Our dream tablet: 10 things we want
Summary: The perfect tablet may never be built, at least not one that appeals to everyone. Using these 10 components would create the best there is.
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Pen for handwriting
Touch tablets are useful gadgets, but they can be real productive tools with the inclusion of a pen. The pen can be used to write on the screen, making it good for taking notes in meetings and similar functions.
The Microsoft Surface Pro has such a pen, and it turns that tablet into a nice note-taking machine. The Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 also has a pen and it extends the usefulness of that tablet.
Only a few other tablets have a pen with handwriting capability (and a popular phone) and our dream tablet needs it to appeal to many.
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Talkback
and we want it to cost $15
Cost
$15
What about....
#9 Mentions Removable Storage
Re: What about
SJVN has almost described a Surface Pro
Perhaps if Haswell can indeed deliver it's promised 9W @ idle, then we may well see 10-hour Surface Pro 2 that is also thinner and lighter too.
Excess is killing Surface Pro -- it is not a contender in the TABLET market
2) Excessive pricing. $1000+ buy-in means its only going to sell in any great numbers to the rich and limited corporate. Sure, its comparable to an ultra-laptop, but thats a different market and purpose than tablets. Before anyone chimes in with nonsense about the iPad top model being over $800, I invite them to look at the percent of iPad sales that are the 'top model' -- pretty tiny. iPad would have NEVER been so wildly successful had its starting price been $800+.
Surface Pro probably steals a LOT more sales from laptops than tablets.
Don't you just hate the lack of a comment editor?
I have a Surface Pro. I really like the Surface Pro. But it is not the dream tablet you make it out to be. In fact, I don't really consider it a tablet at all, bitcrazed. IMO, it is quite close to the ULTIMATE netbook vision realized except for it's battery charge reality. (BTW, just got done testing out Avatron's Air Display beta drivers on it using my iPad 3 as a secondary monitor. They need a bit more work to get the speed up but having a lightweight mobile dual monitor computer system is a joy. But I digress.)
Although the display on the Surface Pro is a very nice and color accurate display, it's resolution is a little shy of retina class. ClearType font tech greatly helps but it is only available in landscape mode. One of the joys of using the iPad is it's portrait orientation capability. As Apple research indicated and the key point Google designers understood when they designed the Chromebook Pixel, the 16:9 ratio display is NOT optimized for web pages and one of the main uses of a tablet or Chromebook is obtaining info from web pages. The traditional 4:3 aspect ratio is better suited for that activity.
That being said, viewing the NBC app on my Surface Pro display in it's HD 16:0 ratio is extremely pleasant. Ah, design choices! One reason why there can never EVER be a single dream tablet design.
I agree that cloud storage is not the answer for all storage needs, (Sorry, Jason Perlow), and I would like to see a micro SDXC storage option available on ANY current tablet design. But there is a caveat to go along with that regarding iOS devices.
Currently, Apple manufactures their iPad tablet with a 128 GB storage option. Sure, one pays quite a price for that capability and a micro SDXC card is much more cost effective but that storage coupled to it's ability to access multiple cloud based storage options negates the necessity for a micro SDXC option.
What about the legit question of digital file transfers from one device to another when wireless transfer options are not available? Lack of a wireless source is the key reason behind the need for a USB2 or USB3 port or that SD card slot in a mobile device.
I won't debate the logic or rationale behind the needs for such ports. They are a necessity for many users. But I will state that the lack of such ports in a tablet device is simply a design choice used by certain manufactures. Those manufactures that omit those ports may view a tablet's thinness or lightness as a higher priority. Especially if their intended customers have a reasonable expectation that this need might be an extremely infrequent one considering the ecosystem that this tablet was designed to operate in.
To be frank, bitcrazed, the actuality of the current Haswell chip design led me to choose the first generation of the Surface Pro rather than wait until the next generation of Intel chips became available. The Surface Pro brings an impressive set of mobile capabilities to current consumers and it's 5 hour battery charge level should be sufficient for most mobile needs - especially if a secondary mobile device (either a smartphone, ultrabook class laptop or another tablet) can be used as a backup option. Personally, I will almost always couple my Surface Pro with my iPad 3 when used in a mobile, away from my desktop, scenario.
So youre saying ...
It's like 2 guys walking around with the same exact tablet but one has an intel processor in it and the other has a ARM type in it. "Hey thats no tablet! its got a PC grade processor in it." Like its not fair or something ...
Ports
Removable storage
Price
Let me add one more thing to your list: a synthetic sapphire screen. If you are going to pay big bucks for a device, the screen should be both super high-res *and* nigh unbreakable, in my opinion.
Other than that, I'm drooling over the prospects of a tablet with these specs!
C'mon James!
Should have been 6 things...
The thin thing is contrary to practical design, limiting the battery size and structural factors with impacts on durability and assembly quality. Beyond a point thin is just bad for engineering.
Cameras? Beyond a utility resolution, you're not getting anything with a denser image sensor on a pinhole camera - poorer low light sensing, more artifacts - haven't we outgrown the marketing "resolution" nonsense yet? A tablet camera only has a few uses.
Speakers. How good can the sound from a 1 cm speaker ever be? It simple physics. Use good headphones or stream to a proper soundsystem.
All the other stuff is good. Add more security. The device needs hardware encryption, restriction and policy settings, and overall seamless layered security. Especially for enterprise use.
Shhh...
I actually lol'd a few times during the article. What kind of mobile games are so graphically intense to need a faux-octacore processor? I don't know about you, but there isn't a single mobile game I ever seen that can compete with consoles/full computer systems in complexity, controls, and magnitude of size. I can imagine now playing Skyrim or something on a mobile device without a controller nor keyboard (how'd a slick dock miss the list?)...wait, no I can't. Are the SD cards faux-cartridges? I guess Angry Birds, Temple Run, etc. genuinely require multicore support because of their intensity.
This list speaks volumes to the disconnect between a tech person and what real people are actually using. Perhaps if low and mid range devices vanished and we had unlimited network bandwidth these features would make sense. In the meantime, reality will go on with $199 devices taking market share from 10" and high-end devices. I wonder what you could stream if all content was at "Retina" resolutions and everyone was using LTE...probably a good documentary on lag.
a tiny bit of nitpicking here . . .
A tiny bit if nitpicking here - but it's the CPU component that's gonna be "faux-octacore," not the GPU component.
Processor strain?
umm no
Funny