Two fun tablet stands

TwoHands.

MonkeyDo. 

It looks to me like TwoHands (apart from being more "grown-up") is more flexible re tablet size. Though I'm not sure how the monkey works. It looks like it's not quite as flexible re width as the other one, but they state that it can hold large tablets horizontally or vertically, and small tablets horizontally. Maybe the arms bend. 

Note that both can give different angles depending on how high you place the grip. (You slide the whole thing up or down.) 

New low price levels for tablets

Wow, that went fast! I was in my local PC store last night, and looked over their tablets. They had about five different brands on display (no iPads, they used to have those prominently, I'm guessing they're sold out), and all of them were at or under £200! (Which means similar numbers in $ in the US, or slightly above). This was Nexus, and Samsung Galaxy, as well as a couple of less known brands.

This is impressive, it was only a few months ago the Nexus Seven broke all rules by being a quality 7-inch tablet and selling for only 200. (Well, that's disregarding the Kindle Fire, but that's a crippled tablet unless you hack it.) And now suddenly they all are at this level, which is not far from half of the typical price half a year ago.

To be sure this is a bit ahead of the natural price development, since Amazon and Google has started a real price war by selling their tablets at cost, not making a cent on them unless the customer spends money in their store on the tablet.

Apple is actually the only brand I know of which is not knuckling under, so far holding the iPad Mini at over 300. But they have a unique and uniquely beloved interface and digital wares ecosystem, so they still manage to be around the number 1 tablet on the market.

It has to be tough for brands like Samsung, they are already losing money on big TVs, now the time has come for tablets too? But they can't just stand their ground, the battle is on for future market share, and 'everything' is at stake.

Walmart offer

It seems Walmart is having a good in-store offer on iPads and iPhones.

Nexus 10, and using text-to-speech

Update: It's a bit startling, but I realize that if push came to shove, and the Kindle for iPad app got text-to-speech, I might just be able to make do with only the iPad Mini for everything! Virtually. It's perfect for all kinds of reading, and the backlight would be less of an issue if it could read aloud most books. 

=====
Google Nexus 10 Tablet: First Impressions, article.

It seems everybody is as impressed with this one as they were by the Nexus Seven. Boiled down, I'd say that it sounds like hardware-wise, it's as good as the iPad, and the Android interface is improving. And it's cheaper than the iPad, maybe $80 cheaper. (Google is selling it at cost, hoping it'll be a loss leader for future market share.)

The one downfall might be that too few apps are still optimized for tablets and don't utilize the large screen. I'm actually amazed, we've had Android tablets for a couple of years now, what's taking the developers so long? iPad apps came in like an avalanche when it came out.

I was curious about Android tablets for a while, and I have a couple. But I don't know that I'll buy any more, because while they are not bad devices, I'm not as comfortable with them as iOS and iOS apps, and I like iTunes video market better, where I can buy instead of renting (I hate renting since I often don't finish things at once).

I am really comfortable with the two iPad sizes and their features, and with my Kindle Paperwhite for long reading. It will take a killer feature to get me to really want something else.

I actually have the Kindle Fire HD because of such a killer feature: it reads Kindle books aloud for me, and it does a great job, much better than the Kindle 3 (Kindle Keyboard). It's great for when you need to do something else at the same time, walking or working. Or relaxing, I find I can relax much more lying fully down in a near-dark room listening to a book than I can when I need light and to hold a device up, and to focus my eyes and brain on reading and decoding letters.

I saw two young reviewers reviewing the Fire HD on YouTube, and they hopped right past the text-to-speech feature with the comment that it was probably only good for when you didn't know how to pronounce a word... Such a lack of vision!

I really hope good text-to-speech will come to the Kindle app for iPad, and to other iPad apps.

Think Superfluous

This in the newest Simpsons episode. It must be very fresh.
I think it's pretty spot on. The iPad Fourth Generation is (apart from the camera upgrade) only a speed bump, and naming it "fourth generation" is almost like Apple saying to us: "See? Aren't you glad we dropped the numbers for different generations? You'd go crazy trying to keep track of them."

Mini keyboard-case

TCGirl found this keyboard case for the iPad Mini. I haven't tried it, and it's doubtful if anybody can touch-type on such a size, but it has many high reviews and it amazingly cheap.

I have this AmazonBasics bluetooth keyboard. It's light, pretty good, reasonably priced. Full size. Nicely simple.
And the travel stand is great. Works with any tablet almost, or phones, and fills nothing in a bag or pocket.

Surface review

An iPad Lover’s Take On The Surface With Windows RT, review.

