The Faulty iMac Saga, Chapter 5: The Moment of Truth

Posted by alect on February 11th, 2010 in RSS Feed and has No Comments

The iMac’s notorious flickering problem has been solved through a firmware update. And after a few weeks’ hiatus, Apple has continued shipping 27-inch iMacs. This may be it.

Can You Safely Buy a New iMac Yet?

Nope, but you might be able to next week.

Why?

There are two noted problems with iMacs—the 27-inch models in particular. First is an issue where their screens flicker. Apple released a firmware update for the problem, but it didn’t seem to fix it. However, the second firmware update looks to have been more successful. How successful?

Combing through about 30 pages of this thread (thanks Kyle), dozens have found the second update successful—and similar threads have come to similar conclusions. A few outliers still exist, but the vast consensus seems to be that the issue is nullified when the update is properly installed.

So it looks like the flickering problem is fixed for most users. This is great news—a huge breakthrough in this whole saga. If your iMac is still flickering after the update, call up Apple and demand new hardware. It finally seems safe to say, you’re probably in the minority.

But the existing, huge question mark is regarding the yellow screens. Are these fixed yet? Apple halted production lines in what we assumed as an attempt to solve the yellow screen problems (among other iMac quirks). Now they’re shipping new 27-inch iMacs again.

Theoretically, the yellow screens could be behind us. But until customers actually receive and test these iMacs, we don’t know if Apple was able to solve whatever problems are going on.

Apple most certainly hasn’t made claims either way.

What Ever Happened With Those Apple Pay-outs

We received reports from the UK, and then the US, that Apple was essentially buying back faulty iMacs for 15% over the sticker price. It was until later, however, that we learned the catch. What once looked like a pretty great deal turned out, well, mediocre. The 15% was a flat payback rate that was meant to cover both tax and shipping. We assume it covered purchasing expenses, but a money hand-out it was not. It’s also worth mentioning that this deal was handed out sporadically, and I’m not sure it’s still being offered to customers at all.

Quote of the Week

“[Apple] said they can issue me a refund via check that’ll come 4-6 weeks. That’s nearly $2600 of my money they’re going to hold for over 2 months since the day I paid for this messed up computer.”

Apple Is All In

So this is it, the big moment of truth. Without official word, we are forced to interpret the delivery freezes as both a silent admission that there were problems with iMacs and an attempt to fix them. But who knows if Apple actually solved the yellow screens. Especially if the source of the issue is really in the LG panel itself—which some suspect given similar complaints with similar Dell monitors—it’s possible that Apple can’t cure the jaundice without raising hell down at the factory, or shopping for another supplier. (This problem shouldn’t be the consumer’s inconvenience, of course.) We won’t know until we see the latest iMacs in the wild.

We’ve got a lot of sources—retail/repair spies, plenty of tipsters who are on their third or fourth faulty iMac and, of course, all of you—just waiting to share their replacement experiences. Tip us at submissions@gizmodo.com and join in.

Apple, I hope we can put these problems behind us because neither of us wants to see how bad that apple on the table can rot.

This Week’s Best iPhone Apps

Posted by alect on February 6th, 2010 in RSS Feed and has No Comments

In this week’s world dominating iPhone app roundup: Your every whim, robotically indulged! Radio champagne, poured generously! Football stuff, assimilated! Your computers, turned into wirelessly controlled zombies! Death foods, avoided! And more..

If you’d rather view this roundup in a single page, click here.

Siri: Speech recognition apps recognize speech. Search apps search. Concierge apps consolidate services. Siri does all of the above:

To use the iPhone app, you just have to say aloud a command like “Book a table for six at 7pm at McDonalds” (I’m sure you’re classier than that, but let’s stick with it for now), and then using speech-recognition technology and the iPhone’s GPS capabilities, your command is translated and processed by the app, responding with confirmation of booking-or lack of availability.

The app is paired with OpenTable, MovieTickets, StubHub, CitySearch and TaxiMagic, and recognizes a respectable number of commands with surprising accuracy. Success seem to vary voice to voice, and some types of requests seem to have a higher success rate than others, but really, just find out for yourself—it’s free, and very impressive.

Where Is My Phone: While this app’s name implies that it has some kind of phone-finding capability, Kyle discovered very quickly that this app is fundamentally about farts. And other noises! But mostly farts:

Turning your iPhone into a remote controlled whoopee cushion is what I had in mind. Little Worlds, the makers of the app, apparently also had it in mind, including more than one variety of fart among the dozen or so sound effects included with the download.
Here’s what’s going on: “Where is my Phone” listens for your whistle and then plays the sound effect of your choice (or your own recorded soundbite) when it hears it. The makers claim it can recognize you Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah-ing from up to 30 meters away, and I had no trouble in activating sirens, explosions and the rest just by whistling on the other side of the room.

Not bad for a buck, athough you’ll have to get comfortable with the prospect of planting your iPhone, which is not cheap, in various risky places for sound gags, which decidedly are. Anyway, far be it from me to put a price tag on a good fart joke.

