Tag: tablet pc (Page 5 of 5)

Orange CEO confirms Apple tablet

January 11, 2010 / Jeff Morgan

Orange’s CEO, Stephane Richard, was extremely candid regarding the Apple tablet over the weekend. He was on a radio show speaking with Jean Pierre Elkabbach, a French journalist, for radio Europe 1.

Elkabbach wasn’t even probing all that hard, he simply stated that Apple was planning to release a tablet, to which Richard agreed. With a webcam? Yes. And will Orange users benefit from it? Sure!

They are going to benefit from the web cam, they are going to be able to, in effect, transmit images in real time. We are going to modernize, in essence, the video phone that we knew a few years ago… the size of the resolution, and the quality of the resolution will be better, and it will be available to all in France.

So we have one more person confirming the existence of a tablet we’ve all known exists for while. There’s no new information here, so just move along folks. Nothing to see.

Apple, News

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2010: tablets over ereaders

January 4, 2010 / Jeff Morgan

Everyone’s saying it. I’m jumping on board. Whatever your feelings about tablets – they should exist, they shouldn’t, they’re pointless, they’re great – there’s no denying the potential market impact of a quality tablet. Quality is the key factor here. Much like ereaders, which no one cared about until the Kindle came around, tablets need a frontrunner, something to rally around and aspire to beat. My bet, like so many others, is on the Apple tablet.

It’s not just that I trust Apple, which I do, but that the market is so ripe for a Apple created device. The world has fallen in love with the iPhone and the iPod Touch, the App Store continues to grow at alarming rates, and everyone is imitating multi-touch wherever it makes sense and in plenty of places it doesn’t. Imagine your iPod Touch on ‘roids, powerful enough to run 1080p video, do some simple editing, and wirelessly post to YouTube. Did I mention you can surf the web and read your ebooks? How much would you pay for a device like that? $500? $600? More?

Amazon and Barnes & Noble don’t think the consumer’s financial tolerance is so high. I do. I think people would be willing to spend as much as a grand on an Apple tablet because it could potentially do everything I mentioned above. In the face of that kind of device, the Kindle starts to look a lot like the Peek, specializing in a service handled just as well, if not better, by a more versatile device.

The one thing that could stall tablets for another year is premature release. Everyone knows the tablet is the next big thing, but if it gets rushed, consumers could see the failed device as a reason to buy an ereader. Wait until the tablet people get it right before diving in.

What do you think? Is this the beginning of the end for ereaders? Will they still have their place in the market? Can they get cheap enough to stay relevant?

Computers, Digital Media, Mobile

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Crunchpad demo coming Monday

December 4, 2009 / Jeff Morgan

Here’s one of the biggest public face-slaps I’ve ever witnessed. This coming Monday, Fusion Garage will be giving a public demo of the Crunchpad, the web tablet for which Fusion Garage had partnered with Michael Arrington and TechCrunch. Fusion Garage CEO Chandra Rathakrishnan will be giving the world the first look at a device it sounds, from Arrington’s report, like the manufacturer is trying to steal.

A big part of the demo will be Rathakrishnan explaining his side of the story. Obviously that’s going to differ from Arrington’s, but with so much split intellectual property and impending lawsuits, I doubt anything he says will guarantee public access to the device. It’s a shame, too. At $300 or so it was something I would definitely have considered purchasing for casual web browsing.

Source: San Francisco Business Times

Computers, News

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The CrunchPad is dead

November 30, 2009 / Jeff Morgan

Less than a month after claiming the CrunchPad was “steamrolling” toward production, Michael Arrington has pronounced his web tablet dead. Apparently there was a serious fallout with the manufacturer. Serious as in the manufacturer is going to try to sell the device itself. Without Arrington. Potentially under the CrunchPad moniker.

This is about as spectacular as device wars get. You can imagine Arrington is pissed, and bound to be throwing around any lawsuit he can think up. He writes this about the email he received from Fusion Garage, the company set to manufacture the web tablet.

Bizarrely, we were being notified that we were no longer involved with the project. Our project. Chandra said that based on pressure from his shareholders he had decided to move forward and sell the device directly through Fusion Garage, without our involvement.
Err, what? This is the equivalent of Foxconn, who build the iPhone, notifiying Apple a couple of days before launch that they’d be moving ahead and selling the iPhone directly without any involvement from Apple.

The rest of Arrington’s post on the subject is appropriately distressed. I’m still amazed Fusion Garage would try to pull this off, particularly two days before the product was set for a public launch. For more detail on the drama, head over to to TechCrunch and offer Arrington your condolences.

Source: TechCrunch

Digital Media, Mobile, Websites

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Microsoft Tablet Could Sneak Past Apple

September 22, 2009 / Jeff Morgan

Mum’s not always the best word when it comes to gadgets. Sometimes it can be better for companies to leak information little by little to generate a little excitement and anticipation for a product. That’s never really been Apple’s SOP, but they will occasionally announce products way ahead of schedule. With the rumored Apple tablet, though, the company’s been quiet, and Microsoft just might be positioned to take advantage of the silence.

Today Gizmodo leaked the first news of a Microsoft tablet called “Courier.” It’s a dual-touchscreen device that uses a blend of gestures and a stylus for control. The whole thing is built like a notebook, you know, the paper kind, with a camera on the backend. Gizmodo even has a video to make the thing look much cooler than it actually is.

I’m pretty skeptical about the whole situation. First, the Giz article was written under the byline “The Paperboy,” which, if you read Gizmodo, you’ll recognize is not a regular contributor. There’s also the fact that no one else seemed to get the exclusive news + video (also granted, it was shown at the Gizmodo Gallery), and frankly, the video looks too good to be true. Granted, the whole thing is shot around the alluring concept of being a young design professional. The controls are clean, if a little complicated at times, and show plenty of eye-candy, but that’s how almost every device video comes off. As one Giz commenter reminded me, even the HP TouchSmart looked great over video. It turned out to be a terribly limited platform with somewhat clunky controls.

Gizmodo promises more in-depth coverage on the device as the week goes on. I’ll wait to pass more judgment until I see a hands-on. For now, I think Microsoft is doing something really smart here. Nothing like imprinting the way a tablet “should work” into consumers minds to generate buzz. Apple’s device will have to be truly fantastic to get attention after this.