CNN Money keeps tablet talk in the headlines
We're not sure what to make of this story on the forthcoming Apple tablet where analysts say things like:
According to [Laura] DiDio [principal analyst at ITIC] the tablet will have a 10-inch to 12-inch screen and a high-end graphics card that will enable stunning resolution -- even more so than the iPhone and iPod Touch.
Really? More than 480x320 resolution on a 10-inch tablet? How will they fit all of those pixels in there? Will it be from the future?
Then:
Only 3% of people whose cell phones can play music say they use their phone as their primary music player, according to a Yankee Group study
[..from 2001?] I don't know anyone with an iPhone that carries around another MP3 player. (Maybe a Shuffle or Nano for the gym but not as a primary MP3 player)
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Comments (21)
That's the only thing I can think of. I have a 30GB Video iPod, which became an iTunes Library backup and secondary disk drive just as soon as I got my original 8GB iPhone. Now, with my new 32GB iPhone 3GS, I don't even need the Video iPod to back up iTunes. Why anybody with an iPhone would carry around a second iPod now is beyond me.
They could simply mean it will exceed iPhone's ppi of 163.
For example: 1920x960 at 10 or 12 inches would be roughly 214 or 178 ppi, respectively.
OK, that is an angle but ambiguous at best from the verbiage in the story.
how awesome would it be to have real 1080p HD resolution on that tablet?
that would be insane....a 10-12 inch panel with 1080 vertical pixels! I had a Dell Mini with a 10.2" screen that HAD a resolution of only 1366x768 resolution...my god, the pixels were so tiny, I couldn't make out any text unless you were staring at the screen from 8 inches away....and I have really good eyesight. I emphasized "HAD" because I eventually sold it cuz it was unusable....texts were so tiny, that when typing in Word, you have to have it on 140% zoom. And it had 5 dead/stuck pixels...smack in the middle of the screen. I read an article somewhere, the higher the PPI density, the greater the probability of dead stuck pixels! It makes sense because they'd need machines of higher precision to manufacture panels of higher PPI density. My point is, if a 10" or 12" panel was equipped with 1080 resolution, it would definately be unusable for work-related activities.
If I'm on the go I just take my iPhone, but if it's just back and forth to work I throw my 160gb classic in my bag since I have a huge collection and a weird penchant for not knowing what I'll want to listen to that day. I also have USB 1 only on my G4 Mac, which makes frequent switching of music on any portable device a PITA.
The study may outdated.
My son and nearly all of his young fellows own a cellphone (or two).
Allmost all of young poeple are using their phone (preped with sd-cards) as PRIMARY mp3-player.
Driving the bus or walking the street you can see a lot of them hearing music and calling friends from the cellphone.
Today that's real.
mhh... I got a 16GB iPhone 3G... and a 120GB iPod Classic...
but as Hucbald said... it's just kind of an iTunes Backup (I got about 70GBs of music)
Plus I'll have it for loooonger trips, when I want to carry ALL my music with me... but aside from that... with the iPhone everything else has become pretty much obsolete.
(Yet again... a shuffle or so... for the gym does still make sense)
Only 3% of people whose cell phones can play music say they use their phone as their primary music player, according to a Yankee Group study
There are a lot of lot tech non smartphones out there that can do mp3, but badly.
The quote from the Yankee Group referred to people's primary music player, not their primary portable music player or mp3 player. Much as I love my iPhone it isn't my primary music player. The iPhone isn't the only phone with an mp3 player either, I used to carry my iPod when I had a Nokia. As far as I can see the statistic is probably true but irrelevant, at least as far as Apple is concerned.
I see lots of people with pearls or chocolates with an iPod for their music, but never someone with an iPhone. Even the smallest iPhone is likely to hold more songs than the average iPod that a person had previous to buying the iPhone.
I just hope the UI looks nothing like that picture. Imagine the headache trying to find an app in that haystack.
Personally, I don't see any advantage to a 10" iPhone/iPod touch that would make me need that in addition to my existing iPhone - especially if it is controlled by Apple as much as the former. If it runs Snow Leopard, however, I'll be waiting in line.
That picture looks disgusting.
apple please release a tablet so i don't have to carry 20lbs of books to and from work and school and something that looks better that that picture and something that looks better than what sony, amazon, and borders have released
"Only 3% of people whose cell phones can play music say they use their phone as their primary music player"
I'd like to see the source, since it's possible that the survey considered MIDI ringtones as an ability to "play music", which is not the same thing as what the iPhone does, or WinMo, or I suspect Palm or Android.
I don't know about anyone else, but I certainly hope that photo is a fake. It flies in the face of the simplicity that I've come to expect from the Apple interfaces.
An Apple tablet? I sure hope not. In fact, I'm having a hard time envisioning what an Apple tablet may look like and what niche it would fill -- unless it's going to be a very, very small niche.
I know alot of friends that carries an cellphone together with iPhone...
Uh, what?
I never use my iPhone as an iPod, unless I'm travelling. Normally I use my classic in my car and at work because it is an excellent music player. Pause, ffwd, etc without looking at the screen. The iPhone/itouch are terrible music players if not using apple headphones because you need to look at the screen to do trivial things
I can virtually guarantee this is going to be a custom ARM processor designed by PA Semi (now owned by Apple.) I can pretty much guarantee Apple won't be forcing another round of universal binaries with ARM/x86-64 instructions supported. My guess is, it'll use Cocoa Touch along with several enhancements, perhaps including Garbage Collection, etc. The kernel/webkit/core animation, etc, will be shared among all three platforms. I anticipate this will have more in common with the iPhone OS, but probably provide more flexibility like traditional desktop machines. My biggest hope is that any "App Store" in the future by Apple will be more of a black-list type approach, rather than white-list type approach. I'm okay with requiring digital certificates, but Apple should stop being so anal retentive about what they allow. Allow first, pull later if it causes problems.
The iPhone platform already has the notion of something a lot like a Universal Binary — the first two generations of both the iPhone and iPod use an ARM6, but the latest devices each use an ARM7. The ARM7 can run ARM6 code natively so the comparison isn't accurate, but submitted binaries may contain separate ARM6 and ARM7 paths. From their recent tech talks, it is explicitly recommended that developers working on floating point intensive apps enable thumb instructions (a shorter instruction format that is therefore more cache efficient, but which causes a major speed hit for floating point calculations on the older chip since it lacks some of the later extensions) for the ARM7 and disable them for the ARM6. So you do end up with two binary executable blobs together in a single application, each intended for a different host architecture. It's just that one of the host architectures is a direct development of the other, rather than being an entirely distinct thing like Intel vs PowerPC.
It would be nice if the Cocoa garbage collection migrated down to a Touch platform.
Um, yeah....really, check out Groklaw (search for Laura Didio on the site) and you will see that DiDio is di-idiot when it comes to being honest in reporting. She's about as "Fair and balanced" towards tech news as Fox News is towards political news. In other words, she distorts the facts and tells outright lies.
I wouldn't trust anything coming from her or the Yankee Group. (Both have been exposed as being very biased towards whoever is the highest bidder for their time.)