There are a variety of tablet-like computing devices in the works. But, assuming that the hardware form factor is similar to the deceased HP Slate, but with WebOS as the platform–here are five reasons that the HP Hurricane tablet will make a formidable competitor for the Apple iPad.

1. Adobe Flash: While Apple continues its public jihad against Adobe Flash–and draws the regulatory scrutiny of the DOJ and the GTC–other platforms such as Android and WebOS are working with Adobe to develop Flash software compatible with their mobile platforms. HTML5 may be the future, but there is no denying that Adobe Flash is a ubiquitous standard regardless of any flaws it might have–real or perceived.
2. Dual Cameras A tablet device may be a tad bulky or cumbersome to use for taking snapshots, but the option would certainly come in handy. Granted, I can take a picture with my smartphone instead–and through some convoluted combination of tasks manage to get them to the iPad so I can draw moustaches on the photos with Adobe Ideas (see- Apple didn’t ban everything Adobe makes from the iPad).

   More importantly for mobile business professionals, a front-facing camera allows the tablet to be used for Skype video calls, and other face-to-face video conferencing solutions.

3. Expandability The iPad is intentionally a closed environment. The lack of USB ports or SD memory card slots fits with the basic culture of the iPad as a Web-enabled mobile media platform, but business professionals need to be able to simply plug in a USB thumb drive and read or copy files.

   While not explicitly prescribed, the iPad camera connection kit apparently offers an alternative to enable some USB capabilities, but an HP Hurricane with a USB port and/or SD memory card slot would be a huge advantage.

4. Distribution channels. Then we get down to the nitty gritty. Forget the features of the hardware or the capabilities of the platform. An HP Hurricane tablet can crush an Apple iPad just by virtue of HP’s massive global enterprise distribution channels. HP has an existing vendor relationship with most major corporations. As long as HP can demonstrate the benefits and value of the Hurricane tablet it will be able to leverage those relationships to distribute the device en masse.
5. HP brand Apple has its dedicated and loyal following. I wouldn’t dare imply that HP has anywhere near the dedication from its customers. But, as the largest computer manufacturer in the world it does have a respected reputation–especially in the business world where Apple often struggles.

   I think it was a wise decision by HP to shift gears from the Windows 7-based Slate to the WebOS-based Hurricane. The tablet–at least the way Apple has envisioned it with the iPad–is a culture shift, not just a new form factor.

   HP is in a strong position, though, to combine its brand prowess and understanding of the needs of mobile business professionals, with the WebOS platform, and lessons learned from the iPad, and create a tablet device capable of challenging the iPad, and with an edge on the iPad when it comes to the business professional audience.

Resource:
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/195993/five_reasons_hp_hurricane_can_compete_with_ipad.html

Google (GOOG) is said to be planning a rival device to Apple’s (AAPL) iPad that will run its Android operating system. Assuming this is true, what does Google need to do to make its slate competitive with the iPad?

Size matters—A “Google Pad” should target the sweet spot of screen sizes, that of 5 to 8 in. Any larger and some will complain that the device is too heavy—as is already happening with the iPad—while smaller devices simply don’t offer enough benefit over current smartphones, some of which have displays of 4 in. or larger ). Google would have to subsequently adjust how Android and its apps run on larger displays. When I ran Android on a 7-in. touchscreen computer, it offered a less-than-ideal experience because the user interface is built for small screens.

Fix the Market—Other companies already offer Android-powered tablets, but those devices are hobbled by limitations that include not having access to the Android Market for software. Google wouldn’t similarly constrain its own product, but it still needs to make finding and installing software from the marketplace easier. One small tweak that would yield huge benefits is an “update all” function. Users don’t want to have to update software one app at a time.

Sync or swim—Unlike its competitors, Google doesn’t offer software to synchronize data between Android devices and computers. The sync software Google offers is the cloud; e-mail, contacts, calendars, and other data are all available through an over-the-air Web connection. But not all consumers are ready for true wireless data synchronization. Google could either bundle solutions like DoubleTwist for media and application synchronization or The Missing Sync for personal data.

Boost productivity—While most people don’t buy tablets to replace the productivity offered by a traditional computer, if it’s making one, Google should include its Google Docs software. Android supports document viewing, but not much in the way of editing aside from limited spreadsheet changes. A native Android application or enhanced Google Docs functionality in the browser for basic document editing would rival Apple’s iWork software for the iPad.

