1) It Won’t be a PC - Not only “it won’t be a tablet” but it won’t be a PC.  The desktop metaphor won’t work here, period.   A “Start” button on a tablet is a joke.   A hovering mouse pointer is stupid.  Drag-able windows everywhere is nuts.  Icons and menus and scroll bars driving functionality is lame.

Apple gets it.  There is no Finder on the iPhone is there?  Thank goodness.  The failure of screen-driven devices beyond pocket size has to do with the reluctance of the industry to disrupt the PC.  Instead this class of device has always been forced into a position of comparison with that of the standard PC either as a companion,  or as an extension, or as a replacement.   This is what happens when industries, not the end users, get to dictate how new technology will be applied into the market.  One of the major criticisms of Apple has been they failed to open their platform and create an industry like the Wintel world, and they also failed to compromise their fixation on the consumer and the end-user experience, rather than put more effort on the standards of corporate IT world.  Thank goodness again, otherwise we would have no iPhone.

2) EBook Store – Yet another store for Apple:  iTunes, AppStore, and now an ebook Store.  I remember reading awhile back that Steve Jobs said nobody reads anymore. Ha ha.  More revenue PLUS, the possibility of a subsidizing angle from a top book store, say Borders?  Unlike the muzak industry, retailers have a bigger foothold on the market and therefore Apple won’t be dealing with the publishers directly.  Border’s makes sense, they are the number 2 giant and just last year decided to go after Amazon head to head with its own internet presence. Why wouldn’t Apple make a deal directly with them? It makes a lot of sense.

3) Video –  This is not the no-brainer people think it is.  A laptop has an advantage besides having a keyboard.  It works well with tops: laps, desks, tables, airplane trays, and other flat surfaces.  Watching video is mainly a stationary activity.  That is why I should also say you can’t take the “TV metaphor” and put it on this device.  If the user interface for this winds up being an Apple TV extension or a touch version of Front Row then this will fail.  It won’t be though, Apple is too smart.  The real killer application of an iPad for video of course is an extension of how we already are using the iPhone 3GS.  Not just for video clip streaming and viewing while in ultra mobile environments, but for video clip creating. It will have a camera, and it will supplant the home cameras in a way that will make it a home video studio with feet.

4) Personal Communicator with Choice. “Not an iPhone” means Verizon and Sprint will be a contractual possibility.   That means the iPAD Pro (vs. a possible WiFi only version) most likely have both a CDMA and GSM radio in it like HTC’s Touch Pro 2. Though I am pretty sure the iPAD will be based on upgraded version of the iPhone’s cocoa touch OS, it is likely the “iPAD” will be considered a new product category.  It won’t be a phone, but it will be a Personal Communicator class of device that was supposed to (and should have) disrupted the PC’s dominance a decade ago. The competition from having more than one choice of providers will allow for even better subsidized prices, making this new contraption even more appealing.

5) WebPad. Wanderbook was conceived with from the idea of creating a WebPad in 1999.   When wireless technology began its rise, the idea of pen computers running a browser, untethered, seemed to be a no-brainer. It was, and still is a valid concept.  As I said in #1 above, the problem is the concept got killed by trying to also port a big fat desktop operating system on to these devices where the will of the mighty PC industry refused to compromise for the benefit of the end user.

6)  Headset Oriented – The iPhone is a self contained phone, and like all phones you can raise it to your ear and speak into it, put it into your pocket etc.  - a major advantage over Personal Communicators with larger screens.  Ok, but this advance could be a disadvantage as well.  Is it really healthy to put a transmitter next to your brain all day?  I won’t feed into the health concerns of mobile phones, just that it is a concern to many people, valid or not.  Plus, handsets are now a no-no in many states while driving and it seems wireless speaker or headsets are the way of the future for this and other reasons.  Plus, unless it is a speaker phone, which for many reasons are not practical all the time, you can’t use your screen simultaneously. So, a device that is meant to be used with a head makes sense.

7) Games – The iPhone and iPod Touch have open up news possibilities in the game market.  A bigger screen simply means bigger possibilities.

8) A New Metaphor UI - This is one I am not sure of…(why I said 7 reasons).  I think this is going to be a very tough nut for Apple to crack. Sticking to the phone metaphor was brilliant, but I think it could fall apart with a bigger device.  However, a more sophisticated digitizer integrated with multitouch may be too much too soon.  Also, of course, breaking too far away from the iPhone U/I would be risky.

