2011/01/29

Windows 7 Tablet - 7 reasons it sucks (and a few why it's good)

I had a brief opportunity to experience one of the latest generation of Windows 7 tablet devices on Friday and here are my views of it.

In brief - Windows 7 is not designed for a touch device and it makes for an awful user experience just putting a desktop operating system into a touch device.

The device I had time with is brand new RM tablet. First impression seeing it in someone else's hands at a few paces was positive. It has an immediately obvious difference to an iPad - a much wider form factor. One of the criticisms of the iPad for consuming content is that it's form factor doesn't conform to wide screen movie aspect ratios.


Once held, the RM tablet feels weighty, but not overly heavier feeling than an iPad. The stats show it is something like 30% heavier, but I think partially because of the different form factor, this isn't drastically obvious even when holding one of each in both hands.

The material of the case is nice to hold with a warm rubberiness that feels sure in the hand. Where with an iPad I was immediately glad I'd bought the Apple case as it felt very slippery without it, this RM tablet felt quite sure to hold - evidenced by how I felt confident holding someone else's device in one hand while flipping it over to photograph the reverse :)



So, with so many positives already in this review, why is the title of this post so negative? Well, once Windows loads and you start trying to use it, is when the problems really start.

Reason Windows Tablets Suck 1: Where are the apps?
By this I mean that the user interface metaphor of the desktop works for large screens where organising your documents is the focus of your activity. Mobile devices tend not to work that way. They have much less storage and you are much less likely to be doing a lot of work on a document.

Instead, mobile devices need to be task oriented, making switching from one task to the next (or between tasks quickly), as simple, quick and intuitive as possible.


Now, Windows 7 does include the task bar at the bottom, which is certainly useful, but notice that by default, despite Office having been installed, the icons to launch the various apps have not been added to the task bar. Instead, apps like Adobe Acrobat tend to add their icons to the desktop, which would be OK if that was the place to find and launch your apps, but it isn't. Microsoft has retained the Start button metaphor as the default place to find applications and to initiate all other tasks, but this mixed metaphor means that sometimes the place to launch your app will be on the task bar, sometimes it will be easiest to hide any running apps and use the desktop, and for probably the majority of things, you'll need to open the start menu and navigate a hierarchy of folders with small fiddly icons (compared to the size of your finger) and eventually after 4 or 5 taps and swipes you'll have launched the app you wanted.

...and don't even get me started on the apps that are running but "appear" (meaning hidden behind a tiny little arrow you have to tap to show them) in the system tray.

The iPad isn't ideal for this I know, but at least it is fairly consistent, and the use of a dedicated button (home) to either click or double click (now we have "multitasking" in iOS) removes any need to stop and think "where is my app?"

Reason Windows Tablets Suck 2: Where did all my screen space go?

Not only is Windows designed for large screens, but so are the apps it ships with, and so are most 3rd party apps. As an example, this shot shows Paint running as default on the RM Tablet. The use of a title bar on the window eats some space, the ever present task bar eats more, the menu tab takes more still, the status bar takes it's share, and finally the ribbon (with nice big finger stabbing friendly icons at least) eats a huge chunk.

After all that detritus on screen, the actual visible working space is only about half the size of the screen! Now I know, the ribbon can be minimised, so can the task bar, and the status bar can be turned off, but the point is that apps are not designed out of the box at least, for this form factor or user interaction mechanism.

This isn't insurmountable as apps can be written specifically for this device type, or could sense the device type and adjust it's behaviour accordingly - but will this happen? In terms of volume, Windows Tablets are a tiny share of the Windows market and so I expect most programmer will only design for the majority market - desktops, and the interface choices that work for a desktop are almost entirely inappropriate for a small form factor touch based device.

Reason Windows Tablets Suck 3: I have 10 fingers, not just 2
As the screen shot above also shows with Paint, it seems this device (the OS?) only supports the use of 2 fingers concurrently in screen at a time. Now, often, apps only require the use of one finger at a time - two when you start pinching and zooming, but many apps on the iPad allow the use of many more fingers concurrently for more complex interactions. If the hardware or OS only copes with 2 fingers at a time, the applications ability to provide a rich intuitive user interaction are much more limited.

Reason Windows Tablets Suck 4: Even the bits designed for tablets fail to work well
Microsoft decided that tablets were the next big thing many years before rumours of Apple working on the iPad even started, so how come I'm saying they still haven't got things right?

