We are officially at the doorstep of the tablet era and we are about to ring the bell and go in. If you haven’t noticed them yet, let me bring them to your attention. These are devices that have smooth, sleek bodies that are unspoiled by a physical keyboard. At the centre of these devices is a gorgeous touchscreen display that acts as both the display and the user interface.
You can draw on them, you can read on them and you can do almost anything that you do on your laptop. These are the modern portable computers that will soon become the next ubiquitous device in the market. Just like you see netbooks everywhere now, they will be present in every hand and will be entertaining a vast demographic of people.
This vision is actually more than a decade old. Back in the days, both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates had envisioned a world without keyboards or mice. A world where people would go back pens and their fingers and use them on slate like devices that have infinite possibilities in every field.
But that did not happen back then because the technology was not in place yet. Fast forward to the present day and you will know that the time is ripe for such devices to start popping up everywhere. And they are.
A new crop of tablet devices is currently under development and they are not your conventional convertible tablets. Conventional tablets are those that are like laptops but have a screen that swings around and folds down to give you a writing surface. The era of these convertibles is on its way out. Now you have devices in the slate form factor.
But these slates, by their very form factor, are extremely limited in the number of choices that they have in terms of components. So they are not the most powerful devices on the planet at the moment. But as time goes by, they are becoming more and more sophisticated, thanks to developments in both hardware and software.
Tablets may not be able to use bulky batteries to prolong life but they now have efficient OS’ like the Google Android to cut down on the battery consumption. At the same time, mobile platforms like the Android have been build from the ground up to run on low resources. But other than performance, they also improve on the user experience.
Before the advent of the Android, tablet makers were few and they were making Windows XP and Windows CE-based tablets. Since these OS’ were never really meant for touch-based use, the devices failed miserably.
Now, we suddenly have a profusion of tablet prototypes and projects that are using Android as their OS of choice. Also, advances made by ARM in terms of power efficient CPUs has really helped the tablets take off. So why are all the exciting ones still months away from production?
That’s because the latest technology is exactly that – latest technology and it will always take its own sweet time to make its way to the consumers. The multitouch interface based tablets that are currently available, like the Archos 5 from Archos, are all products of the development that took place about two years in the past. So they are not very impressive or user friendly.
But the latest ones, like the Vega by ICD (Innovative Convergent Devices) is a glimpse into what the future might hold. There also projects like the Apple Tablet, Microsoft Courier, Acer’s dualscreen ebook reader – that are set to attain fruition sometime soon. Once these explode onto the market, a revolution is more or less assured. So till then, we have to content ourselves with low-tech styluses and glitchy multi-touches.
