Will tablets w/ BT kbds eat all netbooks alive?

[Joesox]

[quote=“mabagal”][quote=“Deuce Dropper”][quote=“maunaloa”]If I’m writing a patent application or contract, I use a HW keyboard and HW mouse. If I’m shopping, on a forum, or other light typing, a touchscreen is fine.

When you dock a tablet, you need a HW keyboard.

Ergo, keyboards are indispensable for some tasks and for some users.[/quote]

this.[/quote]

extremely false.
you cannot make this statement until you live with it for a while.
once again, I have banged out whitepapers, contracts, and entire specs with nothing but the touchscreen.
I am also marginally faster on the touch keyboard than on a physical keyboard. why? zero throw and autocorrect.
experience + data beats speculation 100% of the time.[/quote]
mabagal, Maunaloa said “some users”. I’m one of those users that prefers a hardware keyboard for heavy typing. I average 65 wpm – can’t get anywhere near that on the iPad, and don’t feel that comfortable touch typing for long periods on the iPad anyway.

You’re spot on with a lot of what you write about mobile stuff, but I’d say you need to tone down the blanket statements. For many of us, there are certain tasks that can’t be done on a tablet now or in the next couple of years, and may in fact never be faster or better on a tablet. I get a lot of data onto my two screens at work, and using a mouse lets me click small areas that I couldn’t reliably tap on a touchscreen. Tablets are great for some stuff, but they have their specific strengths and weakness.

[mabagal]

[quote=“Joesox”][quote=“mabagal”][quote=“Deuce Dropper”][quote=“maunaloa”]If I’m writing a patent application or contract, I use a HW keyboard and HW mouse. If I’m shopping, on a forum, or other light typing, a touchscreen is fine.

When you dock a tablet, you need a HW keyboard.

Ergo, keyboards are indispensable for some tasks and for some users.[/quote]

this.[/quote]

extremely false.
you cannot make this statement until you live with it for a while.
once again, I have banged out whitepapers, contracts, and entire specs with nothing but the touchscreen.
I am also marginally faster on the touch keyboard than on a physical keyboard. why? zero throw and autocorrect.
experience + data beats speculation 100% of the time.[/quote]
mabagal, Maunaloa said “some users”. I’m one of those users that prefers a hardware keyboard for heavy typing. I average 65 wpm – can’t get anywhere near that on the iPad, and don’t feel that comfortable touch typing for long periods on the iPad anyway.

You’re spot on with a lot of what you write about mobile stuff, but I’d say you need to tone down the blanket statements. For many of us, there are certain tasks that can’t be done on a tablet now or in the next couple of years, and may in fact never be faster or better on a tablet. I get a lot of data onto my two screens at work, and using a mouse lets me click small areas that I couldn’t reliably tap on a touchscreen. Tablets are great for some stuff, but they have their specific strengths and weakness.[/quote]

The framework of this discussion was around tablets vs other very-portables, specifically netbooks.

I agree there will always be a place for a heavy machine. When I need to grind at something specific, I have a three monitor monster of a setup in my den. I don’t use that machine in my normal workflow much anymore, but it’s there if I need it. I am not arguing that these big machines aren’t best for specific tasks. I am arguing against the people that keep saying those tasks can’t be done well on a tablet, and dismissing the tablet as a toy.

My experience has shown me the tablet is definitely is NOT a toy, despite people who have never lived with one saying it is based on things like speculation and Apple’s messaging in their TV ads. Letting the toy perception propagate at all is a disservice not only to the adoption of this form factor, but to the very people wrongly doing the classification of the tablet not being a serious computing platform because it robs them of experiencing the workflow improvements themselves.

On the need for a mouse in computing: Big screen touch UIs that are optimized for touch don’t exhibit hit area crowding that would necessitate a mouse. They rely on gestures and timing rather than relying on diving down a dense menu. These gestures can hugely accelerate tasks, with the drawback that they are less discoverable. This also creates a very polarized experience when going from a touch-optimized app then to the web, which has dense links and other things that don’t work well with touch. That’s most of the web. This is why device-aware websites are going to be more and more important, and will be the trend moving forward as more people get tablets and complain how websites which were built for a mouse are a suboptimal experience with touch.

On typing on an iPad:

First, would you rather type on the iPad or a crampy netbook keyboard? For me, the iPad wins every single time.