Well, the big difference between the tablets Microsoft designed Windows for and the current new devices is touch instead of a stylus. The tablets that use a stylus were a flop - I know, I had use of a few way back when and they were too heavy, too hungry on battery charge and too clumsy to hold in one hand and use the stylus with the other. By contrast, the iPad is easy to hold and use at the same time, it is positively frugal in it's use of power (in comparison to the earlier tablets) and "just works".

So surely, Microsoft will have re-examined all the user interface elements to make them more suitable for the less precise input of fingers rather than a stylus? To put it bluntly, no.


Getting the onscreen keyboard right for example is vital as that is likely to be something the user is required to use a lot, so what have Microsoft done to make it touch rather than stylus friendly? Well, not a lot as far as I can see. The OS and built in apps at least do tend to recognise when the cursor enters a field where the user might like to type something and it pops up a little keyboard button which when clicked opens the full thing, but this button tends to pop up in different places each time as it is relative to the cursor position in the text box, and things only get worse once the on screen keyboard appears.

The default size of the keyboard is fairly small. It can be resized and moved around the screen but resizing is awkward as it needs a fairly accurate tap on the edges, and because it floats over the top of the running apps (rather than "shoving them out of the way" which the iPad does) it hides a lot of the screen, which more often than not I found included the space I was trying to type in!


Worse than that, compared to the trimmed down keyboard Apple have designed for the iPad, Microsoft have thrown the kitchen sink at the number of keys it puts on screen at once. This better matches a physical keyboard and does allow direct access to more symbols than on the iPad, but this isn't a real keyboard and you tend to need those symbols a lot less often than the letters of the alphabet and number so it's a reasonable compromise to keep them out of the way unless you do need them.

In addition, Apple on the iPad have actually implemented 3 (or more?) different keyboards which appear depending on the context of what you are typing - so for example, when typing in a web address, the keyboard includes a key for typing ".com" with one key press. Microsoft haven't included any of this context sensitive nature into their onscreen keyboard.

What absolutely infuriated me within minutes though was that when launching IE, if I started trying to type a URL straight away, once the default home page loaded, the content of the address bar was refreshed, losing anything I had already typed and completely scrambling what I typed next by putting it somewhere in the middle of the address it put in. Again, this could be improved by changing the default home page to blank, but why should I have to customise a device to stop me wanting to throw it out of the window? (is that why Microsoft call their OS Windows? ;)

Reason Windows Tablets Suck 5: Even the basics go wrong

One thing that made the iPhone and later the iPod touch and iPad "magical" was the way it automatically rotated the display to match whatever way you hold the thing. Well, this RM tablet does that too...except you have to wait a second or so before it realises it needs to do anything, and then instead of smoothly animating the rotation, the screen worryingly goes completely blank before reappearing a noter second or so later - and then the apps running often take a little while to readjust themselves to the new size they need to be, and the on screen keyboard just sits dumbly wherever it was before, meaning you have to manually move it to a new more suitable location on screen.

Once you've done all that, you might expect to be able to hold it any type with your thumbs as you can with the iPad, but the keyboard clutter is even more apparent at this size and typing becomes even more of a chore. A pity as the wide screen aspect ratio actually gives a more usable amount of working screen space in portrait instead of landscape, although notice how the ribbon in Word has compressed itself a lot so that many more functions now need multiple taps to get at them. Again, this changing user experience just from rotating the device makes it much less intuitive.

Reason Windows Tablets Suck 6: Tiny interface elements

I've said it before so this might be counting the same fault many times, but Windows is designed for an interface that allows precise activation of its user interface elements. Microsoft do allow the DPI setting of Windows to be adjusted to make everything bigger - I tried this on the RM Tablet and it helps, but makes the impact on workable space on screen much worse too. You can also selectively resize some of the UI elements, which Acer do on the touch screen desktop and laptop we've had in the office recently.

Other apps tend not to work well with a change in DPI in Windows and even less provide a way to tweak the size of the buttons they use to make them suitable for a touch interface. Take the included calculator app in Windows as an example. Even with the DPI set to 125%, because the app is actually designed to be usable on screen alongside other apps, it is positively tiny on this touch device, with the buttons much smaller than my finger tip. I could still often get the right buttons, but if I were typing a column of numbers in, I wouldn't feel any confidence I could do that accurately without taking great care, and losing patience.

Reason Windows Tablets Doesn't Suck 1:Media Centre

One application I feel Microsoft has (inadvertently) got right for touch is Media Centre. They have designed this for Nettop PCs that plug into a TV and tend to have quite an inaccurate pointing device to select options. As a result, the way it takes over the whole screen and provides nice big buttons to select things works on a touch device quite nicely.

