It looks like Amazon is not letting Apple win without a fight here. Amazon just acquired a New York start up that makes highly advanced touch screen interfaces. Neato!
Location: Windsor, gateway to the world, but I can't find the damn key!
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Adrian.
It looks like Amazon is not letting Apple win without a fight here. Amazon just acquired a New York start up that makes highly advanced touch screen interfaces. Neato!
The problem with Amazon and the Kindle, to my way of thinking, is you must be a wireless subscriber ... in Canada that can be very expensive. Let's hope the new DAVE outfit will drive costs down ... if not, then the Kindle and the iPad with G3 will have a limited market due to its cost of operation. I'll take my Sony eReader thanks.
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The problem with Amazon and the Kindle, to my way of thinking, is you must be a wireless subscriber ... in Canada that can be very expensive.
No wireless subscription is required to use the Kindle - in fact you can't get one. In the US, wireless downloads are free; in Canada, Kindle eBooks are priced at $2 more to cover the wireless cost.
You can also buy Kindle books and download them to your computer, then transfer them to the Kindle via USB. Use of the "Whispernet", as Amazon calls it, is not required.
^^True. Amazon has/had a deal with Sprint (previous gens) so that the wireless was always available, in the background, to the Kindle user, as part of the product offering. AT&T is now the carrier new models will be using with 3G service.
From what I've gathered, Amazon wasn't able to set up a deal with any Canadian carriers the same way they were able to in the US, so they have to charge extra to cover the costs, as antirealist pointed out.
The iPad is NOTHING like a Kindle, so I really don't see the point of comparing them. While the iPad has the e-books feature, it's much more than an e-reader. I'd rather see more comparisons with other tablets.
Personally, I'm waiting for one of the PC manufacturers to announce a decent Windows tablet that I can turn into a Hackintosh. Something with a decent processor, bigger hard drive, better video out capabilities, the ability to run a full OS, more ram, graphics acceleration (one can hope, yeah?), etc...
Personally, I'm waiting for one of the PC manufacturers to announce a decent Windows tablet that I can turn into a Hackintosh. Something with a decent processor, bigger hard drive, better video out capabilities, the ability to run a full OS, more ram, graphics acceleration (one can hope, yeah?), etc...
I kindof doubt that will be super-feasible in the near future. Most touchscreen computers (HP Touchsmart, EePC Touch, etc...) aren't great hackintoshes, 'cause it's hard to calibrate the Touchscreen with OSX if it's not natively supported.
You'd have to have a tablet running nearly identical hardware to a netbook (and with Intel's Pine Trail Atom chips out - Graphics are no longer GMA950 and therefore not supported).
I think Hacktablets are gonna be a whole other "bag of hurt" as Steve's been known to say. Not easy to run full OS X on.
You want a full Mac Tablet computer? Get a ModBook. they've been out for years, and are priced at what a MacBook Tablet would have been from Apple.
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Steve Jobs re: iTunes on Windows: "It's like giving a glass of ice water to somebody in hell"
OMG this is hilarious.... one of the reasons why Windows will never make a Tablet experience that comes within light-years of anything Apple puts out....
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"...the vice president in charge of Microsoft Office sabotaged the company's attempts to develop decent Tablet PCs, by refusing to develop versions of Office that could work properly on them: "To this day, you can't use Office directly on a Tablet PC."
Imagine what would happen at Apple if whoever was in charge of iWork set out to suppress development of an iPad version because he didn't believe it was real computer.
Well golly gee, why would that be? It's not like they'd have to fight with Apple if they tried to make their own clone, or anything.
So instead, people are left to not only buy a Mac laptop, but shell another couple of hundred bucks to get it modded.
I bet it'd be pretty damn popular if Apple released it.
But the point remains that such a device already exists - isn't priced at a HUGE premium over what Apple would charge if they released it.
If Apple had released a sexier "Official" ModBook, and priced it even at $1499, people would be complaining that it's overpriced! And bulky. And it wouldn't run on Apple's A4 chip, and Apple still would have had to rewrite OSX and applications like iWork to work better with touch.
Windows has proved time and again and ChromeOS looks likely to do it again, that simply porting a desktop Mouse-based OS to touchscreen doesn't really work.
Those HP Touchsmart computers aren't really huge seller either - more of a niche market. Apple wanted to make a Mass-Market Consumer device that was somewhere between a computer and a smartphone.
I'll agree that (at least in this first version of the iPad software) Apple's leaned a bit heavily on the SmartPhone origins of the iPhone OS.
But look at iPhone OS 1.0 vs. iPhone OS 3.0 -- Night and day. I bet the iPad's gonna get a lot closer to a computer (while still being touch-friendly iPhone OS-y underneath) sooner, rather than later.
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Steve Jobs re: iTunes on Windows: "It's like giving a glass of ice water to somebody in hell"
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