Apple Tablet
I’m never going to be a major source of news, so I don’t rush to post about all the KoOL N3W StuFFS! but I’m getting quite excited about the prospect of an Apple Tablet of some description.
John Gruber has been keeping my saliva glands going over at his Daring Fireball Blog.
Dan Moren posted on the Macworld blog regarding text entry on the still mythical device:
And now for something completely different - Everybody likes to watch Steve Jobs pull a rabbit out of his hat—especially if he’s not even wearing a hat. (Did I just blow your mind?) Will it be nose-based text entry? Psychic text entry? Camera-based lip-reading? Sub-vocal voice recognition? There are so many possibilities that it wouldn’t surprise me to see something that we’d never even thought of. Odds: 20 to 1
This is my personal favourite of his options, whatever you think of the iPhone, I really do think it changed the way we think about mobile devices and I’d like to think this new tablet device will too.
I’ve used tabletPCs in the past - a few different models all running WindowsXP Tablet Edition. I didn’t mind it too much, got fairly good with the handwriting recognition and was usually happy just scribbling straight into OneNote, but it was clumsy and definitely slower than typing.
As for things we never even thought of - I’ve always been interested in chord keyboards, which you don’t really see these days but has some mileage in mobile devices. It certainly has the steep learning curve that I’ve seen rumoured regarding the new Apple machine.
I don’t think mobile devices will really move forward in this area until we have some kind of direct-telepathic interface, which is not nearly as crazy far-fetched as it once was!