Court developers—Apple has already got the attention of third-party developers, so Google will have to offer an equally if not more compelling development environment in order to have blockbuster applications on hand at launch. Netflix is a fine example. Apple successfully convinced the company to build media-streaming software for the iPad, enabling consumers to watch video wherever a Web connection could be found.

As someone who switched from an iPhone to a Nexus One earlier this year—(though I bought an iPad, too), I find the Apple experience more refined than Google’s. But Android still has much to offer, namely the lack of developer lock-in, easy integration with Google programs, and a growing number of software titles. If the company addresses the five areas I’ve outlined above, a Google Pad could be a very worthy alternative to Apple’s iPad.

Resource:
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/apr2010/tc20100413_828372.htm

The year was 2000. The man’s name was Bill Gates.

That year at Comdex, which at the time was the biggest technology trade show on the calendar, Microsoft unveiled something it called a Tablet PC. Just for good measure, the company unveiled it again at Comdex in 2001. But it never particularly caught on, because who wants a computer that’s basically an underpowered netbook without a keyboard? The Tablet PC was much like a piece of paper, except it was heavier and more expensive and it broke when you dropped it.

Now Apple is offering us another tablet PC: the iPad. We didn’t want one then. Why would we want one now?

The tough thing about writing about Apple products is that they come with a lot of hype wrapped around them. The other tough thing about writing about Apple products is that sometimes the hype is true. So let’s scrape the Vaseline off the lens and figure out what exactly we’re looking at.

Brass tacks: Apple took a computer, chopped off the keyboard and squashed it flat. It’s reasonably powerful for its size. Nobody has independently benchmarked the new house-made 1-gigahertz A4 processor that powers it, but it never once stuttered in the demos, so let’s just say it’s somewhere between an iPhone and a netbook — toward the netbook end — and more than sufficient unto the day. The iPad is thin: half an inch (1.25 cm) at its thickest. It’s light: 1.5 lb. (680 g), half of what a MacBook Air weighs. It runs a scaled-up version of the iPhone operating system we know and love or at least tolerate. To make up for the lack of a keyboard or mouse, the display is a lovely touchscreen that’s so superbright and supercrisp that it looks bigger than its real dimensions — 9.7 in. (about 25 cm) diagonally. The iPad can cost as little as $499 (with 16 gigabytes of memory) or as much as $829 (with 64 gigabytes, plus 3G).

The iPad does a lot — Web browsing, e-mail, photos, music, movies, games, word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, e-books — but you’ll notice that it doesn’t do anything your other devices don’t, and in many cases your other devices do those things better. The difference lies in what you can do with the iPad. You can pick it up. You can rest it in your lap. You can pass it around. You can leave it on a coffee table. You can tuck it in a bag. You can one-hand it while reading on a train.

Now do you want it? Of course you do. It’s all right. The feelings you’re having are perfectly natural.

Back to the Future

Steve Jobs didn’t invent the tablet computer. In the past 10 years, practically every serious PC company has shipped one. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, a man impervious to the lessons of history, arrived at the Consumer Electronics Show (the Comdex de nos jours) in January waving yet another Windows tablet, this one made by Hewlett-Packard. But nobody has ever gotten the marketplace to pay attention. The tablet computer is like a siren that calls seductively to computer engineers, only to wreck them fatally on the stony coast of our total lack of interest.

But Jobs likes nothing better than frolicking in the graveyard of other companies’ dead products. Digital music players had been around for years before Apple made the iPod. When it comes to finally making the tablet computer work, Apple has a few weapons those other companies don’t have. It has world-beating displays. It has plenty of expertise in low-power engineering; the iPad’s specs say it can do 10 hours of Web surfing on one charge. More important, to make up for the absence of a keyboard, Apple has its much patented multitouch technology. The attempts of other companies to emulate multitouch are either funny or sad, depending on your temperament, but they are always futile.

See the top iPhone applications.

Most important, Apple’s engineers know something those other companies don’t: form has trumped function. You can load up a tablet with horsepower and extra features till it can do your taxes and lick the stamp, but if it’s not instantly obvious how to use those features without a manual — and if you don’t look good using them — nobody cares. The iPad isn’t wildly feature-rich. It doesn’t run Flash, and the only browser it runs is Safari. Like the iPhone, it can’t multitask, and it doesn’t appear to have a serious file-handling system. I’ve tried its much ballyhooed full-size virtual keyboard, and it feels like typing with frostbite. It doesn’t even have a damn camera. But you will care about it, because whoever designed its graceful lines and intuitive interface cared about you.