In addition, as I mentioned earlier, the wide screen form factor of the RM Tablet does lend itself to watching HD video in it's native widescreen format using the whole screen to the full. As a result, even just quickly running the sample HD video that ships with Windows 7, it's apparent that this would be one area that Windows devices might eclipse the iPad.

Reason Windows Tablets Doesn't Suck 2: It's Windows - just like my desktop/laptop
This I think is the key positive for Windows based touch devices. The same apps can be run as on someone's desktop, with the same file types, the same rendering of pages, it can network with other Windows devices for sharing files and it doesn't need any effort searching for an app that does the same as you are used to using on the desktop - you can just use the same app - paid for again if needed of course.

...and that last point is actually my last Reason Windows Tablets DO suck 7: who wants to pay desktop prices for apps on a touch device?
One of the joys of using the iPad is that the apps cost peanuts compared to buying fully fledged desktop Windows programs. Many cost nothing (ad supported sometimes), or often only 0.59p in the UK. An "expensive" iPad app tends to still be less than £10, for instance the "MS Office like" Pages/Numbers and Keynote are each only £9.99, meaning you can have a practically complete office suite for less than £30. Compare that to the cost of adding even the cheapest version of MS Office to a Windows Tablet device.

Summary:
Is there a place for a Windows Tablet in my life? No. It would drive me crazy in no time and I can already do almost everything I need for work and personal computing on my iPad.

Would I get one if I didn't already have an iPad - more difficult, but I would still opt for an iPad. Despite its own many foibles and compromises, the iPad "just works" and can do almost everything I need of a device - assuming I have access to a Windows device I can remote desktop to if needed :)

Can I see a place for it for some people? Yes. If the most important thing for you is application and file compatibility with other people running Windows, then the huge compromise in usability is probably worth it.

So there you go. Which would you get and why?

- Posted using BlogPress from mobile device

2011/01/15

Almost a year on - reflections on the iPad

With rumours of the iPad 2 growing daily, I thought it timely to reflect on the impact of the iPad almost a year after it was first announced.

Meeting the hype?:
In many ways, I feel the iPad has exceeded its hype in practice. It was introduced as a game changer, and the rush of copy cat devices already on the market and the flood of others expected in 2011 I think shows it really has introduced the tablet form factor to the mass market and stimulated demand for a form factor that had been tried many times before but always to luke warm reception.

Why has Apple found a way to make this form factor work when others before had failed? Well, I think it's because they approached it backwards. Rather than seeing it as a scaled down laptop or desktop, the iPad was created as a scaled up mobile device. Apple did well initially with the UI of the iPhone, but they also had a few years experience of refining the design before looking to scale the form factor up. I'm sure everyone remembers how they were criticised initially for "forgetting" about simple things such as copy and paste with the iPhone - well, such omissions would have been unforgivable with a device the size and utility of the iPad where as it was just about accepted with the iPhone as less was expected to be done with it.

By all accounts, that period of evolution and development of the UI had the iPad in mind all along. According to one blog I read, Steve Jobs had the iPad form factor in mind when the iPhone was designed and the iPhone was a deliberate step to get the design improved and wait for the technology to be ready before launching the iPad. True or not, I certainly feel the detour via the smart phone has served the iPad UI well and is really why Apple have delivered a device that has captured the imagination where others failed.

Only good for content consumption?:
Early after the launch, most (including me) expressed the view that the iPad was all about content consumption rather than creation. I have to admit that this hasn't proven the case though. Yes, the iPad is excellent for consuming content, but thanks to the plethora of excellent apps that have emerged to exploit its strengths, it is also now an excellent content creation tool. The fact that I'm writing this using the iPad Blogpress app is testament to that :)

For me, the unexpected area that the iPad has excelled at is photo editing. Sure, there is no substitute for Photoshop/Lightroom on a "real" computer on a big monitor, but the intuitive manipulation of images for scaling, cropping has made the iPad my weapon of choice for initial image viewing as it allows me to quickly and naturally manipulate images as if they were physical prints - even better in many ways. The addition of apps like TouchRetouch which performs a basic version of the content aware fill/deletion and colour manipulation apps like ColorSplash and CinemaFX provide for immediate and relatively competent editing on the device.