But the thumb can only reach so far, and let’s face it, thats the primary “stylus” we use, our other digits on our hand – not as much.  The phone metaphor itself can only go so far.  I am guessing the iPAD will not only have a bigger display, but  a richer display, like that from Pixel QI which is a new kind of epaper that has a rich full color and fast refreshing screen, and with a lot of the advantages the other epaper technologies have: high paperlike contrast, low power, lightweight .

Pixel Qi Product Vision

Therefore a richer U/I to go along with it makes sense.

Personally I love the Notebook metaphor of the electronic briefcase (AKA PenPoint), and I find it amusing the PC industry took away the notebook name for itself, but never took the metaphor.  A richer interface means more gestures, and now that Apple has brought back the notion that gestures can be good, instead of bad (yes, there was a time when this was standard thinking, again it was driven by PC industrial driven world).  Not to forget the “ThinkPad” which by the, was also originally a system design for PenPoint.

Anyway, this iPad means there is a need for something richer than the finger or thumb as a stylus.  No not a keyboard, arg…I mean yes, a better software keyboard, perhaps, maybe handwriting reonigiton done right (but thats another article for me to write) – but one that includes ink.  You know, like ink on a piece of paper but digital, concept we some of use know as “ink as a datatype”.  By the way, those who know a little know nothing…Microsoft did not invent ink writing applications.  The whole concept was full realized out of, yes once again, GO corporation with PenPoint.

But I digress.  Handwritten digital  ink, and the ability to manipulate it with a rich gesture set would enable a more human interface, not simply a paper note taking application, no, no, this would permeate throughout the entire U/I, like a lamented layer over everything.   Get it?  Maybe not, it’s really sad that  much of what was PenPoint was ripped from the history books.

Sometimes I just can’t figure out which movie metaphor to use, in this case I will use them both.

I came across a post the other week in my old files, from sometime during my days when I was working on Microsoft’s Tablet PC . Having been intimately involved with the “Go Software” he mentions I understood the truth of his statements deeper than he could possibly know.  The link is still valid.

from Bright-Eyed Master Zen

This tablet PC epidemic is going to be painful to watch. It’s really too bad that all these hardware companies are going to pay the price for Microsoft’s foolishness.

I want a tablet, I’ve wanted a tablet for many years in fact and I’ve purchased numerous devices to try to find something that would work. Every single one of those devices had some major failing that completely destroyed the usefulness of the device.

Now if Microsoft was rolling out a completely new OS targeted at this tablet PC device then maybe I would be more optimistic. Or maybe not given how bad Pocket PC 2002 still is. Unfortunately, running the mess that is Windows XP on a device without a keyboard is simply foolish. It’s not designed for that usage model and the OS interaction is just wrong. This is yet another case of where Microsoft has truly set computing back ten years.

The other day I was in the library and came across the manuals for PenPoint. This was the pen computing environment developed by Go Computing. I of course had to sit down and read through the manuals to see what it was like since I’ve never seen one of these machines. The thing that pains me about this, nothing has advanced. Because the Go software was designed from the ground up to be Pen driven and did not have any need to appear like an existing desktop environment, its interaction model was vastly superior to any current OS that runs on a portable device. Apple’s Newton technology was another example of this. I know these platforms were limited at the time, but just imagine where these things could be today if they had survived?

So now today, instead of getting truly interesting devices with software custom tailored for the unique constraints of the platform. We get crap that runs a desktop operating system that has extremely poor usability even when it runs in the environment that it was intended for. No, I’m definitely not optimistic about the success of these devices. In fact I’m pretty pissed off about it. When they fail it will represent yet another barrier for someone to be able to come in with fresh ideas and actually make the tablet format a success. I can just hear the VCs now, “so what makes you think you can make this succeed when even Microsoft failed at doing it?”. Bah, I want a tablet PC, but I want one with software and hardware designed and tailored for the constraints of the platform. Not some keyboard less laptop running a desktop operating system.

Very painful to watch indeed. Now 7 years later the dust has settled, its time for Tablet Dreams again.

Will Apple make the same mistakes? Heck no.
It Ain’t Going To Be An iTablet
Finally, we’re back to the future, where we left off in 1992…
The Eo Personal Communicator

It’s strange, “history does repeat itself – though in different ways.” I remember Robert Carr (the architect of PenPoint) said something like that to a bunch of weary developers during a talk a long, long, time ago, after GO had died.

