NEWS: Microsoft's dual-screen booklet shows 'face' on web • The Register

If I could do all the tasks shown there using this (or a similar) gadget while sitting at the kitchen table, or by the fire in my living room, but have the operations actually being carried out (**and captured**) on my MacBook, which is tethered to a large-screen display, external keyboard, etc, in my home office -- that would truly be "insanely great".

It was also leaked about 6 months ago. Nothing happened:

It sure looks nice. However, since it's Zune based (WinCE 6), my guess(tm) is that there will be copious legal limitations and entanglements limiting user installed software, music, user created apps, etc. Meanwhile, I'm still waiting for Microsoft Surface:

and Palladium -> Trustworthy Computing (TwC) -> MSE -> etc:

Yawn.

It is more likely USB OTG than USB device, as it supports the external keyboard (, near the bottom), and the iPad Camera Connection Kit, which allows a camera to be connected to the iPad through USB.

Steve

Maybe not via USB but they aren't stopping Johnson and Johnson from making a glucose meter through the dock connector for the iPhone so that should work for the iPad as well.

Of course in that case, the developer of the device will distribute apps. for free.

I notice there are a number of Cisco and Oracle business apps. as well.

And now there are 2 or 3 makers of IR dongles which allow iPhone to be used as universal remotes, with free apps.

The real question is whether the companies which sell computers to doctors and hospitals will develop for iPad. If doctors seem interested in the product (for uses not just limited to their work), they may see an opportunity.

There was a review of a Lenovo Ideapad "netvertible" this week by some blogs. It's about $500-600 and it features a twist around screen as well as being able to go to a clamshell form factor.

Performance was said to be bad and battery life was under 4 hours.

Most of the people who've had hands-on time back in January said the iPad was fast. Of course, it's not trying to run things like Photoshop but on a 10-inch screen, maybe it's not the best idea.

Good idea. Too bad Apple didn't include an SD card slot or USB jack to install one externally. (Drivel: This kinda reminds me of the NeXT Cube, which in 1989 didn't have a floppy disk drive.) I'm not sure what is the politically correct method of loading photos on the iPad, but if it's like the iPod Touch, your friend is going to have to do it with iTunes or one of an assortment of utilities. I use Pod To PC: ($20) (???) An SD card slot would have been soooooo much easier. However, you can store an awfully large number of photos in 16, 32, or 64GBytes of flash RAM in the iPad.

The iPad is scheduled for release April 3. Let's see if Apple pulls off another iPhone style release and gouges the early adopters.

Flash runs very well under OS X of course, it has too, or OS X would have long since disappeared. It's banned from other Apple devices for reasons I don't understand.

Adobe have some very tasty open-source (and free) software these days too. Flex 4 (Gumbo) is fun -- develop serious Flash "apps" with emacs and mxml. Flash isn't going to go away because iSteve is "taking a stand" or some such nonsense. Same with Winders, for that matter.

Truer (and sadder) words were never posted.

Some clues and guesses:

I prefer a conspiracy theory. Apple and Adobe were good friends when the Apple standard for printing was Postscript. Because of generallly high license costs, Apple did everything it could to replace Postscript including licensing Microsoft TrueImage (in trade for TrueType a big investment from Micosoft in Apple). TrueImage turned out to be a total loser and Apple never did anything with it. Eventually they gave up and licensed Postscript. The pissing match restarted when Apple didn't like the price for Display Postscript and hacked together Quickdraw as a replacement.

When Jobs left Apple to found NeXT, he did the basic work on hammering Display Postscript into a workable system, only to have Adobe sell it to many other Unix workstation manufacturers. He was not thrilled.

That was 20 years ago. Whether Jobs still holds a personal grudge against Adobe or its founders is subject to debate. Considering the rocky relationship, and the perptual attempts to dump Adobe products, my guess is that there's something going on at high levels. Probably someone at Adobe stole Steve's parking place.

Cheap is a relative term. I'm waiting for those picture frames to break the $14.95 mark, then I'm jumping in.

Apple lost their way.

Once upon a time they were streets ahead of the PC world, and for a while they held a niche where better graphics were required. Also the Motorola based architecture didn't have the limitations that the earlier Intel based architecture did. Remember the days of 640K max memory and the third party software to make the most of it? It was also more intuitive than Windows.

Really? Why would Apple lie about why an Adobe product sucks? Surely the truth is worse than the lie they made up [and I assume Apple want this to look like Adobe's fault here]?

This one actually makes some small sense:

They also have the trademark infringements to work out. There are two other computer-based "iPad" trademarks already. It won't be as easy to wiggle out of them as they did with with "iPhone".

I happen to have an iPad. That's what I wrote on it some time back before his unit was even a gleam in his eye. It's a bit hard to back up (I have to go to Kinko's), but it doesn't get viruses and it's easy to expand the memory. Sells for $1.59 at any corner store or gas station.

Yep. Also, the clone makers are suing and using the publicity for their benefit:

Cute. Even Etch-a-Sketch has a iPad clone called "Magic Pad":

Could you elaborate on that a bit? In what ways, exactly, is OSX becoming "stagnant" compared to Windows 7?

How would a computer become "obsolete" if it used a CPU other than Intel?

Who ARE these people you mention? I know dozens of Mac users (all quite computer literate, thank you), who all seem to have a pretty level attitude about computing in general (many are Unix geeks). I never hear any of that sort of stuff from them. On the contrary, we knew about the upcoming Intel shift over a year before it was announced. It was common knowledge that Apple was maintaining an x86 build of all versions of OSX since the beginning.

You hang out in some weird circles, since all the Mac users I know of (including myself) routinely operate with multiple platforms and have a pretty good handle on what's going on in the industry. Hell, I'm in the process of shutting down my last Mac server (and moving its services to a Ubuntu server).

We use Macs because we like them for use to which they are put. I wonder if all this rabid "Steve Jobs worship" doesn't spring from your imagination.