Comment by chank | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chank | Hacker News Reader

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The need for precision input will never go away. What we'll continue to see is continued hybridization of the tablet and laptop ala-ms surface. No developer really wants to work on a a subset os and or jailed OS(iOS) full time or an underpowered machine (surface).

What I would like to see is something like a 13" tablet that runs a full OS (i.e. Full OSX, Linux, etc) that I can dock while at a workstation to one or many larger monitors AND several input devices (Keyboard, Mouse, Wacom, Printer, etc). Then when I am on the go, I can grab the tablet(brain) portion and if needed a precision interface or two (wacom, keyboard that's portable enough) and stuff them in my bag hopefully taking up less or equal space/weight to what say a MBA would take up. And it would be great if it would do this in a graceful fashion. Basically I don't want to have to compromise between devices. The only compromise I should have to make is that if I am on the go, it's not feasible to carry around a 30" monitor.

I was going to reply with the same setup: a full power tablet with great docking to a very large monitor and bluetooth input devices.

A little off topic, but I just finished 23 days of travel up the Amazon River and my Android phone (Galaxy III S with 1280x720 screen) was the perfect combination of portability, Internet access, application access, taking pictures and video. Perhaps a smart phone instead of a tablet would work also? With a full power large format phone, you do give up a lot of ease of use with an on-screen keyboard.

I think the real change will come when we have living environments where screen displays are everywhere and we basically live in the interface. I just submitted a Leap Motion developers application yesterday and I can not help but hope for future living environments that have sharable flexible input and display devices that automatically link up with a super phone in my pocket so I still have all of my data always with me.

A pocket device could work, but the need for a larger than pocket sized screen would be needed in certain scenarios, i.e. I want to go down to the coffee shop and code for a while and not have to squint at a small phone screen the whole time. Actual screen size is just as important as resolution in certain workflows IMO.

The sharable interfaces in every location option I think is further ahead than just a powerful tablet /w full docking options. I think projected interfaces will come around even before that happens though.

I think the consensus might be underestimating things like Project Glass and new directions in keyboards (microfluid haptics, perhaps even more radical designs). For example it seems like it didn't take long for people to accept in-ear headsets.

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