Mac Tablet Musings

Earlier this week I had a brief discussion with Houston Neal who posted an article on potential role of the iTablet in EMR applications. There are areas where I would fully agree with Houston. User interface (or its clean, streamlined design) has been the primary strength of Apple's OS for years. User interface has been the winning aspect of the iPhone. It has been both intuitive and cute. It is funny thing with the Apple Tablet (or iTablet or whatever it will be called once delivered...)... Apple has a long track record with pen / touch interfaces. Starting with early Newtons and now with the iPhone and iPod Touch. People love it. It seems pen / touch interface to the OS X should not be that far away. But may be Apple does not want to follow Microsoft's path of just adding a couple of tablet functions to the plain old operating system?

To be honest Microsoft has not been very successful with its Windows Tablets... They were stars of one or two seasons... back in 2004... And they have a niche, but regular users seem to prefer QWERTY keyboard and mouse. I am such a user. I had one of the best Windows Tablets - the Compaq TC-1000 (look: I always refer to it when I post in the Apple tablet....). The Compaq was fantastic for web browsing, but had some issues: poor WiFi, poor battery and slow processor. I believe HP would make good money re-releasing the TC-1000 now, with 8-hours battery, good WiFi/3G connectivity and Intel L9400 or better...). Then I had the Lenovo X61 convertible, but this was not a good pick... soon I swapped it for a plain X61, that was much smaller and much lighter and had significantly better battery life... I was not expecting that much overhead was imposed by the convertible / tablet design. But hey... the issues are almost identical with convertible laptop computer as they are with a convertible car... It is all about the stiffness of the frame... and making it really stiff means adding weight and bulk... By the way this was the strength of the TC-1000 design - the entire computer was in the "screen" part and keyboard was just an add-on. And this is what is envisioned on Houston's page: keyboard is just an add - on.

In the meantime (since first using the TC-1000 back in 2003 I think) I drifted towards classic permanent qwerty + screen design. All that was said about the cute factor of Apple touch interface can be repeated how pathetic it is with its real productivity. Whenever I see people gliding and sliding their fingers on iPhones or on touch pads of their iMacs, I feel sorry. There is nothing like a real keyboard... full stop. I am writing this blog now sitting in an armchair, with my QWERTY laptop where it belongs - on my lap :). It would be much more difficult do do that with just about any kind of tablet, as they are either too imbalanced with most of theit weight in the screen part or the screen joint is just not stiff enough causing the screen to wobble...

Also after spending a couple of weeks with the iPhone, I decided to switch to BlackBerry, and from perspective the 8900 Curve is by far the best phone I have ever had. Again the primary reason to switch was the lack of a physical keyboard on the iPhone. I write a lot and I just plain simple need real QWERTY. Even if it is a small one. But I agree - there are types of applications - mainly those who retrieve data, like EMR, that may be good candidates for tablet design. Let us see what future brings to the table... I just hope they won't replace the keyboard with a wheel...