With the iPad launch upon us I feel the need, finally, to expound on my thoughts and ideas about it. For those of you who know me you will know I value Apples usability and quality of product but at the same time their increasingly restrictive ecosystem is kind of scary. The end result is that I equally desire and yet shun Apple and their products. It saddens me that such an innovative company in the area of usability and quality in their products is also such a capitalist pig that it goes to lengths to create lock in for the express purpose of milking every last dime from it’s customers. It seems to me that a great product at a great value would go even further than their great product designed to stick it to your pocket book. This is why Android is gaining ground so rapidly. Apple continues its trend of tyrannical product lock in with this new, innovative, iPad device.
It seems few people are paying attention to the tidal wave of tablets that are about to hit the market. Most note-ably is a pair of devices coming from
Asus. Both presumably on the same or similar hardware to one another but one running Windows 7 and the other running Android. If you own any other mobile devices besides an iPhone then these are really going to be the devices to look for. While the features that make a tablet unique are pretty obvious what is less obvious is interactivity with your other devices. Imagine having all your contacts, e-mail, documents and browsing experience being identical across all your devices. Apple has all ready drawn the line between their mobile platform and desktop platform. While they are similar they will never be the same and there will be a disconnect of sorts in that respect. However Google is poised to unleash true standardized cross platform experience as Android finds its way from phone to tablet to netbook and finally desktop. The standardized experience will continue on to the desktop via Google’s Chromium OS. All this sameness gets tied together by the “cloud” so that a change on the phone is reflected every where else. Truly transparent cross device computing.
Mark my words Google has something truly useful going far beyond the neat sparklies that Apple is currently dangling in front of the short sited masses.
Last week my router was fried by my lovely cable company who can’t be bothered to ground their cables. The power surge came in not on the power line but on the network line. This also took down my PCs NIC as well. The NIC is inconsequential really. This forced me in to a tough decision. Do I go with another Asus router like the two prior? I LOVE Asus routers. Not only does their stock firmware come with virtually any option a moderately well seasoned IT vet could want but they also feature a wealth of tools that make one click jobs out of otherwise complicated time consuming tasks like trying to setup QOS. The catch is that the competition has been working on upping their game with routers like the Nighthawk and the WRT1900AC.
BrockHatfield.com 