The Productive Organizer

One thing that i find about this iPad craze or news fetish that we are getting now is, WHERE THE HECK IS THE COMPETTION!

Is it their strategy to let Apple walk away with this Scot-free?  Perhaps its the case they don’t want to clash with the release of iPad so that consumers have a clearer visibility.

Today we got announcement of the specification for HP’s Slate:

This is basically a PC, or a Netbook, or whatever HP wants to call it.

It runs on Windows 7. Great OS, but its not an OS that runs on ROM. Can you imagine every time you want to take notes or minutes on this you have to wait 10 seconds for it to come out of sleep or hibernation??

It goes for USD 549.  I don’t think its expensive. Certainly its got more to offer hardware wise. Its netbook pricing.

1.6 GHz Atom Z530 with UMA graphics and  an accelerator for 1080 video playback. 1GB of RAM which cannot be changed. Now how does this  add up on Windows 7? I can tell you OS is good, but this combination will not own the iPad. iPad is optimize such that the software you run on it will be fast. you will be trading fast softwares for a wider range that you are using currently.

32GB flash storage. This is ok i feel. heck i survived on 80 GB home pc for a long time. Its all about optimization sometimes.USD 50 more and you get 64 GB.

5 hour battery. I dunno about battery life but i see this HP Slates battery dying earlier than iPad.

8.9-inch 1024 x 600 capacitive multitouch display. Almost same here. But i’m telling you, Firefox or IE on a 600 height can be pretty irritating. Your viewing range is drastically limited.

an SDHC slot, two camera, a USB port, a SIM card slot for the optional 3G modem, and a dock connector for power, audio, and HDMI out. basically PC peripherals but the SIM card slot is a bonus.

You can see that this aims to be more of a multimedia movie watching device. My overall feel is that this thing is not for me.

For the financial trader who wants to trade on the go:

I have used the Atom with Windows 7 and largely the performance is OK. The plus side is that all your web brokerage and financial charting softwares will work on this baby.

For the gamer:

If you are looking for a nice gaming experience this ain’t gonna cut it. The iPad will be much better.

For the professional looking to be more productive in note-taking, calendaring and task management:

Stick to the iPad. If you need to wait for it to boot up or come out of hibernation or sleep, that hinders you. You think you can live with it but sooner or later that precious second will tick you off.

The productivity apps on the App Store does a much better job. But one thing going for it on the slate is Microsoft OneNote

We are going to see many of these kind of great apps targeting students and i believe this will really help the iPad take off for education.

I am pretty big on note taking so this one is a big plus for CourseNotes!

Have talk a fair bit about what i think this product can do for us here on Productive Organizer so no need to keep blabber about it.

I found this article by Bill Hill,part of the original guys that created the ClearType on Windows for easy reading which we are all enjoying now and he likes the look of this iPad.

Alot of us can only visualize what the iPhone did for us and relate it to a larger screen but this is a guy that have been a forefront not just in the digital age but also in the publishing industry.

[Read the full article here >>]

His initial guess before the announcement:

“Apple could easily create a really elegant Tablet which looked just like a larger iPhone. With the iPhone, it already has a keyboardless UI which millions of users have found easy and convenient to use.“

“With a Tablet device, Apple could enter both the NetBook and eBook markets at the same time.”

“Apple has shown with each of its devices – PC, phone and music player – that there are millions of people who’d happily pay a premium price for a great user experience.”

“If Apple can get reasonable battery life from an iPhone-like Tablet, it’s going to make the Amazon Kindle screen unacceptable.“

Where he thinks Apple have truly got it:

It’s a great-looking device. It’s sleek and elegant – exactly what you’d expect from Apple. But that isn’t why it will dominate the Tablet category. It’s because Apple understands that computers have made a transition from “computing devices” to “consumer devices”. Apple has built its huge success in recent years by becoming a company which creates great end-to-end consumer experiences.

Where he thinks EInk and Kindle fails:

The trouble with the Kindle is that for all its vaunted modernity, it’s really a backward-looking device. So is the eInk technology at its heart. Both are aimed at creating an experience close to paper. But that’s not the Future of Reading. The future will be created by first equalling, then going beyond, paper. It is books with full color, books with video, books which update through the Web. Kindle was good enough to jump-start the digital book market. But it’s not good enough to keep it. eInk was acceptable only until the appearance of a color screen with acceptable battery life. And the iPad’s 10 hours is more than enough to knock it off its pedestal…

His view on the problems with Microsoft’s tablet endeavors:

When TabletPC began at Microsoft, it was a research effort – outside of the regular Windows organization. Once it was re-organized into Windows, that was the kiss of death. I never really thought much about this while I worked there, but it’s my belief that despite all the lip-service paid to end-users, the only Windows customers with any real power are the Windows Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs).

