Ballmer Says Microsoft Is 'Hardcore' About Tablets 324
gbll writes with news that Microsoft is gearing up to aggressively pursue the tablet PC market, according to CEO Steve Ballmer. Microsoft is working with a variety of hardware companies including Asus, Dell, Samsung, Toshiba and Sony, to release Windows 7 slates later this year.
"These slates will be available at a variety of price points and in a variety of form factors — with keyboards, touch only, dockable, able to handle digital ink, etc. Since Ballmer showed off a prototype of a Windows 7 slate from Hewlett-Packard at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, the company has said next-to-nothing about how it planned to address the slate form-factor space. ... Ballmer never mentioned the iPad or the coming Chrome OS-based slates by name during his remarks. Microsoft’s pitch will be that these slates will be sanctioned by corporate IT departments, enabling customers to use them at work and at home."
Re:Kin? (Score:5, Informative)
LOL. They started the Smartphone market?
I had a smartphone in 2001, *9* years ago.
Look up the Nokia 9110i communicator.
The US lagged massively behind the rest of the world in terms of cell phones, so you might want to read up about smartphones in Europe and Asia, they've been around longer than you think.
The 9110i was an AMD 486 running DOS with a GEOS front end, quite a cool thing.
Re:Kin? (Score:4, Informative)
Windows Mobile phones also have been around for longer than you think.
I've got my first one in 2003.
1993 - the IBM Simon - a touchpad mobile with apps (Score:4, Informative)
And sold by BellSouth.
Nokia 9000 in 1996.
Smartphone 2002 announced by Microsoft in 2001 - defined as lacking a touchscreen.
Winner: IBM, by nearly a decade.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone#History [wikipedia.org]
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2002/feb02/02-19intelwirelesspr.mspx [microsoft.com]
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2002/feb02/02-19tismartphonepr.mspx [microsoft.com]
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/wireless/2004/01/01/mpx2002.html [oreillynet.com]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_9000_Communicator [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_(phone) [wikipedia.org]
Re:Still want Courier (Score:3, Informative)
This is not true, iOS is very different under the hood than OS X. There may be similarities, but at the core they have nothing to do with each other. Kind of the opposite to Android & Linux (core is Linux, but that's where the similarities seem to end).
I think MS needs to drop this idea that Silverlight is the panacea for all things mobile. I'm not impressed with them using it with both Win 7 Phone or Win 7 Embeded. It's almost as bad as rumoured the Flash OS that does the rounds every few months. Why you would turn such a resource hog into a mobile platform I have no idea.
While I would love to have seen the Courier get off the ground, I know deep down that MS was never going to release something as cool as that. It's not in their best interest to beat out the iPad, but to create an OS that can compete with iOS. Although I have my doubts they can do this at such a late stage in the game.
Re:Still want Courier (Score:5, Informative)
This is not true, iOS is very different under the hood than OS X. There may be similarities, but at the core they have nothing to do with each other
Absolutely untrue. Aside from achitecture-specific bits, they run the same XNU kernel. On top of this, they have the same libc, the same CoreFoundation framework and the same Foundation framework, providing interfaces to the system. They run the same display server, with the same CoreGraphics / CoreAnimation frameworks providing interfaces to it. Text rendering on both is done via the same CoreText framework. They have the same Objective-C runtime, although the ARM version does not support Autozone GC. Both provide most of the same high-level frameworks, such as the address book and calendar store. There are some differences:
UIKit is about the only major addition in iOS, and I wouldn't be surprised if it shares a lot of code with AppKit (a lot of the classes are almost identical, or just cut-down versions UIKit). Pretty much everything else in iOS is also present in OS X.