Category Archives: Ranting

The Super Tablet

With the embargo off on the Microsoft Surface Pro, we see where we’re going in the next 5 years: the convergence of a newly carved category of machines.

It’s one thing to see Jobs’s iPad as a game changer, but it’s also valid to see that it is a stepping stone towards the perfect device. The perfect device that I want, anyway, since 10 years ago.

It’s small and light, runs for at least a whole day, supports touch interface, can be an data organizing appliance (eg e-book, e-paper, media viewer, camera, etc), can be a competent word processing / desktop tool, can play games, and run all my applications.

It’s okay, I don’t need to make phone calls with it. Ubiquitous internet is nice though.

The Surface Pro is actually the first “tablet” that brings all of that together; it’s not the first to be able to do them or the first designed to do it, but it’s the first to point towards “hey, it looks like this, now you just need to improve my shortcomings.” The wacom digitizer and the gorgeous screen are important elements for productivity  The full-bore Windows OS allows for the rest. We can look at the reviews and note that the weight and battery life are two major drawbacks, but those two are often at mercy of  the impending march of technological progress. It will be soon that we’ll get the same plus those two in a lighter, thinner package, Intel willing.

Discrete or SOC style GPU boost is another story altogether. It’s only now that “ultrabooks” are getting good discrete solutions. Although the jump from a intel-powered tablet and an ultrabook is hardly epic, it’s a real challenge versus battery life and design for thinness. We’ll see.

I give it 5 years.

On Big Ten, Rutgers & Maryland

First a little bit about me. The very first “real” football game I attended was a game in the ’90s when my dad got some free RU tix. Curiously, as Chinese immigrants, from the outside looking in, the two dudes partook a long-time, heartland America tradition: NCAA Division I Football. Army at Rutgers. This was before the High Point stadium was built, so we were playing even closer to where we lived. I think I was maybe a Freshman in high school. Of course, this is before the Schiano era as well, and the now-athletics director Pernetti probably was just a small-time mid-level manager. Rutgers was just having its butt handed to them in the Big East, which it joined not all that long ago at the time. It was a chilly November day and as usual, RU got its butt handed to them. I remember more fondly when Army’s canon went off, and seeing the red knight rode on the field.

To all those OSU dudes planning a trip to central NJ: You know that Avengers movie? You want shawarma that’s actually good? New Brunswick has it (now). But that’s another 10 minutes from the stadium w/o traffic, and the traffic going into NB sucks. Probably triply so right after a game. And forget about parking!

Star Ledger sports writer Steve Politi has it. Not only an answer to Nate Super-Oracle Silver’s Google-search fueled inquiry (actually the numbers speak for themselves, RU is a perfectly fine pickup and fits the B1G profile), but points out the obvious: times are a-changing. I even bothered reading some of what those mid-western columnists had to say about the dilution of the Big Ten.

Well, maybe it is political. Because this is a change you all should believe in. Not only in terms of the obvious–RU is a real academic powerhouse (when’s the last time Maryland turned down an offer to join the Ivy League?). There are a lot of good arguments to keeping the Big Ten the way it has been but since it ceased to be the Big Ten with Penn State, why bother? If the possibly enigmatic Big Ten commissioner wants to expand to the east, how is that a bad thing? The worst piece I read came from some newspaper which argued that this isn’t good for the games. Hello? RU is 3-0 against B1G opponents, right? And it’s not like they play them every year. The part that makes it the “worst” is how it then complains how college football is not a religion to some of us like how it is to the stereotypical mid-west demographic. How is this “part of the game” now? More like part of the meta-game, yeah?

There are plenty of Buckeye fans that I want to go with to see that inevitable game, and most of them lives on the East Coast. It would be p. chill.

On iPad Mini

People say now the MBAs has taken over Apple at the wake of this announcement, etc. If you don’t know why they’re releasing a mini tablet, you are blind and/or a fanboy. Put it this way: one size never fits all. It’s as true as Moore’s law. It’s why there are 2 iMacs, or 2 Macbook Pros. And why shouldn’t there be 2 (or more?) iPad size factors? I welcome Apple’s new move, it’s more progressive, more demographic, it offers choice with the minimum compromise. It has a reasonable price point for what you get, too. If Apple is serious about dominating the tablet space, they have to release multiple form factors.