With all that up-and-running, I immediately headed to the Windows Store (the virtual one with apps, not the physical one with Surfaces) to get some apps. Total nightmare. In the ten days I’ve been using the Surface, that Store has either been down or completely unresponsive a large percentage of the time. It just hangs and hangs and hangs, seemingly forever. I restart, re-open and some things work, then it hangs again. I’ve been trying to download one app for days — still no luck. I’m sick of restarting. And the back-button just isn’t working. Joy.
Of course, that doesn’t even speak to a lack of apps in said store — which, let’s be honest, is the real problem.


My local PC store told me that here in UK also, the Microsoft Surface tablet is only sold in MS stores. Good luck with that, MS! (He also said some computers with Win8 were coming, but probably not before xmas.)

Altogether, Win8 and the tablet seem to be off to a godawfully poor start. Of course MS is famous for doing that, but then get it better, and take over completely (Windows was no good until version 3). But it has been a looong time since they did so, and one has to wonder if they are simply way too far behind in the race this time along. Particularly the great lack of interest from even the large app developers is a very, very bad sign. iPhone/iPad was besieged by developers even before it was *possible* to develop for the platform. ("Web apps," said Steve Jobs, "do that, they're great".)

Books on paper: for when nothing else works

I have come to see paper books as a sort of emergency solution. There are big drawbacks to them, they are very expensive and takes many months to make, you can't change the font size, they are big and heavy, bringing more than a couple is very impractical, they are vulnerable and don't wear or age well, you can't look up words in them or connect to online encyclopaedias, they have to be transported several times to reach the reader...

But: if a person does not have the money or the skills, or for some reason the desire to own an ereading device, a paper book is still a way you can get this valuable content to him, so hurrah for them!

The New Minimalist

Is Digitization Enabling Minimalism for a New Generation?, article.
Let’s imagine I took every e-book in my Kindle library and converted it into a physical book, and then took half the stuff we watch on Netflix and converted those films and shows into DVDs (let’s assume the other half are rentals we wouldn’t keep), and then printed out my years of archived photos (less than most people have, but enough) and stuck them into albums. Just how minimalist would we really be then?

Yep. I would call myself a minimalist, though not a radical one. And yet, in the years between getting Comfortable economically and being able to get my stuff digitally (roughly the naughties decade), my big lust for good books and visuals still made me assemble, heck I dunno, a couple thousand books and disks. I had to keep buying book boxes (not cheap considering my cherry-wood minimalist good taste), I have them in every room.

I have actually weeded out the collection at least three times, but it appears that I'm now close to the level where the rest is hard for me to get rid of. Even if I know that at least 90% of it I won't ever read or watch again in that form, I'm too attached to it.

But it'll change, there's no hurry. As I get more digital in my habits, I can feel my feelings for the physical objects slowly change in the direction of them being just simply that, physical objects. My DVD of Blues Brothers is just a plastic disc and paper cover, it's not the movie I love so. It's faster, though not cheaper, to find and watch it from iTunes than to locate it in my collection.
Books mostly, I can barely stand reading anything on paper now. I still buy blu-ray discs, though I'm not exactly sure why. But an HD movie is such a big download.

But anyway, it's amazing to think that these days you need just a chair and table and a bed, and for all your communication and entertainment and education needs... well, basically an iPad! Wow. Heaven for students and minimalists.

The new wild west

Why the Daily Failed, or the new wild west of Net magazines, a post on my main blog.

iPad 2 vs 1, get a 2

I've been saying that I don't find that the difference between the iPad 2's screen and the 3's Retina display is all that important, except cosmetically. I stand by that, but one thing I hadn't noticed until today is how big a step forward the iPad 2's screen was compared to the iPad 1's.

I don't recall anybody writing about that, and I don't know how Apple did it, especially since the have the same size pixels. But compared to the second generation, the iPad 1's screen is just sort of grainy and muddy. It has an odd tri-color shimmer to it, like the pixels are visible somehow.  The second generation has a beautiful, smooth clear rendition, the grain effect is totally gone. It's just much better to look at, even though the amount of detail is the same.

Combine that with the lighter weight, the better camera, and the higher speed, my advice is: when buying a used iPad, only consider the first generation if you can get it much cheaper than an iPad 2. (There are even quite a few apps now which only run on iPad 2 or later.)

It's amazing how fast this development is going. The iPad still feels like a new tool to me, but already the first generation is basically outdated.

I wonder what they're going to do for iPad 5? (The fourth gen is basically a speed bump.)

News Corp. Shutters The Daily iPad App

News Corp. Shutters The Daily iPad App, article.