Now, comparing against a full-screen keyboard, I got a lot faster on iPad when I realized the throw is zero, so I didn’t have to move my fingers vertically as much. I now basically drag my fingers across the surface of keys on physical keyboard because of this, which doesn’t slow me down, but it feels different and takes some getting used to. We’re not dealing with a typewriter hammer here anymore, so anything mechanical that travels and slows down the input should be minimized or eliminated. The second thing was to simply start trusting the autocorrect and knowing that the iPad is adjusting the size of the hit areas for the keys behind the scenes depending on the candidate list from the last few keys you hit. Meaning ham-fisting. The third was to learn some of the tricks to “making the autocorrect your bitch” like the extra character+delete to defeat it quickly. I can maintain ~65WPM on an iPad.

I believe that to design products, one has to make blanket statements. That one must tune to a specific persona. One has to stereotype viciously to pick that target persona. The early adopter. If one did it right, other users will adapt to that use case design once they see the light. The S-curve in a nutshell.

[Joesox]

mabagal, as far as netbooks go, I agree with Maunaloa’s unshocking prediction that tablets will mostly take over. But you were talking about real work, and for that I’m not convinced that tablets will take over from all other small computers. Most of the few hundred people on our floor have ultraportables. Perhaps two or three of them could effectively and efficiently transfer most of their work to tablets. The rest, not. The combination of soft keyboard, single small screen (even smaller with the keyboard open), and touch UI mean that it’s just not fast enough to enter and manage data on a tablet.

An external keyboard might help, but it’s a hassle, and then you’ve got ergonomic concerns as you reach up to touch the screen all the time. Actually, even using the soft keyboard for long periods could be bad ergonomically – we’re always being told to separate the keyboard and the screen as much as possible.

@mabagal

We migrated everything from our task management, code store, bug tracking to graphic design and user interface design tools and repositories to the cloud. We chose tools that run in pure HTML/CSS/JScript and when possible have a good native client on the mobiles. So technically, we can run the entire company from a phone, and actually we have at times. We are a small company, so we design it however we want, but medium to large companies will have to do the same or be chewed up by smaller, more agile companies with more mobility, more agile tools, and lower cost structures.

Companies have to do what’s most efficient. And I don’t think it’s efficient for most companies to transfer most of their office work to tablets and phones. I can see that a lot of vertical applications would work well on a tablet, but for spreadsheet work / document manipulation / serious coding / anything else that needs management of large amounts of data or concurrent applications, I don’t see it happening soon. Email, possibly, though you still need to be able to smoothly grab bits of data from your heavier applications and get it into emails.

[mabagal]

I think I may not have gotten what I was trying to say out clearly.

Firstly, I don’t think tablets will get rid of notebook computers, but they can definitely supplement them to make the whole workflow better. Eventually, the two may become one. The Lion Mac OS preview is already starting to show signs of this roadmap.

Secondly, I wasn’t arguing that every company should switch over to strictly phones and tablets. That’s impossible. I was simply stating that corporations should move as much of their workflows as possible “into the cloud” in the popular vernacular, or specifically, make their data and workflows accesible to any device via the browser. Specifically meaning web interfaces written in pure HTML/Java and also native clients in places other than just Windows boxes.

Thirdly, we should look at this with a broad perspective.

People’s workflows in every office are either specialized or general.

Specialized use cases, like coding, CAD, big spreadsheets, trading platforms demand a “big” machine. 10 years ago, this meant a giant box. Now, this means a laptop and in a large majority of the startup world and even with big players such as Facebook and Google, this now specifically means a standard-issue off-the-shelf Macintosh laptop. Sometimes with auxiliary screens. But regardless, pretty much an off-the-shelf laptop instead of a giant box. These will only get smaller, but they are still nowhere near as portable as a tablet like the iPad.

General uses cases, which let’s face it, is Word, Powerpoint, Excel, Outlook and webapps, are already covered quite well with the just the first generation iPad. The workflows are fast and complete. Getting data around is easy, you just have to know the pathways. I’ve shown a glimpse of this with my screenshots but I am more than happy to demonstrate to people who doubt it. Every workflow you mentioned except for coding and heavy-duty spreadsheets (ie: solvers, pivot tables, very large datasets that could be better managed in MatLab or Mathematica), I can show you a fast workflow on the tablet. All of this was made possible only a few weeks ago, when iOS 4.2 hit, giving us multi-tasking and alt-tabbing on a tablet. iOS 4.2 really is the dawn of this new age.

