Showing posts with label Surface. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Surface. Show all posts
Thursday, July 31, 2014
Take two tablets and call me in the morning….
It happens every year as July dwindles its way into August and is as inevitable as the swallows returning to Capistrano or salmon’s need to swim back up stream to its spawning grounds.
“So,” my wife will ask me. “What do you want for your birthday?”
After assuring her that her continued presence in my life is present enough, and watching her roll her eyes, she’ll repeat the question.
“No seriously. What do want?”
As a tech guy and self-proclaimed gadget geek and woodworker, you think that I could give her a list a mile long. Yet lately, I’ve been hard pressed to even come up with two or three things that: A) we can afford, B) won’t land me in divorce court or on the couch for a week or two and C) that I really, really want.
At this point in my life I seem to have all basic hand and power tools that a semi-serious woodworker/DIYer needs (or at least all the tools that will comfortably fit in our garage and still allow us to park our cars in there), and while my tech gear is kind of on the old side, it is still more than sufficient for what at I use it for.
“What about a Kindle Fire?” she suggests. “Or maybe one of those Surface things. I’ve seen you looking at them…”
Every time she suggests this, I think about it for a long time. After all, not many wives would volunteer to buy their husbands an expensive toy. (And yes, I do have a great wife! That’s why I stay married to her!) But in the end, I wind up turning her down, because to me, that’s what these tablets are – expensive toys.
Now I’m not saying tablet computers like the iPad, Surface, or any one of the various Android-powered devices out there aren’t useful or convenient. The 195,435,004 people who went out and bought one of them in 2013 would seem to prove that. I’m just saying that at the moment, I don’t see them being very useful for me.
I don’t travel a lot and do most of my reading (and a good bit of my writing too) floating in my inflatable pool chair in the summer. So having my entire library of books and magazines at my fingertips isn’t as big a deal for me as it is for my wife, who does travel a lot. So if I finish a book or magazine I’m reading, it’s only a few steps to the house to grab another, while for my wife, who might be on a plane somewhere, grabbing another book from our bookshelves is a bit more problematic.
Also until they make those tablets completely water proof, I would not dream of taking one near the pool. If the book I’m reading gets splashed or I accidentally drop it in the water, I can fish it out, place it on the side of the pool to dry, and aside from some wrinkly pages go back to reading it within 20 minutest. Drop a Kindle, Nook, or worse yet an iPad or Surface in the water, and you’ve got yourself one very expensive paperweight.
I know you can do more with these devices than just read e-books. You can watch movies or stream videos from the Internet on them, e-mail, browse the web and even open and work on office documents. But I can do all that stuff on any one of my old laptops.
Even my oldest unit, an eight-year old Dell laptop with only 2gb of RAM can handle these tasks with aplomb and I find having a built-in keyboard much more useful than having to hunt and peck on an on-screen keyboard that offers no tactile feedback.
So for now, I can’t see spending money (or my wife’s money) on something that’ll I’ll only use until the novelty wears off then revert back to one of my old laptops because, to me, they are more convenient.
What would make me change my mind about getting one?
Well price would be always be a factor, so it would have to be cheaper than buying full-fledged, laptop. Right now, for the price of an iPad or Surface, I can buy a mid-range laptop that has lots more processor power and memory than any tablet on the market and wouldn’t limit me to just their simple apps. On a laptop I can run any software I already have or need.
It would also have to be rugged. As a tech, I’ve seen way too many of these devices get broken, and since they are not easy to fix and I’m a bit of a klutz myself, I’d want them to be able to withstand multiple drops from about table-top height without screens cracking or the electronics fritzzing out. Plus, they’d have to be water-proof, not just water resistant. I want to be able to drop one of these things in my pool and be able to fish it off the bottom five minutes later and have it still working.
Thirdly, I’d want it to have two screen modes: a high-definition color display for when I’m inside and an e-ink display so I can actually use it outside in direct sunlight. Kindle’s Paperwhite displays are great for reading books outdoors, and I’ve even seen some e-readers that can convert pictures into black and white so you can read a magazine page even with the sun shining over your shoulder.
But wouldn’t it be cool if a tablet could sense it was outdoors and switch to an e-ink display mode for your apps, so you can do more than just read outside? Yes, I realize this probably would not work for everything, but for writing and editing office documents, e-mails and even some basic web browsing, it should be just fine. And since that’s what I’d mostly be doing with mine…..
Finally, I’d want it to come with a stylus and an app which would recognize my handwriting and convert my scribbling into an editable text and save it to a .txt, .rtf or even .doc or .docx file. That way I could replace the clipboard and pencil I use when writing in the pool and get back the few hours it takes me to type all those pages into Microsoft Word on my computer.
Of all my requirements, I think this last one is most obtainable. There are a few apps out there that are close to doing this already. But until they prefect them and the other things I mentioned, I think I’ll keep passing on a tablet computer, and stick with my fallback gift: clamps.