The app was initially hampered by technical problems, but The Daily’s key issue was a conceptual one. While the app boasted lots of digital bells and whistles, in the end it was very much a general interest newspaper that seemed to be geared toward people who didn’t really like newspapers. You can’t make that work no matter what kind of platform you use.

I am not exactly sure what he means by that. But I agree inasmuch as the app/newspaper The Daily didn't appeal to me at all from the beginning. I would have bet ten to one that it wouldn't survive. (But I couldn't find any takers.    :-)

Dunno if I am the right judge though, since I have very little interest in newspapers. I have honestly tried to read them from time to time, but apart from the tech sections almost nothing seemed interesting to me. I'm not interested in politics and I'm not interested in sports, or in car crashes, or all that stuff. 

iPad with USB keyboard!

Once again you can use your iPad with a full USB keyboard. (My old video is here.)
You need an Apple USB adapter of course, but here's the new thing: you simply plug in an Unpowered USB hub between the iPad and the keyboard.
For example the excellent keyboard on the Alphasmart Neo can be used.

Just ignore the "device not supported" message the iPad gives you.
(I've not tested if this works with the new Lightning connectors on iPad 4 and Mini. You need a different Apple adapter for them of course.)

MS bungling it again?

Microsoft Introduces ... The Horse & Buggy Era, article.

Admittedly MacObserver can be quite blatantly anti-MS, but there's some point to it. I read recently that a market researcher hung out for two hours in a shopping centre by an Apple store and a Microsoft store. In those two hours, the Apple store sold an impressive eleven iPads, and the MS store sold zero Surface tablets. Zero! That's not a good number, unless you're a mathematician.

update:
Bruce said:
Microsoft has a tough job ahead of them, that's for sure.
One rationale for buying Windows for the home has been, "It's what they use at work." If Microsoft can convince IT departments of big companies to use Windows tablets, then they may have a chance.
All of the stuff that I could care less about on a tablet, like SAMBA and Active Directory, might help Microsoft by making their tablets more attractive to IT departments.

 Eolake said...
Yes, their biggest chance must be to leverage their stronghold, enterprise. I was just thinking that, when reading this article.
Microsoft's nightmare scenario is actually starting to take hold. 

... Although, as they point out, Bring Your Own Device is getting big, so it's not the nineties anymore.

Barclays Bank in the UK just bought over 8,000 iPads, apparently on demand from employees! Not Kansas anymore either.

Thoughts on the newest Chromebook

The Google Chromebook is out in a new version, and the price is only $250, less than an iPad Mini. And David Pogue likes it a lot.
The Chromebook concept takes some getting used to: It’s exclusively for online activities. Web, e-mail, YouTube, and apps like Google Drive (free, online word processor, spreadsheet and slide show programs). The laptop has no moving parts: no fan, no DVD drive, not even a hard drive. It’s silent and fast, as long as you don’t try to do two things at once (video playback and music playback, for example).

I must say, if the keyboard is good, it makes a lot of sense as portable typewriter. It's as light as a Mabook Air, but much cheaper. It holds no data on its own, so that and the price makes it less of a worry re it getting stolen.

And of course, unlike me (I have a trillion email accounts and use an email app), a surprising number of people, even very pro and geeky people, only use Gmail and they use it from the Gmail web site, so this handles that too.

And again, unlike me who needs a computer for web site design and photoshopping, it actually does 95% of what people do these days, email, web, and whap apps (Office etc) can be done in a web browser.

I hate to give Google their due, but Apple has p'd me off by getting a patent on rounded rectangles! :-) (Is this the beginning of a turning tide for Apple?)

A private reviewer on Flickr discussion group for Alphasmart devices writes:
There are many web posts that say the Chromebook is useless without a network connection, but that's not really so. Enable offline documents and you can write on the go without a network connection. You can't log into the Chromebook without a network connection, but you can log in and "sleep" the system. It wakes up still logged in.

That is good. A net connection is still far from ubiquitous or very reliable, and it would be irritating to be totally helpless if you don't have it, and you're inspired to write.

Pogue writes that the keyboard is "carefully modeled on the Macbook Air's", and that's no joke, I would have sworn I was looking at a Macbook Air keyboard. Samsung really has no shame, or they took it literally when Picasso said "great artists steal". One can understand Apple/Jobs' wounded ego re their creations getting ripped off.

Update:
Bruce said:

Google has another operating system which is more popular than ChromeOS. It is being put on laptops without Google's help. These laptops are less expensive and can do more than the Chromebook. 
Imagine what could happen if Google put some time and energy into Android netbooks.