Then there are the workflows that are only possible on a tablet. Not replace the laptop, supplement it. Until they can truly become one in a way that is not as clumsy as it is now.

FWIW, I am passionate about the march to mobile because I am an enthusiast and because of my history. A decade ago and up until the time I left in 2006 for my own venture and business school, I worked in a place in the Redmond, WA Microsoft campus called “Pebble Beach”. In that 3 building complex was where Windows CE was born. Those days were interesting. Because in those halls, people walked around with these keyboard + stylus / keyboard + touch devices and all sorts of other mobile computing contraptions that never saw the light of day. At the time, Microsoft was the only company in the world with the software capabilities and cash reserves to take a stab at the scale it did. It was obvious even in those days that keyboard + upright touch panel was a nightmare for usability. This is before the feasibility of capacitive multi-touch and the avenues that opened for a truly great tablet as is the iPad.

At the time, I worked in the Automotive division, where we were shipping a lot of stuff, including Ford Sync. I worked with the other CE folks hand in hand, and got their dogfood devices early. My work machine was always a Tablet PC from the minute it was first available. I carried a PocketPC Phone in dogfood then switched to a WinMo phone. There was a lot of hard work done back then that paved the way of what was possible and ended up with WinMo phones and PocketPCs, but not many other form factors, all stylus-heavy or hardkey-based. Which was a shame. Apple took a gamble on multi-touch and the rest is history.

I learned a lesson from that experience: Take gambles and embrace the technology that may not seem quite ready to the casual observer. It will surprise you in what it can do for you that you would have never expected.

[Joesox]

mabagal, for your first and second points, absolutely agreed.

For the third part, I have no doubt that you personally can get data into your iPad and push it around different apps with dizzying speed. But I don’t think multitasking on a small touch screen is the most intuitive or efficient way for most people to concurrently do the different kinds of tasks I mentioned.

I’m sure you’re aware of the research showing that multiple screens increase efficiency. One reason for that is of course that you can view a lot more data at one time and move it from app to app very quickly (perhaps you can match that speed on the iPad, but I don’t feel most people would be comfortable doing so). But I think another reason is that you can allocate different spacial areas to different tasks or apps, which is a very human way of working.

Touch UIs are great because they let us feel that our data has physical form, and we’re directly manipulating it. But if you end up working with a lot of different screens and apps all the time, you lose a bit of that. You can have fancy transitions, sure, but there’s no direct correlation between switching apps and anything you can touch and manipulate in the real world. (If you read about people’s experiences with iOS multitasking, you’ll see that many still don’t find it particularly intuitive.)

So, multitask on your tablet when you’re not at your desk, sure. But it seems to me that for a few years at least, if you need to juggle multiple apps / tasks while at your desk, you’ll be better keeping the tablet for just one of those tasks.

[maunaloa]

The iPad is pirate flags and small teams again. MS threw huge resources at WinCE and WinMo, which were hits with techies, but Apple’s UI smarts made soccer moms buy smartphones. It was (is) all there in WinMo and Tablet PCs, but the painting was roccoco. Apple reduced what for most people was a maze of choice to a button. I hate the button, I want choice (I also like flip smartphones, but few are left). Techies are not mass market, soccer moms are (and I bet soccer moms won’t multitask on iPads). The skins that HTC and Samsung put on WinMo show that how close a WinMo device can be to the iOS device. There’s a dissertation in why MS can’t get v.1 or v.2 consumer products right, but is better at enterprise than IBM, Oracle, or SAP. Everywhere you see IBM, Oracle, and SAP, you also see Windows and Office, and you also see Windows and Office everywhere you don’t see IBM, Oracle, and SAP … except smartphones and slates. (Slate = pad tablet)

To me, a portable computer is a painter’s brush. I have and use 10", 12", 14", and 17" notebooks. In the office, I have Eyefinity. I see a slate and BT keyboard replacing the 10" netbook in the next 12 months. On days you need a keyboard, you pack the keyboard, probably as a screen cover (I’ve cracked several palmtop and smartphone screens … it is a problem.), and take both. On days you don’t need a keyboard, you take only the slate. A Stowaway keyboard, when folded, is about the size of a deck of playing cards. Will I dock a slate in a keyboard? Of course. Stowaway keyboards, although more cramped than a netbook keyboard, made it possible to create Word documents on smartphones. A keyboard the size of an iPad, mo’ bettah.

