Asus Joins Tablet PC Race 235
WrongSizeGlass writes "Reuters is reporting that netbook pioneer Asustek Computer Inc. has become the latest technology company to jump on the tablet PC bandwagon. The device will be called the Eee Pad, will run on Intel or ARM chips, and use Microsoft's Windows operating system. 'The Eee Pad can display Adobe Flash for the full web experience, has a USB port and a camera,' Asus Chairman Jonney Shih said. Asus did not release pricing details or a potential release date, and did not provide further details on the format or a launch date for the new app store."
"Flash" (Score:5, Insightful)
The fanboys will scream (Score:4, Insightful)
And then whimper when they find out Asus has been making Apple products for years.
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1042363/asus-apple-building-tablet-pc [theinquirer.net]
Android (Score:5, Insightful)
Day Late... (Score:5, Insightful)
Neither model is expected to hit the market until Q1 2011, with prices tipped at between $399 and $499.
At which point the iPad will have been out for an entire year. Every one else that can will have jumped on the bandwagon. If I *wanted* a *Pad, I'd go and get an iPad. I'm not waiting until Q1 of next year for something.
Reminds me of what PCWorld said about the Windows 7 Phone:
"If this were two years ago, Windows Phone 7 might even be a cutting edge innovation that could set the smartphone world on fire."
NT with a CE compatibility layer (Score:2, Insightful)
Pretty sure if this thing will run Windows, it is not going to be an ARM chip.
There's no reason why a Windows brand operating system can't run on ARM. Just as Windows XP has "wowexec" to run Windows 3.1 apps, and 64-bit builds of Windows 7 have "wow32" to run Win32 apps, perhaps an ARM build of Windows 7 would have "wowce" to run apps designed for Windows Mobile [wikipedia.org].
Re:Android (Score:2, Insightful)
...or rather, at this early point, Asus won't dare to openly challenge The Bully and talk about anything but Windows.
Re:"Flash" (Score:3, Insightful)
However, as a marketing bullet point, it makes perfect sense. Adobe already supports Windows, and is desperate to support android, so if you are running one of those, the engineering is done for you, more or less. Plus, it makes for an easy, instant, product differentiation vs. the iDevices. Completely logical that you would see it showing up as a bullet point.
Re:Day Late... (Score:4, Insightful)
iPad, iShmad. I am willing to wait until a tablet comes out that does what I want. Or (more unlikely) until Apple decide that it will allow the things I want to do with a tablet to be done.
Re:NT with a CE compatibility layer (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes except then every existing windows application in the world would not run.
Joins? (Score:5, Insightful)
By announce a simi-vapor product with no concrete release date or price..
Pad. How Original (Score:3, Insightful)
horrible (Score:4, Insightful)
A Windows 7 tablet and a Windows CE tablet, both lousy software platforms for tablets. They should be shipping Android, ChromeOS, and MeeGo.
Re:NT with a CE compatibility layer (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a tablet, not a desktop.
But I suspect people will still want to run applications on it.
The only reason to run Windows is to run Windows applications, so if Windows applications don't run, why would anyone choose it over Linux or iWhatever?
Yawn (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Day Late... (Score:3, Insightful)
Even then the market will be far from saturated, especially considering that Apple targets only premium people living in premium places.
Did you know that, for a few years, you can easily find, say, a manufacturer which sells more media players than the total number of iPods produced up to that point? Not so visible in favorite markets of analysts/etc., but...
Re:NT with a CE compatibility layer (Score:4, Insightful)
You got it wrong. This time Linux runs circles around Windows. Though Windows losses it's selling point, as existing x86 binary applications don't run on this thing (if it is ARM), existing Linux apps can just be recompiled and run just fine on ARM.
You basically have the inverse situation here.
Re:Half baked (Score:2, Insightful)
will run on Intel or ARM chips, and use Microsoft's Windows operating system.
Some manufacturers just don't get it and some do. [afterdawn.com]
Expect epic fail, Asus. You've been warned.
They just don't get it (Score:3, Insightful)
These rubbish Windows OS based tablets have been around for years, they've sold poorly (even Bill Gates's predictions were completely wrong) and just have rubbish usability. Why will they sell now?
Why do you think Apple put iPhone OS on the iPad? simple, there is masses of touch screen compatible software for iPhone OS, the UI is great for a touch screen (it was built for one). Apple even redesigned and rebuilt their office tools for the touchscreen.
Microsoft couldn't do any of the above, there's just too many internal squabbles and underhanded tactics at Microsoft. The head of the Office software team refused to support tablets, so Office is painful to use. Windows itself only has a hack of a tablet layer on top of it to support tablets.
Re:Half baked (Score:4, Insightful)
All these companies seem to be saying to themselves "Wow, Apple sold 2M units and their product doesn't even have a camera or a USB port, and can't play Flash. If we make sure our product has those, we'll be rich!"
Meanwhile, these vendors seem totally oblivious to the all the things Apple got exactly right with the iPad (form factor, battery life, consistent touch-optimized UI, integration with the existing iTunes ecosystem, revenue generation features for third-party developers built into the system, ability to draw on existing iPhone/Mac developer pool obsessed with user experience, etc.). The companies doing this are going to end up with buggy, slow, awkward devices that consumers won't touch, and they'll be scratching their head saying "But we have more features! It makes no sense!"
HP is pretty much the only company that seems to have a coherent response to the iPad. It's rather obvious what happened to their Windows 7 based Slate device. They were planning to ship that as their response to Apple, but then someone at HP actually used an iPad, and said, basically "Holy $h!t, we're not going to match this by taking a Windows 7 netbook and ripping the keyboard off". And fortunately for them, WebOS -- which has the potential to be a very credible tablet platform with a bit of reworking -- happened to be for sale.