The problem is, actually, if you compare the Mini with, say, the Amazon Kindle Fire HD. The Fire HD is a terrible machine overall, but for certain specific applications, nobody does better. One of these is watching/consuming media: reading and watching videos. Both of my parents bought tablets in the past 12 months. Mom got the original Fire, and Dad got the Nexus 7. Dad uses his mostly to browse websites like Craigslist, Mom uses hers for Chinese/Korean/Japanese soaps. Now that I know what they use these things for, I would not hesitate to get mom the Fire HD if she wants another one for Christmas, or an iPad for dad. The only real advantage for the iPad mini for Mom (and it would be the one to get since she has a history of RSI/carpal tunnel), is that she can ask one of her Apple fashionista friends to do tech support, and not me. I think Dad doesn’t want an iPad because that contrarian streak is part of the family DNA and nobody wants an iOS device as everyone has one, plus Android tabs are better deals. Well, a refurbed iPad 3rd generation is a great deal now.

For the record, I’m very much ecosystem neutral. I evaluate based on merit. Mostly. I’m glad I dodged the bullet on the 13″ Macbook Pro w/ Retina. If it had a 650M I would have had to sell my 15″ and trade it in.

The other concern about fragmentation (as in, Apple is fragging more of their ecosystem) is valid, but ultimately near-sighted. With Android, it’s a good case study on how fragmentation impacts user uptake and developer uptake. I think ultimately we have to recognize that fragmentation is the future. There’s no way around it. You might as well bite the bullet early. Apple definitely has a big head start by not fragmenting their ecosystem, but the time will come when they have to (to grow marketshare with more devices, to differentiate their existing product lines, etc). Well, they already did with the iPad. It’s not a stretch to do it again, as soon it will be a reality for all devs in this space.

Walled gardening and world-wide messaging

Something to think about.

I think Google’s got this down. Their “walled” garden is not an ecosystem. Their ecosystem is the moat. OTOH, cross-platform messaging by necessity has to be cross-platform. For the sake of sales, Apple opened gates to work on hardware other than theirs. But will they open their messaging portals too?

If you think about the value of feature-rich messaging (think BBM) that is ubiquitous, they’re all just side-level value-adds. Think of it like iterative iOS improvements, like iOS6’s panoramic photo capabilities. Stuff you can live without but it’s nice to have, or a small app purchase away from having. For the most part, if we look at cross-platform messaging by technology and break it down, there are just these few layers:

1. IP (everything that requires an IP to connect to a server or something, which would include BBM and others like it, and even twitter.)

2. SMS/MMS

3. SMS/MMS to/from IP

By jabber-style, I’ll be super vague and include this as any sort of IP based messaging: facebook, BBM, iMessaging, AIM, gtalk, twitter, IRC, what have you.

FB, AIM and Twitter are already platforms that supports this. New generation social networks trumps AIM and other older gen networks for greater features and more flexible, better driven use cases. But for pure messaging they are probably on par (twitter at a short distance behind the pack, maybe). Group messaging is still something many messaging clients don’t get right. It’s partly what drives many to twitter and their ilk, I’m thinking.

The problem with Apple’s ubiquitious nature is how the iMessage application works over SMS, similar to Google Voice as integrated by Sprint. The added benefit of having that baked into the default text app is wondrous and multitude, except this rarely happens outside of the iOS garden–more importantly, all of this is only interesting because it is just a IP over SMS kind of a thing.

But it’s just an walled garden extension of SMS. It’s not a replacement that is built on top of it, like Whatsapp or GV/Gtalk/Gmail. So there you have it.

XKCD

Someone on my twitter says something to the extent that XKCD would be pretty okay if it just chop off the 4th panel for every strip. I’m partial to that idea.

Because why play xkcd when you can play Terraria?