Masochist me? An Ars writer's iPad-only workday
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
> My essential software tools include a fully functional Web browser, an IM client for communicating with writers and other editors, some way to access IRC (the "office" part of our virtual office lives), an e-mail client, a Twitter client, an RSS reader, and a simple writing app that an export clean HTML.
See above, some of us have more demanding requirements from our computers.
The hardware is perfectly capable of what I would need to use it for. However, the software unnecessarily cripples it. I don't see why I shouldn't be able to get a piece of hardware because other people don't want to use the software that I use.
Remove the artificial limitations and I'd buy one no problem. "Not in the target audience" be damned.
I would imagine someone will build a tablet (Microsoft seems to be on that trail) that will fit the needs of developers / power users. Truthfully, I am surprised there is not such a tablet offered by a company producing Android tablets.
That is a pretty recent example. They have been offering tablets that run traditional OSes with traditional specs for years.
Is the hardware capable of letting you do coding and what not? Sure. But at the limitation of keeping it appealing to the masses? Probably not.
It's simple. There is more money to be made on the average consumer than the much rarer programmer/power user.
If you don't like that then I guess you should be happy there are alternatives that maybe one day will do what you want. But as it stands, not even Android (the "power user" OS, if you want to even call it that) doesn't even do what you want without rooting it.
Point is, what the GP wants isn't really something we'll see for the time being. Being cranky about it isn't going to change things.
And really, that's all you'd need to do to satisfy me.
So the real problem is building a mobile computer on which you can quickly enter text and symbols. I'm currently building a prototype of a folding tablet, about the size of a novel, that allows touch-typing. As your fingers grasp it and hold onto the back, they naturally fall on the home row of a split keyboard. Haven't actually gotten it together but will post pictures and an ergonomic explanation when I do.
Instead, I had to make conscious decisions to switch over to IM and respond to several people at once, or go to IRC to see what the rest of the staff was up to, or go back to Writing Kit to dedicate another hour to uninterrupted writing. It's a different mental process for a typical computer user, but it worked out a bit better than fine if personal productivity was the metric.