Disregard any tablet running a desktop OS; they've been on the market for years and nobody wants them. And disregard attempts by companies that know nothing about platform-building to adapt current smartphone versions of Android (or desktop Linux distros) to tablet use. They'll do it badly, and hardly anyone will write apps with such monstrosities in mind.
Watch HP with WebOS. Watch Google, when they get around to doing a real tablet version of Android. Watch Apple (obviously). And watch Microsoft, when it eventually occurs to them that they need to do a tablet version of Windows Phone 7 rather than pushing desktop Windows 7 on tablets.
Everything else will prove to be an irrelevant sideshow.
Re:Android (Score:5, Insightful)
Hence "its better with Windows" being plastered on the promo sites for certain eee models last year.
The funny part is that my EeePC works so much better with Linux than it does with Windows... I don't even remember the last time I booted it into the Windows partition.
Re:"Flash" (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not disappointed. I want to see Flash die a horrible, flaming death.
Re:Day Late... (Score:4, Insightful)
Plays EyeTV HD recordings without the need for a realtime transcoding server.
Plays HD HomeRun recordings without the need for a realtime transcoding server.
Plays Handicam home movies without the need for a realtime transcoding server.
Comes with 250G+ internal storage or allows me to connect external storage.
Connects to upnp servers and samba servers and netatalk.
Allows for management of the device in the complete absence of iTunes.
Re:Half baked (Score:3, Insightful)
They have not (Score:3, Insightful)
You make it sound like no one ever made any other software for PCs that have utilized other inputs.
For the most part, they have not. You can count meaningful PC tablet software on both hands, probably while eating a hotdog.
The iPad can run around 200k applications written specifically for touch input. Around 5k or so I believe, that target the iPad specifically.
To claim any tablet PC has even a reasonable collection of touch based software you can use out of the gate, is absurd.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Half baked (Score:4, Insightful)
Meanwhile, these vendors seem totally oblivious to the all the things Apple got exactly right with the iPad (form factor, battery life, consistent touch-optimized UI, integration with the existing iTunes ecosystem, revenue generation features for third-party developers built into the system, ability to draw on existing iPhone/Mac developer pool obsessed with user experience, etc.). The companies doing this are going to end up with buggy, slow, awkward devices that consumers won't touch, and they'll be scratching their head saying "But we have more features! It makes no sense!"
You mean like it happened with Android?
To paraphrase the words of the Apple loyalists... maybe it's just you're not in the target market for these tablets.
Disregard any tablet running a desktop OS; they've been on the market for years and nobody wants them.
Nobody wants them for $1500, this one is gonna be $500. If you ask people around on whether they'd like a Tablet PC or not, the most common response you'd have gotten was "no, they're too expensive", not "no, they're running the same OS as my computer". This one addresses that issue, it remains to be seen whether it'll be enough or not, but I don't think you're justified in dismissing it outright.
Now, I'm not in the market for this product either as I find the idea of Windows on a tablet to be dumb as bricks, but I hate this idea circulating around, that unless you don't copy Apple's designs 100% you can't succeed in today's market when reality has proven that wrong again and again for the last quarter of a century.
Re:The solution is here (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, I don't know about the guy you're replying to, but I do want a tablet--I just recognize that freedom isn't free, and I won't buy a jailed tablet because I refuse to support lockdown.
I think of that as a perfectly valid reason to not buy an iPad or an iPhone. I think a lot of times this is really what people mean, but instead they make up invalid technical excuses why they will not buy the product. They should just state the real reason but people seem reluctant to divulge core motives. Stating a device cannot do X or Y when actually it technically can, is not a good reason.
I totally see your point in not buying the devices, it's just that I see Apple supporting open technologies (like HTML5, Webkit, Zeroconf, etc) in addition to the proprietary ones, and like to support one of the few companies that really makes contributions to open source (not that Google is not ALSO such a company). I buy Apple not wholly to support the closed model, but to support a company that works hand in hand with many other open standards in a way Microsoft never did or did only begrudgingly at best.
I complain about Apple because I think that in the long run, the jail will doom the iPad and iPhone to niche status, and once iPhone market share dips below 5% you'll see the same sort of developer exodus you did from the Mac platform in the 90s.
That is possible but very, very unlikely at this point. What happened to Apple in the 90s was really bad mismanagement and bungling of a good position. But it was also a singular position to mismanage, that of consumer computers.
Apple now is firing on all cylinders in Music, Video (to a lesser extent but still very widely used), Mobile, and Laptop development. Furthermore they are the only ones that have a mobile platform spanning a really wide gamut of devices - iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad. Yes Android will have some devices covering the iPad area soon, but that will take some time to ramp up to really work as well for consumers as the iPad - I mean, no Android store to start with? And some devices not arriving until next year! With that many segments of the market working well for them, any one or two can slump but it's hard to see a decline across the board.
You also make a vital mistake in your forecast. You think that Apple will have a jailed app environment forever. I'm sure they intend to, but if in fact access to alternate download of material is so vital to consumers, all Apple has to do to keep marketshare is simply remove that restriction, with yet another wave of positive press for them. My personal thought on that is that Apple is tolerant of jailbreaking (they could easily block it if they chose to) exactly because it provides that outlet for technical users that desire it, while maintaining a very real extra level of secure for less technical consumers who do not chose to jailbreak. There's not even the concept of an Anti-virus app on the iPhone for a reason.
The failures in the 90s were design failures, but future failures you forsee could easily be overcome by simple easing of restrictions - which Apple has been doing with the platform all along (the latest example being lifting the restriction against multitasking). So any restrictions with consumer demand to remove WILL be removed. It's just that right now, there's no real consumer demand to remove the limitations in place - it remains to be seen with the rise of Android if consumers will decide that freedom is one that is important to them.