of informative results. Here's one from Popular Science that seems to lay things succinctly:
The Curious Case of Flash on the iPhone | Popular Science
One might also notice a bunch of news bites from early last year about Flash coming to apple "soon". Supposedly, there is collaboration between Apple and Adobe but no results are forthcoming.
At about that same time (2Q 2009), there were also announcements about the Hulu app being a few months away from release. Looks like those claims are starting to kick up again. Keeping my fingers crossed.
The Curious Case of Flash on the iPhone | Popular Science
One might also notice a bunch of news bites from early last year about Flash coming to apple "soon". Supposedly, there is collaboration between Apple and Adobe but no results are forthcoming.
At about that same time (2Q 2009), there were also announcements about the Hulu app being a few months away from release. Looks like those claims are starting to kick up again. Keeping my fingers crossed.
