by CATR
The (iPod)Touch(i)Pad
[Via asymco]
The world’s largest PC company just launched a “media tablet[1]“. Conflating the iPod Touch and iPad brands into “TouchPad” HP joins RIM in announcing an integrated OS/device product to compete as a platform vs. iOS and Android (and to some degree even against Windows).
There are others waiting in the wings. Presumably, Microsoft is hard at work to release a tablet-compatible Windows sometime near the middle of this decade. MeeGo is also going through its gestation period targeting Atom-based tablets. John Gruber notes the excitement around tablet platforms in his article about this post-PC renaissance in computing alternatives. I also noted that the end of the PC era was marked by the end of WinTel at CES.
In that context, yesterday’s WebOS event was perhaps anticlimactic. But it’s still remarkable. Consider how far we’ve come. Step back now and remember the dark days only one year ago when, right after the iPad announcement, a nearly unanimously chorus was pouring derision on the concept.
[More]
The complete quote from Bill Gates demonstrates his lack of vision in this area and may explain why MS was unable to get people to buy tablets:
“You know, I’m a big believer in touch and digital reading, but I still think that some mixture of voice, the pen and a real keyboard – in other words a netbook – will be the mainstream on that,” he said. “So, it’s not like I sit there and feel the same way I did with iPhone where I say, ‘Oh my God, Microsoft didn’t aim high enough.’ It’s a nice reader, but there’s nothing on the iPad I look at and say, ‘Oh, I wish Microsoft had done it.’”
Voice, a pen and a real keyboard. No tablet coming out on the market now uses any of those approaches as a major method of input.
In fact, the whole article is pretty much the definition of not getting it. How things change in a year! Noe evry company is trying to get a tablet out on the market. He talks about the iPad as though it will finally be the debacle that reduces Apple to the same level as all the other also-rans. At the very end he adds some possible caveats but it really is indicative of the feeling a year ago – the iPad was doomed to failure.
Now every hardware and software manufacturer is touting their tablets, which all look like the iPad.
But none of them got it a year ago and they do not appear to get it now. They simply hope that making it look like a iPad – same shape and color, app store, touch screen – they will become an iPad. The iPad, however, is simply part of a complex ecosystem Apple has created, that permits people, particularly developers, to pretty seamlessly move from mobile devise to desktop.
No one else has that and until they do, there will be little competition.
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