Form over Function

167 days, 23 hours, 6 minutes and 3 seconds
until my Churchill Trip - 11th May - 13th July 2012
Perth>SF>Seattle>Austin>NY>Boston>London> Heidelberg >Salzburg>Vienna>Singapore>Perth 

The debate at the moment I believe is over form rather than function when it comes to tablet technology. People are getting caught up in the hype of the marketing and not considering function and fit for purpose. 


Over the last year there has been many different tablet and net-book and now the ultra-books hitting the market. All with their many offerings, but when it gets down to it what are we looking for? What I see is many people are just adding another device to their stack. Another way to consume their own and others content. In fact I have an Android table which got a lot of praise and damnation, that being the "Notion Ink Adam".

As I said on the Notion Ink forum at the time when I purchased the tablet, it was innovative and was leading in a direction that many tablets did not. It was different and it took the mobility aspect to a new hight utilising the Pixel Qi display technology. Many of the tablets in the market place all claim to be capable in the mobile space but take them into the bright light as see what you can see. The adam goes from a back light device to liquid paper screen. In bright light I can continue to use the device where ever I am. 


Camera, big thing with a lot of devices, one on the front and one on the back, the adam came up with a rotating camera so you only needed one. There are many little components of this device which I believe that were thinking outside of the box. Yes, there are issues and these were outside of the companies control, but the open source community came to the assistance and many different ROM's have now be developed which address a majority of issues the users paid.


It was very exciting when purchasing as it was done online and at a set hour in the day. There were hundreds online at 2am in the morning in Australia and around the world waiting to buy. I have not seen anything like it other than with Apple, but this company was not Apple it was a small company in India. There are still things to be sorted out with the device but I am still a very proud owner of a new innovative product. But this is not the issue of this posting.


The issue is Form over Function, many of the organisations I seen are jumping on the Apple bandwagon to get their iPad. Don't get me wrong I am not an Apple basher, I like the product. I have been a proud iPod user for years, my daughter and wife use MAC laptops and my daughter is about to get an iPad. For what they are used for they are fantastic, easy to use and able to consume a lot of different media. But what I am looking for in a portable tablet device is something that will provide me mobility but when I as sitting at my desk provide the necessary capabilities to replace my desktop. If the tablet has 3G capabilities then replace my phone. If I am going to be totally mobile then give me the tool to do the work.


I have to laugh when I see people showing off there mobile device and then the phone goes off. The next the next thing they need to get at their desktop to carry out further work. Then when they head off they pack the laptop as well. The portable and mobile concept just looks like it is adding something else to carry. 


But there is another slate coming out which I believe is starting to head in the right direction. Not only is it a capable device but I believe it is heading in the right direction to become a desktop replacement as well. That is the Samsung PC Series 7 Slate. I has the power of an i5 CPU, 4Gb of RAM and 64 Gb of solid state drive and is only 13 mm think, front and rear cameras and with the docking station provides the ability to connect to a large screen when sitting at a desk and also comes with a nice blue tooth keyboard. With this device you have mobility and a real desktop replacement which can connect to the network via the Gigabit Ethernet connection in the docking station. 


But one of the best parts and the part that really gets me excited about this technology is that it has a WACOM pen device. Using the pen which works exactly as like a real pen and you can lean on the device while writing. The other part that many people don't realise is that in Windows when you use the pen device, in an application like One Notes or any of the window product you can actually search your writing. Try that on any other device and you wont have such success or the ability to lean on the device while writing. The WACOM technology is something worth having.


This is the technology which will be worth watching.