Your thoughts are interesting, and not taken as rambling at all... Yet I
personally feel that a well designed and highly portable tablet would fit
my needs for mobile computing much better than a PDA. In fact a powerful
enough slate, that would allow myself to utilize larger programs (such as
statistical and graphical) and polished word processing/spreadsheets would
easily replace my desktop as I almost need to portability of a desktop, and
laptops themselves are still too bulky. Yet, of course, the issue of power
management and durability of the design comes into play (if I have to worry
about getting caught in a rainstorm then the unit is not durable for me).
And, quite, I like your idea of making the tablet, in this case, more
portable by being, say, foldable. Further, then, the PDA to myself becomes
more for notes and smaller tasks, as well as leisure (such as music, books,
and games).
Always,
Sam
> Recent threads both here and on Newton-FR got me thinking about the
> different ways people conceive of portability and what they associate
> with it.
> For one thing, there seems to be two radically different ways to
> understand what PDAs should be. On one hand, there is the paradigm in
> which a PDA should do everything a "normal" computer does with the added
> features related specifically to PDAs such as wireless everything and
> HWR. Then, there's the paradigm where PDAs are mostly useful as basic
> PIM+notes with restricted features. This seems to define part of the
> debates on size issues as people who want like the Newt's screen size
> may relate more to the first paradigm and those who dislike the Newt's
> size tend to respond more to do the second.
> But it seems there's more than size at stake.
> There's something compellingly original in the handheld concept. More
> task-oriented than session-based, maybe? It's not just being able to use
> your computer anywhere, including a crowded Japanese train (I like this
> image) but also having more of a digital slave than a toolbox.
> A friend of mine who's both a researcher in psychology and a design
> freak was telling me that people seem to like doing things with
> computers rather than asking the computer to do things. Maybe this is
> changing or, at least, a new form of computing experience has been
> emerging with the PDA. Old news, maybe, but still interesting.
> Especially in light of the other paradigm of do-it-all PDA.
> After all, if you use your PDA for quick tasks and queries, you don't
> need much in terms of display size and input mechanism. In situations
> where it'd be appropriate (i.e., not during a lecture), a voice-based
> system would work. Apart from the Star Trek references, there's nothing
> specially weird about a cell phone you could ask for movie schedules,
> stock quotes, daily reminders and voice recording.
> But then, if your ideal machine is a Letter/A4-sized touch-screen that
> you can fold and bring in your shirt pocket and still use as your sole
> piece of digital equipment, the task-based paradigm doesn't work.
> In fact, it even reaches the thread on digital music. Apart from the
> convenience vs. quality issue, there's that of different uses. When you
> workout, you most likely want to listen to music with a strong steady
> beat with a fairly homogeneous profile. This is the "quality" of the
> sound you want. If you want High Fidelity reproduction of a classical
> concert, the last thing you want is the homogeneous profile. Most
> classical music really wasn't designed for working out.
> And I don't think PDAs were designed for work sessions. But maybe
> there's a need for an extremely portable workstation.
>
> Sorry for these ramblings.
> Alex, on his fairly portable iBook used as a MacOS X workstation
>
>
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