So now I am developing in Cocoa, using Objective-C, I literally do feel I am in 1992 again.   Not surprising, Cocoa (then known as NextStep) was developed in parallel periods, both PenPoint and Cocoa are purely C-language based, with Object-Oriented extensions modeled directly on Smalltalk. Both are heavily message based, using the Model-View-Controller paradigm throughout.

At least somehow, someway, and it wasn’t easy, NextStep survived and is being ported to the products this type of technology was destined for, ever since the Dynabook vision that spawned it all.  Awe yes, Episode VI The Return Of The Jedi.

I wonder if this Bright-Eyed Master Zen guy from the past looks like a muppet?

I have been thinking about telling the full story of the stylus-driven computer devices, especially what happened during the 1990’s – where from my unique point of view a full chapter of history on this technology has been forgotten, misremembered, and never properly recorded.

Of course, currently I am being driven by the hype and heated rumors of Apple’s upcoming Tablet (just google it)… I’ve seen this hype before, for 20 years as a matter of fact, but never this loud.

Anyway, if you know me, you know I know tablets (and their many other AKAs).
Mobilepoint (e-case)
The word “Tablet” actually would be one of the dumbest names Apple could use and it shows how Microsoft has brainwashed the media.  “Tablet” might have been appropriate 10 years ago when these devices were more than an inch thick, but this is the 21st century.   Besides the fact that the “Tablet PC” has been a grandiose failure – not because it was called a “Tablet”, but because it was using a OS that is meant for desktop PC’s. Big, and fat OS at that.  Putting a little i in front of the word won’t fix the word.  Forget it.

So, anyway,  I came across an inquiry on the google finance board which summarizes the entire wacko world of Internet speculation on these rumors….:

http://finance.google.com/group/google.finance.22144/browse_thread/thread/80c7af8e9b015a30

“Subject: iTablet Aug 9, 7:58 pm
I would like to hear your opinions on what OS you think tablet will
use. Full-fledged Mac OS makes better sense to me, as I would like to
be able to use on it apps like Photoshop,Pages,Numbers,Rhino and
others. But full-fledged Mac OS on it might cannibalize laptop sales.
iPhone Touch OS allows for fast development of many apps, but doesn’t
allow existing desktop graphic, 3D modeling etc. apps. Hybrid? Full
Mac OS with some bridge to iPhone apps? Hmm. Not sure. Then there is
the price. For expected $800 for device I would expect full Mac OS,
not just access to app store apps. Personally, I would be willing to
spend $800 for tablet with full OS, not for limited iPhone Touch like
OS.”

Ignoring the desire for a Mac OS I focused on the word tablet and whipped out this response.

“Well, we know it will be OS X…
The question at a technical level is whether it will be cocoa (as in
Leopard) or cocoa touch (as in iPhone).
It will take a lot of guts on Apple’s part to create a new platform,
but if they do it won’t be called a tablet. I agree, the appstore is
very inviting, especially with a larger and more capable device. I
would guess it will be based on the iPhone OS, and overall won’t be
radically different than the iPhone other than it have a little more
of everything. It will be a challenge not to screw up the user
interface, with a screen slight bigger the thumb won’t be the primary
stylus anymore. Most likely it will be a Personal Communicator class
of device, somewhat smarter than a smart phone, somewhat less desktop
oriented than a Mac. I am also guessing it will be called the iPhone
Pro. You heard it from eddie clay first.”

Yep, “iPhone Pro” makes sense.  Although if Apple had the guts they would resurrect the “iBook”name, but only if it was truly going to be a new platform or at the very least, presented a user interface and organization metaphor beyond the iPhone’s.  More what that might be  (and why you don’t want a “full fledge Mac OS X”) in my next post.

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A lot of new and interesting things for developer’s has been announced at the Apple developers conference, yet I was struck by this article from PC World:

WWDC No Shows: 10 Things We Wanted From Apple and Didn’t Get.

What was number one item?

1. The Apple Tablet

Much of the tech community expected Apple to unveil some sort of tablet-like device at the WWDC this week. Reports suggested a 10-inch touchscreen could be coming our way, priced between $500 and $700 and running a Mac OS X-like operating system with multitouch capabilities.