MotionX GPS Drive: Once upon a time, a homely little app called MotionX GPS was described on this site as “Hands Down the Best Value In GPS Apps”. Now, our biggest complaints about the app—its somewhat clunky UI and lack of landscape mode—have been remedied. Says Wilson:

All in all, it’s a palpable improvement for a worthwhile product, especially one so durned cheap. That’s right, it’s still just $1, with $3/month or $25/year turn-by-turn voice service. You may hate GPS navigators, you may even hate GPS apps, but if you are on vacation and you don’t have this app-at the very minimum, that is-you are just crazy.

See, in the App Store, three bucks buys you a decent novelty soundboard, or, you know, that cross-country road trip you’ve been aching to take your whole life.

Logitech Touch Mouse: Air Mouse Pro is one of the coolest apps in the App Store. With it, you can control your computer’s mouse, enter text via the iPhone keyboard, run apps, control media—it basically turns your iPhone into a wireless control center for your laptop or desktop, without the awkward experience of using a full VNC client. Logitech Touch Mouse is that, except with just the mouse and the keyboard. So, 75% of the functionality, for 0% of the price.

NewEgg: To have built a PC in the last decade is to love NewEgg. Now they have a free app, which, if downloaded, raises your risk of impulse-buying a new Mini ITX power supply buy roughly 400%.

Don’t Eat That: There’s a tremendous concept here that’s not fully realized. What Don’t Eat That can do now is tell you what pretty much any listed ingredient on a food label is, and perhaps whether or not it coincides with some allergenic, philosophical or preferential objection you have. It also introduces you to new reasons not to eat specific ingredients. (They’re carcinogenic, bad for kids, etc.)

What it can’t do, though, is take a single food item and break it down for you, which is what it feels like this app is reaching for. If you have the patience to enter ingredients individually, and don’t mind an app that errs (way) on the side of caution with some of its recommendations, you’ll get a lot of use out of this thing.

This American Life: This American Life is the best thing on the radio right now. (ATTENTION RADIOLAB FANS: You will have failed if this statement nets me less than 20 hate mail letters.) So when I say that the TAL iPhone app does nothing but play you lots and lots of WBEZ’s flagship show, I mean that in the best way possible. Half of what you’re paying for here is utility: you can access any and all TAL shows whenever you want, as well as live streams. The other half of what you’re paying for here is the show itself: anyone who’s listened to their podcast over the last few years knows it costs them a lot of money, and this app is intended to help pick of the bandwidth tab, at least a little. To this end, it helps that it’s very, very good. $3.

Assassin’s Creed 2: Takes the franchise into somewhat odd side-scrolling territory, but manages the transition well. If you have trouble with onscreen controls in general, maybe pass on this one. If you don’t, and you’re an AC fan, it’s worth a look. [via TouchArcade]

Super Bowl XLIV Official Program: As many people as watch the Super Bowl, I have my doubts about how many actually purchase a hard copy of the official game program. Programs are for plays, or foreign films, or your daughter’s dance recital! This is football! (This is something a football fan would say, right?)

Anyhow, this is that print program, adapted for the iPhone. It’s five bucks, packed with photos, historical context, stats and fresh editorial content. Warning: there is roughly a 50% chance (feel free to debate that figure in the comments) that you’ll hate this app come Sunday.

This list is in no way definitive. If you’ve spotted a great app that hit the store this week, give us a heads up or, better yet, your firsthand impressions in the comments. And for even more apps: see our previous weekly roundups here, and check out our Favorite iPhone Apps Directory and our original iPhone App Review Marathon. Have a swell weekend everybody.

Why (and How) Apple Killed the $9.99 Ebook

Posted by alect on February 6th, 2010 in RSS Feed and has No Comments

Publishers joining Apple’s iBooks store are turning their back on Amazon and its vision of the flat $9.99 ebook. Apple forced the music industry to charge 99 cents per song, so why are they helping publishers set their own prices?

To screw Amazon.

The difference between Amazon and Apple is this: Amazon is very much in the ebook business to sell ebooks. They want you attached to their platform. That’s why the Kindle Reader is on both PC and iPhone, as well as the eponymous e-ink device. Ebooks are huge for them. They sell six ebooks for every 10 physical books. That’s why they want to own the market. Apple, on the other hand, sells content in order to sell hardware. The iTunes Store, the App Store and the brand-new iBooks Store exist so you’ll buy iPods, iPhones and iPads, which is where Apple really makes money. iTunes revenue is just a bonus, though an ever fatter one with the explosion of the App Store.

You can see that the two companies place far different values on the content they sell. A more illustrative example: Amazon has been selling books at a loss—paying $15 for a hardcover bestseller, only to turn around and sell it for $10 on the Kindle. Apple would never, ever sell content at a loss. They make a decent bit of change, but apps and music are really just a way to fill up your iPhone.