[mabagal]

[quote=“Joesox”]mabagal, for your first and second points, absolutely agreed.

For the third part, I have no doubt that you personally can get data into your iPad and push it around different apps with dizzying speed. But I don’t think multitasking on a small touch screen is the most intuitive or efficient way for most people to concurrently do the different kinds of tasks I mentioned.

I’m sure you’re aware of the research showing that multiple screens increase efficiency. One reason for that is of course that you can view a lot more data at one time and move it from app to app very quickly (perhaps you can match that speed on the iPad, but I don’t feel most people would be comfortable doing so). But I think another reason is that you can allocate different spacial areas to different tasks or apps, which is a very human way of working.

Touch UIs are great because they let us feel that our data has physical form, and we’re directly manipulating it. But if you end up working with a lot of different screens and apps all the time, you lose a bit of that. You can have fancy transitions, sure, but there’s no direct correlation between switching apps and anything you can touch and manipulate in the real world. (If you read about people’s experiences with iOS multitasking, you’ll see that many still don’t find it particularly intuitive.)

So, multitask on your tablet when you’re not at your desk, sure. But it seems to me that for a few years at least, if you need to juggle multiple apps / tasks while at your desk, you’ll be better keeping the tablet for just one of those tasks.[/quote]

Yes, I think you are right on with regard to multi-mon. Particularly with spatial organization. My CAD and Coding rig at home as I mentioned is still a 3 monitor beast. It’s an old Dell 30 flanked by two old Samsung 204Bs in portrait. Great for doing work on the main screen, then having documentation and e-mail/IM/other collab stuff on the flanks. I started with the dual 204Bs and added the 30 after awhile.

Back in the day, I used to play a lot of online poker as well. It used to be that the windows didn’t scale down from 640x480, so this setup allowed me to play 12 simultaneous tables on the center monitor in a tile arrangement. On a small monitor the option was to cascade or stack the tables. My ROI and BB/100 (both measures of return) in those games was always much better with the tables tiled rather than cascaded. On the order of a more than a whole percentage point or half a BB/100 over a pretty large sample.

Looked like this:

(Not my account or setup, but this is basically what it looked like)

When I did this, I also had a 1600x1200 Dell 15" Laptop so I could play 4-tables on the go.

But I think that spatial organization issues of a single monitor can be heavily mitigated or improved upon by software analogies of the physical. Generally, virtual desktops and specifically, the Spaces implementation of this in Mac OS.

We took a bit of a gamble at our office. It is a smallish office so space is a premium, currently has currently 16 people and growing, will post some pics later, we are waiting for a write up to publish. We issued everyone Mac laptops without an external monitor. This includes devs and designers. We asked the devs whether this mattered to them. It turned out they mostly use Spaces in Mac OS with either 4 or 16 Spaces anyway, so multi-mon didn’t matter to them and actually was a distraction to using Spaces the way they do. We asked the designers whether they needed more real estate. It turns out they too were using Spaces and were more than happy with the hi-res option on the 15" MacBook Pro.

I use both Spaces and Expose in tandem. Four finger swipe for Expose and corner-then-pick for Spaces. If it’s an app pair or Space pair, I will also Alt-Tab (Command-Tab) and Control-Arrow to move between them. All of these can be categorized as a “gesture”.

There’s nothing other than current horsepower constraints (specifically MIPS per Watt) that stops a tablet from incorporating a virtual desktop with a four or five finger swipe gesture in the direction of the target desktop to switch between directly. Or a five-finger or even four-finger-two-handed pinch-zoom-out to view the full space to select one. HTC-Sense shell style, but on a tablet and a reserved gesture, making it accessible while an app has foreground. Eventually the front cam can even be used to incorporate no-touch gestures. The beauty of a 10" or larger multi-touch space is exactly as you said, you can treat your UI like a physical object.

There’s also nothing that stops a tablet from incorporating windowing to run concurrent apps in the same screen.