Every since Moses its seems humans have been fascinated by Top Ten Lists and Tablets.

I am certain Apple’s response to this “Netbook” era will be more of a new platform, not just a big iPhone, or little Mac.  The phone metaphor for a pad size device won’t work, but it probably will use a lot of the iPhone functionality, app store for sure, and apps in general should mostly be compatible.   Speaking of Pads (lighter version of tablets) and netbooks, this technology could be the biggest breakthrough yet.

From Pixel Qi – Home.

“We are a fabless developer of a new class of screens that use standard LCD manufacturing materials and processes.

The screens will be available for mini-laptops and ebook readers in high volume mass production in mid-2009.  Our mainstream laptop screens will be available in 2010.

The readability and legibility of our new screens rival the best epaper available today.  What’s new about our screens: fast video rate update (refresh), and fully saturated color at very low pricing because we use standard manufacturing materials, processes and factories.  Our screens use 1/2 to 1/4 the power of a regular LCD screen, and when integrated carefully with the device can increase battery life between charges by 5-fold.

The choice of the screens used in a computer, or any portable, can have a huge environmental impact.  Pixel Qi screens are the greenest screens ever made and will be critical to new generations of green electronics.”

Pixel Qi – Home.

I wrote this document a decade ago.  It was based on many years of work and many many dollars of investment.  Yes, some will recognize it as looking a lot like PenPoint.  Yes, this was all based on GO and Eo’s technology that had supposedly died in 1995.  It didn’t.  We at Mobilepoint had some success deplying it and making it into a very exciting solution for a specific need: face-to-face…as you saw briefly shown in one of my past video clips.   Ecase was not only based on penpoint, and much of the “in development” work that Go was doing at the time of their sudden death, but also many of the applications that in themselves were revolutionary…whom we also licensed the source code from the ISV (application vendors) before the faded away.  I was tasked to put it all togther gain, port it on existing hardware, and make it more integrated (i.e. make it a whole).

I did all that instead of pursuing Internet startup opportunies that I am embarrass to name….arg.

I still think the concepts of ecase were many years ahead of its time, and only recently has the concepts and technology surpassed it…(yeah, I thinking of the iPhone’s cocoa OS).

ecase1998.pdf>

Here’s some clips from marketing promos we did back then with me giving a brief overview of the technology at the end:

I don’t even want to link to the analysts on this subject…about how the iPhone’s features compare to other smartphone OS’s such as android,  Palms (Pam Pre) and the blackberry’s…Multitasking seems to be the biggest lacking feature on their charts.   This is completely worng….and misses the point.

This is a Phone platform for phones first and foremost, not a general purpose platform.  It could be though, but it isn’t.  This is very similar to what we experienced in the 90’s with personal communicators…we got confused because an OS like Penpoint was so powerful,  we forgot what the "point" really was for the consumer problems to be solved.

Nothing should take away from the user experience at a cost consumers expect from a phone. That is, a spinning beachball, or hourglass is one of most annoying user experiences we can have on a computer, but its totally unacceptable on a phone. What is amazing about the iPhone is it can maintain the phone metaphor while also being a platform for so many general purposes. That’s why we are confused.

Eventually this technology will solve most of the problems that laptops solve (it is OS X after all), and I expect more platforms (e.g. webpads) with different metaphors based on this technology (multi touch) …but a smartphone thats more like a laptop? Microsoft wishes…

More on THEY. The thing is, this article will not get copied, plagiarized, regurgitized across the netsphere as truth (like the current trash $99 iPhones, and “Apple bans facebook” mumbles that are going around) :

via A Consumer’s Guide to Apple Rumors | Technologizer:

There are many unique things about Apple, Inc. And one of the oddest of all is the degree to which straightforward reporting about the company’s activities has been drowned out in recent years by a surging sea of rumor, speculation, prediction, and–increasingly—wishful thinking. Everybody, it seems, wants to spoil the surprise of Apple product launches by revealing the secrets which the company works so very hard to keep. But a remarkable percentage of the these soothsayers are just plain terrible at their chosen profession. They’ve become the Gang That Couldn’t Predict Straight.

As the quality of Apple scuttlebutt has nosedived, I’ve become more interested in the culture of Apple rumors than in most of the rumors themselves. With this article, I’m beginning a series on the Apple Rumor Game.

read more…