Moreover, the iPad is merely the tangible component of a much larger device, an entire Internet ecosystem that extends out to the horizon in every direction. Other companies simply cannot match Apple’s skill in constructing media pipelines for its products. The iPad is launching into the teeth of a storm of competition: there’s a tablet shipping this month called (unfortunately) the JooJoo that is physically the iPad’s rival, and Sony, Dell, Acer, Asus, Lenovo and (undaunted) Microsoft are all said to have next-gen tablets in the works, to say nothing of the inevitable swarm of Chinese knockoffs. But nobody anywhere does delivery like Apple, and a tablet is only as good as the stuff you can put on it.

Apple already took this hill with the iPhone. The App Store alone has piled up 150,000 offerings in the space of not quite two years, turning the iPhone into a mature mobile-gaming platform to rival Nintendo’s DS. The iPad will hold that hill and erect cruelly unassailable fortifications on it. The most interesting steel-cage match this year will be Apple and the iPad vs. Amazon and the Kindle in the e-bookselling arena. I’ve seen what books look like on the iPad, and I’ve seen Apple’s e-bookstore. The iPad is going to fold, mutilate and spindle the Kindle.

Introducing the Home Computer

But to say the iPad is revolutionary isn’t quite right. There’s nothing like it out there, so there’s no regime to change. One of the things that makes Apple unique is that it never holds focus groups. It doesn’t ask people what they want; it tells them what they’re going to want next. Where Microsoft likes to enter established markets and take them over by brute force, Apple works by creating new niches and dominating them from the get-go.

Nobody — not even Jobs, by his own admission — is sure what consumers will use the iPad for, but I’m guessing it will be the first true home computer. Conventional PCs live in studies; laptops make brief, furtive forays into the living room. The iPad will become the first whole-house computer, shared among an entire family, passed from hand to hand, roaming freely from living room to kitchen to bedroom to — look, it’s going to happen — bathroom, at ease everywhere, tethered to nothing. It’s not a revolution, but it’s a real change, the kind of change you notice.

If I have a beef with the iPad, it’s that while it’s a lovely device for consuming content, it doesn’t do much to facilitate its creation. The computer is the greatest all-purpose creativity tool since the pen. It put a music studio, a movie studio, a darkroom and a publishing house on everybody’s desk. The iPad shifts the emphasis from creating content to merely absorbing and manipulating it. It mutes you, turns you back into a passive consumer of other people’s masterpieces. In that sense, it’s a step backward. Not much of a fairy-tale ending. Except for the people who are selling content.

Resource:
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1976932,00.html?xid=rss-topstories

A day before it goes on sale, that remains the question. What exactly does iPad do?

As Steven Colbert said on “The Colbert Report” Thursday, “You can shield your eyes from the sun…and just look how quickly it makes delicious salsa.”

What iPad does, perhaps, is change everything, reports CBS News correspondent John Blackstone.

“The iPad is like the Beatles of 2010,” says Wired magazine senior writer Steven Levy. “It takes something that we thought we knew and makes it seem fresh.”

Levy says the brilliance of the iPad is that it makes the computer disappear. “You don’t think computer when you use it. You just do the task you want to do.”

Want to read a book? The iPad becomes a book. Want to read a newspaper? The iPad becomes a newspaper. It can be a game board or even a movie screen with the touch of a finger.

The appeal of that has already been noted by other computer makers who are now rushing to get their own tablet computers to market– just the way apple’s iphone started a flood of other smart phones, the ipad will do the same.

And the act of touching something changes the experience.

“It’s inherently intuitive to use your fingers,” says technology analyst Larry Magid.

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It may be what apple has been working toward for decades, reports Blackstone. In the beginning computers were complex. You almost needed a programmer’s skill to make them work.

Then along came Apple with machines that seemed designed for anybody to use. In a remarkable interview from 1981 a young Steve Jobs told a skeptical CBS News correspondent why the computer he’s built will catch on.

“It’s just going to be very gradual and very human and will seduce you into learning how to use it,” said Jobs.

He was right. We’ve learned how to use computers and now he’s selling one that doesn’t seem to be a computer at all, and that may open doors as yet unknown.

“The thing about technology is that the most exciting applications are probably the ones that nobody has yet imagined,” says Magid. “Technology opens up the doors for creativity.”

For all the hype, it’s what happens at the Apple store that counts, reports Blackstone. While there’s certain to be a crowd Saturday when the iPad goes on sale, the response to the iPad in the weeks and months ahead is what will determine whether it changes the face of computing.

Resource:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/04/02/eveningnews/main6358242.shtml