"A sort of PC": how Windows 8 will invade tablets (and why it might work) | Hacker News Reader

"A sort of PC": how Windows 8 will invade tablets (and why it might work)

arstechnica.com

36 pointsllambda24 comments

Honestly, one little thing that would make me happy is no longer feeling like a second-class citizen on certain sites because I'm using a computer that is 3/4" thinner than the one I just stepped away from. I'm looking at you Hulu!

If the tablets did nothing more than claim to just be a PC and not some special mobile device that you should charge me extra to use when I visit websites, it would be a huge upgrade.

I had a job in health care where it required me to wander around a hospital for 12 hours, talking to each individual unit, and taking notes.

I tried hard for 2 or 3 months to make a laptop / tablet combo work. (xp tablet edition).

Eventually I gave up and reverted to using a clip board with 20 sheets of paper. Paper was just a better technological solution to the problems I had.

Things that I _really liked: >Being able to annotate and write on a Word Doc or on a scanned document with a stylus was really, really nice.

>Not having to keep 20 pieces of paper organized was huge.

>Having a large screen that was internet connected if I needed to look something up on the fly was amazing.

>One Note is _really, _really nice software, and completely developed with that type of computer in mind. Being able to annotate a doc, and add sound, video and handwriting was amazingly cool, and quite intuitive. Built in features like the calculator, and table creation were quite astonishing.

>Handwriting recognition was quite trainable, and fairly easy to use after a while. Generally, I didn't have to use the handwriting recognition at all, I could just write down notes in One Note.

>Stylus use was a huge plus. I can't stand writing on an screen using touch only. I've tried tons of different on screen keyboards, and I've never found one that I like. Annotating things or writing by finger painting has never been good for me.

Things which stopped me from using it:

But, where the model broke down completely:

>Username and password inputs. The handwriting recognition in XP tablet was built around recognizing entire words, not combinations of symbols and words. So, trying to get a username that wasn't in the dictionary recognized as such, and then getting a password filled in while not being able to see what was being typed in the password field were complete dealbreakers after several months. What I usually ended up having to do, was bring up the onscreen keyboard, and click 25 to 30 times to inpute my uid/pwd every time I had to log into the hospital's software system, which timed out every 4 minutes unless I was active on it. So, I ended up logging on to the system with 30 clicks, about 10 times an hour, which was infuriating.

>Portrait vs landscape. I carried the tablet around with me in portrait mode all the time. Using a tablet/stylus like a clipboard/pen is extremely intuitive. Desktop applications generally expect a landscape orientation, however. It's hard to carry a tablet in landscape mode and write with one hand... it gets really easy to drop the tablet.

>Weight, and battery life were also pretty big concerns. I worked 12 hour shifts. I don't think that there has been a battery / portable computing device combination that has been created that can stand up to 12 hours of constant wireless / touchscreen use that is portable.

All that being said, I'm looking forward to seeing Windows 8's touch first approach to these problems. I also suspect hardware manufactures know something the rest of us don't. A walk down a Fry's netbook / laptop aisle in San Jose shows a _ton of touch screen enabled laptops and netbooks. The Build conference in a few weeks is going to be really interesting.

There's no way to use biometrics to login?

Tablets will really take off when someone finally implements the unified stack--capable of working across manufacturers. By this I mean, automatic syncing with my desktop/laptop. If I have a webpage open in my browser, it shows up on my tablet when I open my tablet browser and the changes get pushed back to the desktop when I sign back in. Yes, I know WebOS had/has this, but no one integrated it into the desktop stack. Same goes for documents, email, etc.

Prime example: I create slides for a presentation on my laptop. When I'm done, the desktop pushes the slides to my tablet and I can edit them on the fly, present, whatever. Any changes I make on the tablet then get pushed back to the desktop automatically when they are in range of each other.

The second part is pretty much Apple's vision for iOS 5, Lion and iCloud.

I hope that it becomes as integrated as the parent comment is saying: I open a page, it's on my iPhone, it's on my laptop, it's wherever my AppleID is.

/That/ would be awesome. But I don't think iCloud will quite be that (yet).

Again, Firefox Sync is already that. Why aren't you using it right now?

Because I don't use Firefox.

