So many of you are aware of the trials facing the Kuban clan these days, but for those that don’t my father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer last year and my baby niece was discovered to have a brain abnormality.
There is no way I can even summarize all the events surrounding these so I won’t even try – I will simply point people to the web sites dedicated telling of their journey: DanKuban.com and CountingAllJoys.blogspot.com.
Well the ultra-hyped Apple tablet has finally been revealed as the “iPad”. Some are excited about it while others are disappointed. But now that the dust has settled, I think it’s clear that Apple’s real purposes in their “launch” was simply to stall.
Let’s review: As more and more companies looked toward the slate (keyboardless tablet) form factor as the next “netbook market”, Apple began to get worried they would be beaten to the punch. Ironically it was probably the deluge of iTablet rumors that spurred the competition on towards creating the next great device before Apple cornered the market, but the advances made in more powerful and lower wattage processors didn’t hurt either.
As the various tablet designs began to leak out before CES 2010, the iTablet leaks became the norm replacing the wild speculation of the “fan boys”. Apple effectively cast a shadow over CES and had people instead looking toward the Apple event. Unfortunately while the Apple event was attempted to mirror the iPhone launches it failed to deliver.
Consider the following:
I believe that Apple intended to launch the iPad ready to ship with iPhone OS 4.0, full flash and at least limited multitasking this June alongside the next iPhone. Instead, the competition came knocking and Apple acted quickly to stall the market and hopefully gain enough time to finish their product. And if they scared off a few companies that were in the planning instead of prototype stage – all the better.
I think this is a great idea overall. However, I think the 10″ screens with a max vertical resolution of 600px almost defeats the purpose of the double screen. I mean while this setup is actually 107% of my 24″ monitor wide it is only 50% as tall (pixel wise). That coupled with the fact that many programs just don’t play well below 720px high makes this not quite as great as one might assume.
Now take this concept and make it a dual 11.6″ setup with a CULV chip and 9400 Nvidia GPU… and that’s a device that would appeal to a certain segment of professionals. As it stands, this is a not-quite-there product.
If you’re still interested tho – you can grab it for $913 + importing fees.
It also has a brand new JavaScript engine that will address IE’s historically weak rendering in web apps and similar code. Microsoft already claims the engine is as fast as the improved engine in Firefox 3.6 and that more optimizations are enroute.
The company also made a renewed pledge to web standards and said it will support both newer technologies like HTML5 as well as those it has ignored in the past. CSS code can now show rounded borders, and CSS selectors are now supported. Sinofsky explained that this area still needs significant development time but that a perfect score on the ACID standards test is the ultimate goal. IE9 in its very early state only manages a 32/100 score where the latest Chrome, Opera and Safari versions are already at 100.
There are “a lot of things we need to do” at Microsoft to follow standards, the executive added.
No roadmap has been given for the browser, but the development is likely to prove crucial for Microsoft. Despite the release of IE8 and many users receiving the new browser by default with Windows 7, total IE use is continuing to fall as Firefox, Safari and Chrome respectively draw more users. – Microsoft vows GPU acceleration, standards in IE9
I’m sure those two tidbits are unrelated: a crappy browsing experience and diminishing market share. Why is Internet Explorer even still around anyway? Oh yeah it’s pre-installed on 95% of computers and most people are too dumb to download & install anything from the internet that isn’t a virus or spyware.