And continuing the dissing of Apple’s latest bid to leech money from suckers, this article and discussion at PCMagazine’s site compels me to respond (here, because with a couple hundred W3C errors on the PCMag page, wouldn’t you know that one of ’em is making my comment submission fail). But first, the “official” Apple iPad intro:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDNVAgxOIew
Apple: “The best web surfing experience, the best email experience, the best photo and movie watching experience… ” And no, I did NOT add the emphasis. Just watch the thing. It’s in the original Apple video.
These claims are simply over the top, unsupportable, ridiculous. NONE of those experiences on a 9.7″ screen with NO keyboard and tiny lil speakers can be “the best” anything.
Also from the video, “…a screen THIS large…” *feh* As large as my usual 23″ widescreen I’m using to view this page? “Large” is silly. Large compared with a iPhone? Sure, but that’s not what 99% of folks use for their primary web browsing and email and video viewing experiences. For a reason. Actually, many reasons.
Contrast the iPad’s really minimalist feature set (designed to do almost nothing but sell more media from Apple) to something like the ASUS Eee PC T91MT Multi-touch (convertible, on the fly) Tablet Netbook. 32GB SSD (+500GB included online storage), actual keyboard and touchpad for real computing needs, USB, media card slots, WiFi, Bluetooth and more… for $115 less than the base 32GB SSD iPad.
Add 3G hardware to the iPad and bump it up another $130, but add the same functionality with an UNLOCKED 3G USB peripheral to the ASUS unit? Easily done for about $50. Oh, and did I mention almost unlimited inexpensive expandability for the lil ASUS via the USB ports?
What’s to like about the iPad in comparison to the lil ASUS?
Well, the chief “benefits” of the iPad seem to be paying (lots) more for (a lot) fewer features and being locked into the Apple Straight Jacket. Woo-hoo! Sign me up to blow more of my money for fewer features!
Not.
Caveat: I don’t own one of them–yet; gotta save those nickels and dimes, folks–but I gather from users that the first thing to do with one of the lil ASUS comps is UNinstall the preinstalled Touch Gate software, since it is just a hanger-on from when the comp was designed to be able to run XP with multi-touch. Win7 Home Premium (preinstalled) has all the multi-touch capabilities built in.
BTW, the lil ASUS unit has been in the channel since at least November of last year, and numerous tablet notebooks abound. So, tell me exactly, just what’s so new and ground-breaking about the iPad? Oh, the Apple book/media store? Kindle for PC, and Barnes and Noble’s eBook offerings alone top 1,000,000 in the ePub and pdf formats, downloadable without a B&N nook and usable on a PC, why! even on a lil ASUS (or any other) tablet PC with higher screen resolutions than the iPad.
Color me unimpressed with the iPad. Just another way for Apple to con suckers out of more money in the Apple Straight Jacket Store.
The new computer I brought home at Christmas is an ASUS – high end laptop that does far more than I need it to do for work, but which flies for gaming (yeah, guilty pleasures I don’t have the time for but do anyway) and music applications too.
We have Kindle for PC installed on four of the machines at the house (as well as a pair of Gen.2 Kindles – the normal size, not that giant idiotic monstrosity that strikes me as more trouble than benefit – that get a LOT of use) and it’s really a great platform. VERY user friendly and very nice if you like reading on the PC. Plus, I can whispersync it to the kindle so I can start on the same page I ended on if I get a few minutes to read something at work or on the computer – and it means when I’m away on vacation or work and get some reading time I can continue even pleasure reading without interruption and without having to bring the kindle (since I bring the laptop anyway). Yeah, A++ to Amazon for Kindle for PC. I hear it also has an iPhone app now, but since I refuse to carry a cell phone that’s less helpful for me.
Yeh, I really, really like ASUS products. Lovely Daughter’s lil HP netbook is just a re-branded Asus, and it works very well. Son&Heir’s MONSTER Asus gaming notebook (it ain’t a “laptop”) is a wonderful machine. My own primary machine is built on Asus components. I like Asus stuff.
I like a lot of what Amazon does with the Kindle platform, but I’ve not yet bit on one. I might end up with the best of all possible compromises by using something like the lil Asus Tablet with KindlePC and ePub books from Barnes and Noble (as well as all the other e-format books I get elsewhere). Sure, the Kindle-included 3G syncing would be missing, but I’ve put books down w/o bookmarks for so many years now, I generally have no problem opening an eBook on a different computer, now, and getting right back at where I left off. (I do like the “free browsing” feature the B&N nook offers, and there’re a couple of B&Ns w/in driving distance)
Still, a Kindle (or a nook) PLUS one of these lil Asus Tablet PCs would be about what the 32GB SSD model iPad would run with 3G hardware, so best of all possible worlds could be a combo of 2 devices for eBook reading.
I also (very nearly) refuse to carry a cell phone, although I do carry my Wonder Woman’s cell phone when I travel to see my folks, at her insistence. It’s not as though she would come and rescue me were I to break down or something; she just likes to stay in touch.
I’ve been slow to move on getting a portable eBook reader, but I do believe 2010 may well be the year. Of course, some of the eBooks I already have archived I’ll need to redownload in whatever format the portable reader accepts. Oh, poo. *heh* (I prefer html format since I read ’em on my computer, and reading them in Opera gives me just the control over display I like.)
BTW, in an unrelated aside, I am so VERY tired of murderers of the English language who use “less” when they mean “fewer”. “Express lane X items or less,” for example, is an abortion of English that moves me to wish for a direct line to Dr. Tarr and Mr. Fether. And so, “Sign me up to blow more of my money for fewer features!” instead of the increasingly more common, “Sign me up to blow more of my money for less features!”
I can actually enumerate the feature disparity, so the proper word is “fewer” NOT “less”.
Not that anyone who’s commented here has made that error (or even cares, for that matter *heh*), because no one has.
Yeah, but “fewer helpful for me” just ain’t got that awesome ring….
(lol)
Yeh, Yak. It ain’t…