Anyway, I had a broader point and was only using browsers as an example. The ideal here is a universal login that allows me to be at any terminal/device and have my working environment there in its entirety (or some device-appropriate representation thereof). Things like Dropbox are nice, but they're certainly no substitute for an integrated, comprehensive solution and offer little or no value to me right now. (Hey I've got an iDisk if I want to share some files with my devices or friends.)

Because I don't use Firefox.

Well, then, given that it solves a problem you have, maybe you should reconsider that.

I get your general point, but your vision seems to require being locked into one vendor, and I certainly don't want that, especially since I don't use any of the vendor's software.

I don't think you'll be locked in at all. Given that iCloud is already a web-facing service which you can use from a browser I can imagine we'll see clients for windows and possibly even android: Apple will want people in the cloud because ultimately it's a win for them. (They'll no doubt boost marketshare as well as "mind" share in porportion to the success of iCloud.)

I'm hoping/thinking this is where Microsoft is going with the streaming OS stuff. My understanding of the patent is that it allows them to load portions of an OS from diverse sources.

The way I see it, they could load the portions you need, not only of your documents, but also based on the class of device you are using. It doesn't have to be streamed from the cloud, theoretically it could be streamed from any device, though cloud syncing is an obvious one as well.

I'm with you on most of the things you say, but I add the further caveat that I don't want multiple 'devices'. If Microsoft can stream OS to specific hardware, we may break out of the 'device' mentality. I have an external monitor on my laptop. I don't consider that a 'device', or my mouse, my keyboard,etc.etc. Can we get to a world where we think of all the objects we interact with as nothing more than I/O. Like a pencil and paper?

I think that's the idea behind iCloud

If I have a webpage open in my browser, it shows up on my tablet when I open my tablet browser and the changes get pushed back to the desktop when I sign back in

Firefox Sync.

documents

Dropbox.

email

That's how IMAP works.

I have my documents, open tabs, bookmarks, history and email all on my Android phone. It already works, and it's amazing.

Talk about fragmentation.

No, what I want is one service, one login that works across all my devices where all I do is login and I'm set. No extra set up. No plethora of services to rely on.

I would love to see iCloud become this. If so, it has a chance at being a killer service.

I don't see why you need to wait, though. The time it takes to set everything up is O(number of devices * number of services), both of which are pretty small, and the benefits you get are O(time you use the device), which is pretty large.

iCloud will never become killer as long as it's locked to one vendor's platforms. The reason why Firefox Sync, Dropbox and IMAP all work is that they're all available across a large number of platforms.

What makes you think iCloud will be "locked"? There's a Window's version of the MobileMe services (as some kind of plugin from what I understand). I don't see why there won't be a similar solution for iCloud.

Btw, Firefox Sync is "locked" to a platform itself: Firefox.

It isn't really locked, it's just that no one else uses it.

Will iCloud be an open protocol? Will I have access to it on my Android phone?

Firefox Sync is an open protocol -- there's nothing stopping somebody from writing a Chrome extension implementing it.

Windows 8 tablets (that's a mouthful) need to compete with iPad in battery life and physical weight more so than UI or developer interest.

The big advantage of Windows tablets over Android or webOS is that they're truly different. All current tablets, including the iPad are similar in design and functionality software-wise. If Microsoft can support tablet-specific apps as well regular Windows application in that form factor then that is something special. Then they don't necessarily have to match the iPad in battery life and weight as long as the hardware is somewhere in the same ballpark.

I think Apple's Lion OS clearly a sign that iOS and regular OSX are converging. Now think about an iDevice with a fast CPU, lots of RAM and a high bandwidth connector (thunderbolt?) that allows to plug a big monitor and keyboard, and boom, you don't need pc anymore. You have it with you all the time. It behaves as iPhone while on the go and as a desktop OS when docked-in.

> So successful has the iPad been—and so unsuccessful were Windows tablets of old—that the iPad's flaws and limitations have been extolled as virtues.

Alternatively:

So successful has the PC been - and so unsuccessful were Windows tablets of old - that the iPad's virtues have been extolled as flaws and limitations.

The article discusses the possibility of a Windows tablet that might sit alongside devices like the iPad. Reducing the argument to this dichotomy of "the iPad is great, everything else fails" is exactly what the article aims to counter. There are other markets, some people are looking for something else entirely. Maybe..just maybe, Windows 8 can offer an alternative.

>...so unsuccessful were Windows tablets of old - that the iPad's virtues have been extolled as flaws and limitations

I don't see how that follows? If anything, it's the opposite.

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