What a difference a couple of years makes. Before iPhone came along, the world of touch screen devices was moribund – confined to tablet PC’s with pens and not much else. Today, fingertip driven UI’s are the rage, and the enthusiasm for touch devices generated by the launch of iPhone continues unabated. Consider the following stories currently headlining techmeme:
- Apple Reveals New Touch Screen Technology for iPhone & MacBook Tablet
- Plastic Logic (Finally) Shows Off The Que, Its (Very Expensive) Kindle Competitor
- HP’s Windows 7 Slate Device Revealed by Steve Ballmer
- The Other HP Slate Runs On Android
- Dell confirms Android-powered tablet device
All of that without a mention of Apple’s mysterious tablet device, which has been rumoured for months now.
It begs a question, naturally, which is “What is the future of the netbook?”. An enthusiastic netbook user, myself, I wonder whether I might instead substitute a slate if a suitable one were available. After all, netbook’s are most useful for simple email, web browsing, presentation display and the like. Couldn’t a slate fulfill a similar purpose? I already find myself reading a substantial amount on the tiny iPhone display – more so today than on my HP Mini netbook. Would I read even more on a device with a larger and sharper screen which incorporated natural page-turn gestures?
Food for thought, eh?
Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry make Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.
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Following through on that, if you'd read even more on a decent slate, you'd be reading less on your iPhone. Are all the iPhone wannabes missing the curve?