This one’s gold: Why Tablets Are Just a Fad, on PCWorld, by Katherine Noyes. For some reason, Noyes appears particularly miffed at the suggestion tablets are obliterating laptops and netbooks in mobile computing. It’s all she can do to stop herself screaming “No, you idiots! Laptops forever,” before jumping off a cliff with 15 Sony Vaios glued to her head.

Ever since rumors of Apple’s first iPad began to look credible back in 2009, I’ve been watching the tablet space with a mixture of wonder and confusion.

Which is presumably why you wrote the article you did, but do go on…

After all, the devices really don’t offer anything you can’t get on a smartphone

Aside from, say, a bigger screen that hugely impacts on the usability of complex apps and makes reading books and watching movies a lot nicer.

or a notebook computer,

Apart from massively superior battery life, a slew of handy streamlined apps, a lack of lap-burning temperatures and touchscreen capabilities that actually work.

and their form factor is inconvenient, at best.

Unlike those super-convenient laptops, with their super-convenient form factors. CLAMSHELL FOREVER!

Yet strong sales are backing up the hype–at least for now–suggesting something about the devices has caught on with consumers. What is that mysterious “something”?

The tactile nature of computing? The huge number of available apps? The high level of usability that means even toddlers and centenarians can use the devices?

Purely marketing, I believe.

Oh. Stupid me.

Apple is nothing if not master of the glitzy sales pitch, and there’s never been better proof of that than the iPad’s current success.

Fair enough. 15 million consumers can’t be wrong. UNLESS THEY’RE TAKEN IN BY APPLE’S GLITZY SALES PITCH!

Mark my words: The device–and all the others of its ilk that have sprung up for a piece of the action–are nothing more than a passing fad, at least in the mainstream.

I’m sure you’re right, assuming we ignore the iPad’s ongoing success. And the iPad 2’s huge early sales. And the iPad 3 rumours that are already circulating. And the fact every single major manufacturer in this space is desperately trying to rip off Apple and create its own ‘iPad’.

1. Limited Functionality. As far as I can tell, tablets do not offer any significant functionality that’s not already available on a smartphone or notebook computer

Which, as hinted at earlier, are two entirely different things, with different use-cases.

yet they lack critical components like keyboards.

Man, if only my iPad had a software keyboard or some means of connecting to a mechanical Bluetooth keyboard.

In fact, you can get a laptop with considerably more memory and storage and a much better CPU for a significantly lower price, as my PCWorld colleague recently pointed out.

Presumably, your PCWorld colleague didn’t point out that only geeks care about tech bullet points, and that CPU speed doesn’t remotely dictate how fast a device actually feels? No? Ah.

So why the hysteria? It’s a fancy new toy, and–in the case of the iPad–one from Apple, at that. Never underestimate consumers’ desire to impress each other with the latest and greatest gadget, especially if they’re Apple fans. “Latest and greatest,” however, doesn’t tend to stay in one place for long.

Tsk. Those 15 million idiot Apple fan-boys, eh? (Let’s ignore for the moment that many people buying iPads are entirely new to Apple, and the majority of iOS device owners don’t own a Mac.)

2. It’s Inconvenient. Unlike smartphones, the tablet form factor is too large to fit in a pocket or purse, yet it doesn’t offer anywhere near the functionality of only slightly larger devices like notebooks and laptop computers.

But you can fit a laptop into your pocket or purse? I don’t understand.

I just don’t see why you’d be willing to carry one of these things around–in addition to a phone, most likely–when you could have something convenient (a single good smartphone) or powerful (a laptop).

Oh, OK. Either it has to be mobile or it has to have a 426 GHz processor. Got you. That makes sense—if you’re a crazy person.

3. Waning Excitement. It’s true that other manufacturers are still hot on Apple’s trail with their own iPad-like contenders, but the release of the iPad 2 made it clear that excitement with the devices is already fading.

Mm. Those queues were only slightly longer than the ones for the original iPad, and the device only sold quite a lot more units. Wait. What was your point again?

Reviews of Apple’s new tablet were generally mixed,

True. The fuckers didn’t even include a free unicorn.

suggesting that reality is beginning to sink in.

And not that people had unrealistic expectations. WHERE IS MY GODDAMN UNICORN, APPLE?

4. Remember the PDA? Back in the 1990s, PDAs were the must-have device du jour, but they went on to spawn today’s smartphones. And indeed, the value they offered–and still offer, in smartphone form–is hard to argue with: portability, organizational tools and Internet connectivity, to name just a few. The natural evolution in this space led from something bulky but useful into something conveniently portable and useful; why would we want to go back again?

Because I can’t use GarageBand on my iPhone. Or (comfortably) read. Or create art in SketchBook Pro. Or play Civilisation Revolutions, Halcyon or World of Goo. Or work with Keynote. Or— Oh, sorry, you were being rhetorical, weren’t you?

It’s no secret that I am not an Apple fan

Man, I’d really never have guessed. GOOD JOB IT DIDN’T COME THROUGH IN YOUR ARTICLE OR ANYTHING.

as its devices are so closed and restrictive

Yeah, those Apple bastards and their walled gardens. Luckily, that’s not the case elsewhere. I’m looking forward to a weekend of installing the Mac version of iLife on my Windows PC and Microsoft Office on my Xbox.

…

What?