I also find the iPad an excellent device to show off my photos to other people. The natural interface allows it to be passed around a group of people without having to explain how to manipulate the interface. The excellent screen makes the images look good and the ability to plug it into the 50" flat screen TV to really show them off to family and friends all work well. OK, I may be guilty of inflicting my photos on people like going back to the old stereotype of projector slide shows of years past, but at least with this technology, you can quickly skip through to the best images and read your audience better than having to switch all the lights off and have them doze off in the dark ;)

With creative apps for audio/music, video editing, blogging, databases AND mind mapping among many others, I now find myself only rarely feeling "hmm, I need a real computer for this". Even then, the remote desktop app usually leads me to use the iPad as the interface while using apps on a PC.

Security:
OK, firstly, no computer connected to the Internet is ever going to be 100% secure, but the iPad (any iOS device) isn't doing badly at resisting exploits. From the ground up, Apple have employed just about every type of security best practice, and for the most part their efforts seem to be paying off. Famous last words perhaps :)

This emphasis on security isn't without its drawbacks however. Because each app lives in its own walled garden, its taken some time for apps to be able to interoperate on files. Apple have now introduced a mechanism to "open this file in another app" which has helped a lot, but for the most part, apps need to rely on off device storage in the cloud to be able to interact.

Which leads me to another point...

Do we need the 3G version?:
Early on, I hadn't intended to get the 3G version as the pattern of use I expected would have been in areas almost always with WiFi coverage. I opted for the 3G version in the end as a "just in case" decision, and I am so glad I did.

Within a few days, I found myself using the iPad in a cafe and needing the 3G to be able to access almost anything useful.

What I realised is that this device had forced a paradigm shift on me - embracing the cloud for almost everything. This requires of course an "always connected" device to be practical.

This could be achieved using a MiFi or other tethered 3G => wifi smartphone type solution, but I prefer the single device elegance possible with the 3G version of the iPad (although the single point of failure does concern me).

I now feel that without buying in to this shift to the cloud, it's almost impossible to get the best from the iPad and I suspect this will be the case for any similar form factor device. Perhaps the abundance and ubiquity of such services is another reason why the time was right for the iPad where other devices had failed before?

So what are the issues?:
While I'm certainly an advocate for the iPad having been won over to the UI by having an iPhone first, I'm not blinded to it's many remaining short falls.

The lack of a standard USB port to be able to transfer files (or extend the storage) is a real pain. I suspect this will be one shortfall that will remain unsolved with the iPad 2 though despite much speculation to the contrary. The reason I think this is because Apple apply a premium to the larger storage capacity devices they sell, and allowing users to buy the lower spec device and then increase the storage using someone else's hardware would be anathema to their marketing ethos. I hope I'm wrong though.

No camera. While I doubt I'd ever want to use a device the size of an iPad as a camera, there are lots of apps which would benefit from having a built in camera. Augmented reality apps, google goggles, video conference (facetime) and document capture/scanning are all applications I can see immediate benefits for but there are undoubtedly many other doors this addition could open. The low cost/impact of adding this hardware to the design means this is something I'm certain (ish) to be in the iPad v2.

Screen issues. The screen on the iPad v1 is already very good, but it could be better. The aliphatic (?) coating on the screen makes removing smudges fairly easy, but it does get a lot of smudges from finger grease in the first place. I understand from some rumours that Apple have improved this coating and this would certainly be welcome.

The screen is also very bright and clear, but the introduction of the retina display in the iPhone 4 has shown that it could be even better. I'm probably 50/50 on if a retina screen will be included in an iPad v2 as it comes down to cost. Its not a "must have" upgrade, but if the cost is manageable, it probably will be included as it would look great on marketing materials for when compared with the competition. Personally, I'd rather see an improvement to make the screen more readable in direct sunlight and/or a move to thinner and lighter OLED technology (even better would be to make the whole form factor flexible to make it more pocket friendly, but I suspect that is 3-4 years away at least still)

Summary:
The landscape for the future of mobile computing certainly looks very different at the start of 2011 compared to 2010 thanks largely to the success of the iPad.

- Posted using BlogPress from mobile device

2011/01/11

Quick and dirty quiz tool

I just came across a nice simple little quiz creation/hosting site that offers a basic but useful tool that could be worth remembering.

It's called Quiz Revolution and below, I've knocked together a very simple test to show the sort of thing it can do. To really shine, it would need video or images creating rather than the plain text I've put in, but it gives a little flavour of what it's like:



I particularly like it's emphasis on a small little form factor, locked to 380x400 pixels (although with a choice of a couple of looks), suitable for embedding in other things, such as this blog post.

(I just hope it works posted here as I'm writing this on the iPad quickly and can't check it first)

- Posted using BlogPress from mobile device