They’re the customers Windows really has to care about – because most people get their OS upgrades when they change machines. And the Windows OEMs never seemed to get what TabletPCs should really be about. Most of them shipped machines which were basically conventional laptop PCs with Tablet functionality implemented like an add-on. They all had keyboards, and converted to tablets by swiveling a standard screen.

He likes Windows OS but talks about the Mac book pro being his best Windows PC:

This MacBookPro is the most trouble-free Windows machine I’ve ever had. I could never get a Windows laptop to Sleep and Wake instantly. Even if it would sleep when brand-new, inevitably the Sleep capability would fail within a few weeks, and I’d be forced to use Hibernate instead. My MacBook Pro still Sleeps and Wakes reliably, months later.

ClearType is better than what apple implemented but hey Apple wins because Microsoft fucks it up:

ClearType was one of the things we did get right at Microsoft – even if it took ten years to get it into the hands of most customers.

I’m not revealing any confidential information here. Anyone who saw Bill Gates’ keynote speech at Comdex in 1998 saw me on stage demonstrating ClearType. And they heard Bill say – in pretty emphatic terms – that it would ship in Windows.

Well, it shipped in Windows XP, right enough. But the Windows team buried it so deeply that most users never even found out it was there, or how to turn it on. It wasn’t until Vista that it was turned on by default for all users. And that shipped in 2008. Ten years after we first showed it before we truly got it into the hands of our customers!

What ClearType Addresses and where iPad might not do so well, reading texts:

we invented ClearType specifically to solve the problems of creating highly-readable text at normal reading sizes (between 9 and 13 point). There’s a lot more technology going on than simply utilizing the RGB sub-pixels on LCD displays. Apple’s clone creates text whose characters look more like the original print fonts at those sizes than ClearType does – but the price they pay is a lack of sharpness and clarity, and text that’s slightly blurred at the edges. That means I still prefer to do all my reading on Windows, with “genuine” ClearType – even on this great 133ppi display.

My only misgiving about the iPad is that its screen is 122ppi. If Apple implements its current ClearType clone on it, we might end up with text that’s slightly blurry, and could cause problems reading for sustained periods. That’s only speculation, though. I can’t say for sure until I’ve held one in my hands and tried to read on it for several hours.

He got farked for saying Windows Pc Makers don’t measure up:

But my BootCamp experiences led me to ask the question – publicly, in this blog: “How can Apple make a better Windows machine than any Windows PC maker?” (That turned out not to be such a good career move for me at Microsoft. Take my tip – never tell the Emperor he’s butt-naked, unless you’re sure he’s big enough to see it as an opportunity to buy new clothes).

If you install Vista on a Mac using BootCamp, and run the Windows Experience Index diagnostics which rate its capabilities, you end up with better scores than the vast majority of Windows machines. This machine rates a WEI of 5.3 – and I’ve never seen a score higher than that.

People are willing to pay for good user experience:

Even in these tough economic times, Apple has proved there are plenty of people who’ll pay a premium for a great device. It has been creating winners for years now. There were plenty of cheaper MP3 music players available long before Apple’s iPod appeared. Yet the iPod owns the market - even though it was both later to market, and more expensive. Checking out eBay recently, there were only 3 used iPods for sale (and over 1000 Zunes…)

His new phone and his experience with the Windows Mobile Phone:

There are plenty of mobile phones around. But Apple’s much more expensive iPhones (both the phone and the service) have been flying off the shelves. I’ve had a Windows Mobile phone for years. But compared to the iPhone it’s a complex, fussy, unfriendly brick. I had been meaning to get rid of it for a long time, but I don’t use a mobile phone that much, and I still read books on it using Microsoft Reader, so I’ve been hesitant about making the switch.

However, last week I dropped my Windows Mobile phone in the water. It was DOA when brought back to the surface. So now I need a new phone. No way am I buying a Windows Mobile replacement. I really grew to hate that phone. I’ve checked out the new Google phones, and I don’t like them much either. No, I want a great customer experience – so I’ll go with Apple.

Okay so yesterday we have the iPad and today we here quite a few noise on the upcoming DELL Product Mini 5.

Its based on a 1 gHZ snapdragon and have 3G sim and runs Android. I talk about this sometime back and then it looks a solid device.

But whats this about Micheal DELL pricing the device at USD1000 and more? I think its a fail there! I believe the 3G iPad cost even less.

They gotta think about the pricing if not DELL is going down the drain.

Here is a look at the device in video. It looks very very smooth for an android probably due to the processor

Dell Mini 5 Hands-ON from Gizmodo on Vimeo.