Rumor has it that Apple is fast-tracking what would essentially be an oversized iPod touch tablet computer for early 2010, and apparently I am the only person in the world who considers himself kind of a techie who is not messing their pants at the thought of the sheer joy Apple will bring us with such a product. After all, the iPod touch is awesome, and the iPhone would be awesome if it wasn’t married to a wretched bitch of a carrier like at&t, a touchscreen computer would be the most awesome thing that ever awesomed.
After all, this has to be the wave of the future, because in Star Trek: The Next Generation everyone works with touch screen interfaces! Never mind that it seemed like it took way longer than it usually would to get any thing done because the LCARS interface makes MS-DOS look like “My Baby’s First Operating System”, touchscreen flat tables with no noticible feedback are the way to go!
WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON HERE!?
To quote Abraham Lincoln, people who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like, but what about people like me, who don’t automatically jump in line for every new shiny thing Apple makes. I hate to be a Windows fanboy, but I’m rapidly discovering that’s what I am, because when I’m not actively deciding the best way to murder Justin Long for this PC vs. Mac ads, I find myself being the only one that doesn’t drop everything when Apple announces something new to stand in a line even though if I just waited ten seconds I’d probably get one.
The point of the rant isn’t to bash Apple though, it’s to say that this thought that touchscreens are the way of the future is short sighted. Yes, it’s fun to drag your finger across a screen, but I know some of you have iPhones and I know that typing a tex tmessage on th iPhone is a bitch, because I have an iPod Touch, and trying to tweet on my iPod Touch is not a fun time, since 99.9% of the apps in the app store absolutely refuse to use a landscape keyboard.
And even with a landscape keyboard, it is hard to tell where exactly you’re at while you’re typing. The reason tactile keyboards work is because they’re…well…tactile. A good typist can navigate a keyboard based on touch, and most people can figure out where they re on a keyboard based on touch. People don’t buy laptops because they keyboards suck are too soft or don’t have enough response or are too slick. The QWERTY keyboard as we know it is kind of a perfected thing, no matter how many different variations there are.
Yes, this is an actual thing.
So it’s not my current hatred of most things Apple based that drives me to say that I don’t think the Apple tablet will be that big a deal. For one, it’s going to be cost-prohibitive, like $800 bucks for what basically amounts to to a Dell Mini with shiny glass that’s easily scratched and an Apple logo etched on the back, but more importantly, unless Apple pulls some insane innovation out of their ass, what exactly does the world gain from having a slightly larger ipod if one of the key elements of inputting information into said slightly larger iPod is as broken down and gimpes as it is on the iPhone and iPod Touch, and yes, a larger screen will make the experience of typing a slightly more enjoyable one, but we don’t know how much space that keyboard will take up on the screen, or if the apps will be forced to use a portrait mode.
Maybe I should wait until more is known, but what fun would that be?
Alright, folks, I’m heading to bed.
KC
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