On the keyboard, I still contend it’s not needed, but for those who really feel they need it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZ4ZV2elMYQ

[mabagal]

@maunaloa

The iPad is pirate flags and small teams again. MS threw huge resources at WinCE and WinMo, which were hits with techies, but Apple’s UI smarts made soccer moms buy smartphones. It was (is) all there in WinMo and Tablet PCs, but the painting was roccoco. Apple reduced what for most people was a maze of choice to a button. I hate the button, I want choice (I also like flip smartphones, but few are left). Techies are not mass market, soccer moms are (and I bet soccer moms won’t multitask on iPads).

Right, which is why progressive discoverability is something that Apple also does well with its products. Soccer moms using Macs also don’t use Spaces or Expose, but those functions are there if you know how to get to them. You can turn all of those functions on, and a casual user can still use the machine as they know how. Touch computing, particularly gestural computing can smash down current frameworks we have for multi-click down contextual menus to accomplish a task. The drawback is discoverability. But that drawback is also an opportunity to make an extremely powerful UI paradigm palatable for even the most casual of users. If a user knows about a gesture at all, they’ve already sent a signal about what kind of user they are. Therein is the opportunity.

[Dial]

mabagal you’ve almost got me sold on an ipad - save the following - excuse me if its been dealt with upthread and I’ve missed it.

Isn’t it easier to type on a horizontal surface while viewing a screen tilted toward the vertical - as you find on a note/netbook - rather than viewing a screen lying flat - as you have on the ipad. That to me is the big turn-off. And, then, of course, the whole dock plus keyboard arrangement simply replicates a netbook in a more awkward form.

[mabagal]

It feels the same way it would if you were looking down and writing on a peice of paper. Now, the kids born today may very well never know what it is to write on paper, but the rest of us still do. The official Apple iPad case also leans the tablet at a nice angle for both viewing and typing.

Personally, I carry a small felt-tip like stylus called a Pogo that makes drawing on an iPad feel like drawing on a whiteboard. This along with typing and gestural multitouch is a very visceral sort of an experience which is very different than the rigid keyboard and mouse point-and-click form we’ve come to get used to over the past 20 to 30 years.

Yes, you are correct, the docked keyboard experience with a tablet is extremely clumsy. This is why I don’t feel a hard keyboard is a good thing with a tablet. Even in heavy typing use profiles, the vast majority of the time we interface with a computer is spent not typing.

[Dial]

[quote=“mabagal”]It feels the same way it would if you were looking down and writing on a peice of paper. Now, the kids born today may very well never know what it is to write on paper, but the rest of us still do. The official Apple iPad case also leans the tablet at a nice angle for both viewing and typing.

Personally, I carry a small felt-tip like stylus called a Pogo that makes drawing on an iPad feel like drawing on a whiteboard. This along with typing and gestural multitouch is a very visceral sort of an experience which is very different than the rigid keyboard and mouse point-and-click form we’ve come to get used to over the past 20 to 30 years.

Yes, you are correct, the docked keyboard experience with a tablet is extremely clumsy. This is why I don’t feel a hard keyboard is a good thing with a tablet. Even in heavy typing use profiles, the vast majority of the time we interface with a computer is spent not typing.[/quote]

Alright then, time to go and play with one in the Apple store. That is, when it finally arrives in Taiwan. Not exactly on topic, but how is it that a computer which is largely produced in Taiwan isn’t sold in Taiwan until well after the rest of the world?

[Kea]

they have them for play in 3C right now…

[mabagal]

@Dial

Alright then, time to go and play with one in the Apple store. That is, when it finally arrives in Taiwan. Not exactly on topic, but how is it that a computer which is largely produced in Taiwan isn’t sold in Taiwan until well after the rest of the world?

BoPoMoFo.

[Dial]

@Kea

they have them for play in 3C right now…

I’ll go have a look in my local 3C and see if you’re right. I happened to be in the Dunhua Eslite Apple store today and the guy there said give it another week or two.

[Dial]

Ok, I’ve had a bit of a play and I’m underwhelmed. Can’t believe I’ll really be able to type with ease/speed. A macbook air 11 inch is what I’d really like, but too expensive at 35,000. I’m going to try and convince myself its worth it. My current mac is very old and still going well enough. Longevity/reliability trumps cheapness?