tablet rumours
It's a few days before the next Apple announcement, and I'm really surprised at how the blogs have absolutely exploded with rumours, conjecture, hyperbole, and heaven knows what else. There's a part of me that hopes that Apple goes on stage on Wednesday, pretends to be completely unaware of the bandwidth devoted to all of these rumours, and announces a minor update to the Mac Pro. Or maybe a new version of that ugly iPod speaker thing they did a couple of years ago. Or just OS X 10.7, which I've decided should be named Tipsy (he's a big kitty!).
Comments
Anonymous
February 04, 2010
So now that the iPad announcement has been made, what are your thoughts? What are the possibilities for seeing MS Office for the iPad?Anonymous
February 05, 2010
I want to get my hands on one before I form an opinion. My first thought is that I'm a fast touch-typist (140+ wpm), and the idea of a soft keyboard for touching isn't very convincing. We don't have anything to share yet with regards to iPad development. :)Anonymous
February 10, 2010
And what did you expect from a tablet? A KEYBOARD? That´d make it a laptop that doesn´t fold! :-S If so, to match your logic, people should be very dissapointed if the next version of Excel features such weird things as rows, columns and cells.Anonymous
February 10, 2010
Hmm, I seem to recall a whole generation of tablet computers that did have keyboards. There's even the Modbook for a Mac version of one: http://www.axiotron.com/index.php?id=modbook The question for me is whether the iPad will be mostly about reading with a bit of content creation. On one hand, I'm not convinced at the idea of a soft keyboard because typing is faster on real keyboards and I care deeply about my typing speed; on the other hand, I regularly send texts, write emails, and post to Twitter via my iPhone and mostly ignore the fact that my input on the iPhone is much slower than what it would be if I were typing. Will the iPad be something where I accept the soft keyboard limitation because it's useful enough otherwise? I don't know -- I want to get my hands on one before I form an opinion.Anonymous
February 11, 2010
I don't think the Modbook has a keyboard although I presume you can connect one via USB or Bluetooth. The Modbook does have a stylus though. And of course, Apple has created a keyboard for the iPad as well. See "iPad Accessories" at the bottom of http://www.apple.com/ipad/specs/ Of course, there will be lots of MS Office doc creation on the iPad. iWork will be able to create documents that can be exported into Office formats. I have no doubt that Dataviz will make an iPad capable version of DocstoGo which is already available on the iPhone. To me it would make sense for MS to make native Word, Excel, & PowerPoint apps. Why let other companies get all the revenue?