For that reason, I’d be far more inclined to look at Android tablets such as the Motorola Xoom–which, I should add, could certainly be useful in niche applications such as health care and inventory control.

CURVEBALL AWOOGA ALERT!

So, tablets are rubbish, boring, inconvenient and overly-hyped, apart from when they’re not made by Apple? And only for niche applications that the iPad already excels in but Android doesn’t? Right. Got it. Carry on.

For my purposes, though, I just can’t be bothered. I see no reason to own a tablet, and fully expect them to fade out of the mainstream over the next few years.

Much like your relevance as a tech writer.

Apple is evil. Google is good. That’s because iOS is closed and a walled garden, but Android is open. Presumably that’s why Google is delaying distribution of Honeycomb’s source code (Bloomberg).

Google argues Honeycomb isn’t ready to be altered by outside programmers; depressingly Andy Rubin, vice-president for engineering at Google, is quoted as saying:

We didn’t want to think about what it would take for the same software to run on phones. It would have required a lot of additional resources and extended our schedule beyond what we thought was reasonable. So we took a shortcut.

We have no idea if it will even work on phones.

So it might be open at some point in the future, presumably when it least affects Google’s own business (such as, say, when it’s no longer useful to RIM) and currently doesn’t work on phones; additionally, half the carriers will ignore Honeycomb anyway, to ‘encourage’ customers to buy new devices rather than upgrade old ones.

Open.

Andy Ihnatko on the iPad 2:

Many of you were around for the transition from text to graphical user interfaces. Some of you were even around when the world shifted from mainframes to personal computers. Well, congratulations: you’ve lived to see your third revolution in computing.

Interesting that Apple’s been instrumental in all three of these revolutions:

• The Apple II was one of the first personal computers, boasting then-rare built-in features, such as colour graphics, sound and a keyboard.
• Mac OS popularised the graphical user interface, in a time when people were staring glumly at command lines.
• And now iOS has kickstarted a touchscreen revolution that every other major player in the industry is clamouring to join.

It’ll also be interesting to see what the fourth revolution will be—and whether Apple will be a part of it.

 

We’re about to hit the first anniversary of Steve Jobs’s Thoughts on Flash open letter. Within, he rallied against suggestions Flash was ‘open’ (given that it’s a proprietary plug-in), and argued that Adobe had hardly delivered regarding releases and performance:

We have routinely asked Adobe to show us Flash performing well on a mobile device, any mobile device, for a few years now. We have never seen it. Adobe publicly said that Flash would ship on a smartphone in early 2009, then the second half of 2009, then the first half of 2010, and now they say the second half of 2010. We think it will eventually ship, but we’re glad we didn’t hold our breath. Who knows how it will perform?

According to Technologizer, a year later, the answer is clear: Flash still pretty much sucks on a tablet.

I watched Best of Show on Amazon Video on Demand in hopes of performing an informal battery test. It drained the battery from 44% full to 15% full in one hour and 20 minutes. But during that time, the audio got out of sync, and then the picture froze–and I couldn’t get Flash to work properly again without rebooting the Xoom.

I watched Glee in HD, again on Amazon, and it would play smoothly in full-screen mode for a few seconds, then sputter, then play smoothly, then sputter…

I tried Bejeweled on Facebook; it was playable, but the animation was herky-jerky.

Google’s Picnik photo editor sort of works–I could load photos and apply effects. But the sliders that are everywhere in the interface don’t function properly; I don’t think they really understand touch input.

Of course, the Flash Player version running is still billed as ‘beta’, and doesn’t support hardware acceleration, but that merely backs up Jobs’s original thoughts, and justifies Flash’s not being supported on the iPad. Or, as Technologizer itself puts it, “the version you want is always not quite here yet”. The article sums up the current situation of Flash on tablets nicely:

We’ll know that Flash Player for Android makes sense when having it is clearly better than not having it…

As it stands, Flash for tablets is nothing more than a bullet point—a stick to beat Apple with. Unfortunately for Apple’s rivals, it’s able to counter that stick with the iPad 2—a baseball bat with a chainsaw attached.

Despite the Trainspottings and Shaun of the Deads (Shauns of the Dead?) of this world, there’s still a belief that Brits ultimately have two choices when creating a new film:

• Period drama with politeness and kings.
• Slightly implausible comedy, written (by law) by Richard Curtis.

To that end, it’s great to see indies continuing to do decidedly un-British movies. Upcoming is Joe Cornish’s sci-fi comedy Attack The Block (Empire, trailer), where aliens rather stupidly decide to invade our planet by way of South London estates.

The trailer looks pretty good (despite its penchant for hateful teal and orange colour-grading), but it could yet fall foul of American stupidity. According to Dark Horizons, US execs are considering subtitling the film, because of those tricky South London accents. As if a good chunk of Americans don’t already have an excuse to not watch the film (it not being American), subtitling it will surely keep people away in droves.

Still, this entire story, while sad, doesn’t shock me. I remember seeing a US backlash to Shaun of the Dead, with people—without irony—complaining about the ‘difficult’ accents, including Simon Pegg’s. Frankly, if you’re from the USA and you can’t decipher Simon Pegg’s accent, you’re pretty much fucked when it comes to watching films and TV shows from the UK. Hell, you’re probably pretty much fucked understanding anyone from outside of your town or immediate family.