Why do I want clamps, you ask?
Because a woodworker can never have too many vises.
Thursday, July 12, 2012
Microsoft looks to upset the Apple cart
Them thar are fighting words, Steve.
"We are trying to make absolutely clear we are not going to leave any space uncovered to Apple," Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told website, CRN, reigniting the ages-old Microsoft-Apple war. “Not the consumer cloud. Not hardware software innovation. We are not leaving any of that to Apple by itself. Not going to happen. Not on our watch.”
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| STEVE BALLMER: Microsoft's head honcho |
The first strike in this new offensive came a few weeks ago when Microsoft announced its plans for a pair of tablet computers dubbed "Surface,” which it hopes will knock Apple’s iPad off its throne as the must-have gadget of the past few years.
"We do feel empowered to innovate everywhere and bring our partners with us," Ballmer said. "We are just not going to leave any -- what’s the expression people like to use -- We’re not going to leave any stone unturned, so to speak, as we pursue that."
It remains to be seen if this new philosophy out of Redmond, Wa. can turn the venerable tech giant around. In the past, Microsoft’s philosophy was "last to cool, first to profit” letting others do the innovating, then swooping in with its own version and using its brand recognition to corner the market. Sometimes this philosophy worked, as with the Xbox, which usurped by Sony’s PlayStation as the hottest gaming console around, and then with Kinect, which improved on Wii’s innovative wireless controller.
And sometimes it did not.
Does anyone really remember Microsoft’s iPod-killer, The Zune?
I didn’t think so.
Whether Microsoft’s Surface tablet becomes another Zune or displaces the iPad is anyone’s guess. But at least this time Microsoft does not seem to just be copying a device made by someone else. It is actually improving upon it. According to the company’s website, the device will come with its own built in stand and a foldout keyboard that doubles as a protective cover for its touch screen. (If you want these things on an iPad, you will have to buy them from third parties).
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| FINALLY SURFACING: Mircosoft's new tablet PC. Will it be an iPad killer or go the way of the Zune? |
The Surface will come in two “flavors,” an ARM-powered RT processor unit with a stripped down version of Windows 8 on it and a more powerful Intell-powered processor unit equipped with Windows 8 Professional. Weighing between 676 and 903 grams and measuring between 9.3 and 13.5 mm thick, the Surface seems to be a hybrid of an iPad and the ultra-light MacBook Air and is aimed directly at the corporate market.
"Coming from a Microsoft-based environment, it will certainly have to be considered as a potential laptop replacement for the likes of sales representatives in the field," said Andrew Paton, group manager of IT services at Rondo Building Services in a recent ZDNet/TechRepublic poll of chief information officers about whether Surface will rival iPad in the business world.
"Technically, from what I've read, it does plug a gap in the corporate space," added Steve Lee, CIO and senior vice president of technology for the Asia-based Changi Airport Group.
But not all chief information officers interviewed by ZDNet/TechRepublic were so sure of the Surface’s success.
"I am not sure [Microsoft] can make up the lost ground to iOS or Android devices,” said Peter Smith, group manager of information systems at Quick Service Restaurant Holdings, an Australian company. “It is not really apparent whether Microsoft is trying to position the product as a tablet or an ultra-light laptop. Reviews on the intuitiveness of the interface are not particularly positive, so it sounds like Microsoft still has some work to do."
After using Windows 8 on a desktop computer, I’m inclined to agree with him. The interface is clunky and after years of being used to where Microsoft put things, I suddenly felt lost trying to accomplish even the most basic tasks. But on a tablet, my experience may be completely different.
Who knows, I might even like it.
I certainly hope this shift in Microsoft’s thinking bears fruit and renews interest in things like its original Surface product, the touch-screen interactive table, now called PixelSense. I remember how excited I was when I first heard about it a few years ago.
My friends and I saw all sorts of possibilities for it, including it being one really kick-ass gaming table for our Dungeons and Dragons gaming sessions. No more having to draw maps or use figurines on home-made grid boards. Just touch and swipe! Someone even developed a really cool astronomy app for it, NUIverse. The video for it has since been removed from Youtube, but you can read about it here and see some screenshots of it here.
Off the top of my head, I can think of at least two groups of users who would benefit from such an advance: engineers and artists doing Computer Aided Design work and the billions of people who use their computer to play games such as Halo and Half-Life and Call of Duty. Just think how much cooler it would be to play those first-person-shooters if you could reach inside the game and grab and manipulate the weapons. It would literally add a whole new dimension to the game.
After that all Microsoft would have to do is add is tactical feedback, and they’d have something very close to the Holodeck from “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”
And that, my friends, would be the ultimate killer, must-have gadget, one that I don’t think even Apple would be able to top.
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