Do you remember three years ago, when Apple was battling with the record labels for control over (legal) digital music? Apple still owns 69 percent of the market and sell 1 out of every 4 songs, period—in other words, they owned the market, which deeply frightened the labels, who were afraid of losing control. Universal, the biggest label, flipped out, and even tried to build the anti-iTunes. That failed, so the music business bit the bullet (or the poison pill) and went DRM-free, not with Apple at first, but with Amazon. It became a (sorta) credible competitor to the iTunes monster, long enough to give the labels just enough extra negotiating power. When iTunes music downloads went DRM free, many of them—particularly hit singles—suddenly cost $1.29.

The situation is remarkably similar, except this time, Amazon’s wearing the market-maker pants. Some estimate Amazon’s share of the ebook market to be 90 percent, but I’ve heard from people in the publishing industry say it’s closer to 80 percent. But that’s nitpicking. At this moment, Amazon owns ebooks. The book publishers’ fears are the same as the record labels with iTunes: They’re paranoid about losing control over pricing, and their own digital destiny. They’re worried that books are being undervalued, and that once people have the mindset that the price of an ebook is $9.99, and not a penny more, they’re doomed. They needed an insurgent player: Apple.

Apple has advantages that Amazon didn’t have with music: Scale and technology. iTunes has just moved 3 billion iPhone apps. Apple’s sold over 250 million iPods. By contrast, Amazon’s sold an estimate 2.5-3 million Kindles since it debuted 2 years ago. Analysts predict Apple will sell twice as many iPads this year alone.

In terms of technology, e-Ink looks old and busted and slow next to the iPad’s bright, color display. (Even the fact that the written word is much easier to stare at for long periods of time when presented on e-ink won’t save the current Kindle.) An iPad can do more than books: Beautiful digital magazines, interactive textbooks, a dynamic newspaper. Oh, and it’s a computer that does video, apps, music. Amazon’s scrambling now to make a multitouch full color Kindle after betting on E-Ink, but that kind of development takes at least a year. Even if they churn out a full color reader that is somehow better than the iPad, it likely won’t matter: It would just be a very nice reader to iPad’s everything else, and it would be 9 months too late.

The print industry is swirling down the toilet, and apocalypse-era publishers minds’ dance with hallucinations of digital salvation via iTunes for print. It’s the iPod for books. What Amazon was supposed to deliver, but now maybe never will.

With that contrast in mind, all the publishers needed was a little push. All Apple had to whisper was, “Hey, we’ll let you set your own prices for books. You should control your own destiny. We’d love to have you. You know, $12.99 is a really good price for a beautiful color version of your amazing books. BTW, why are you letting Amazon undersell you?” It doesn’t matter that publishers make less absolute money through the agency model used by Apple—Amazon might’ve given them $15 for a book it sold for $10, but under the agency model, the seller takes 30 percent off the top. They wanted to feel in control, and that their books are worth something more. Steve gave them that, even as he’s probably got his fingers crossed behind his back.

Amazon knew what it was doing by insisting on $9.99 as the price for ebooks. A flat, easy-to-understand rate—one that’s notably cheaper than its analog counterparters—is a paradigm that works, especially when you’re trying to essentially build a whole new market. It plays into the part of our brains that like easy things. That likes the number 9. (No really, 9 is a psychologically satisfying number.) Amazon believed in it so strongly, as I said before, they sold books at a loss to keep it up. (I’m not suggesting, BTW, that Amazon would be any more benevolent to the industry than Apple. They wouldn’t.)

Price would’ve been Amazon’s major advantage over Apple too—being able to undercut Apple by setting whatever price they needed to compete would’ve been its ace in the hole against the iPad’s flashy color screen, and everything else it can do. And now that’s poofed. Apple will be able to sell you ebooks for the exact same price as Amazon. By turning the publishers against Amazon, they’ve effectively dicked the Kindle over. Why? To fill out another bullet point as to why you should buy an iPad. The real question is how long it’ll take publishers to realize that’s all they are to Apple: one little bullet point.

Comic Books Will Look Incredible on the iPad

Posted by alect on February 5th, 2010 in RSS Feed and has No Comments

I’d buy an iPad just to read comic books. Think I’m nuts? I probably am, but see how you feel after this first look at what Panelfly, maker of a popular comic book iPhone app, is building for the iPad.

Instead of simply scaling up the existing iPhone app, the folks from Panelfly put their heads together with the Sugarcube dev team and brainstormed. With all the talk of the iPad and how it could restore comic books to their former glory, they realized that they needed to revamp the app and make a version specifically for the iPad. This way they could take full advantage of the device’s screen size and provide a new way of purchasing and interacting with the content.

The way the Panelfly iPhone app works is that you download the app for free from the app store and then add comics to your library through in-app purchases. Stephen Lynch, CTO and designer at Panelfly, hinted that the company is currently exploring several different purchase models for the iPad version, but was unfortunately unable to elaborate even when I tried to coax out whether there’d be a subscription option.

As far as reading and navigating content on the new iPad app goes, let’s just say it’ll blow us all away. From what Stephen was able to share with me, Panelfly “didn’t want to stray too far from the native Apple UI elements, [they] wanted to create something that was [theirs] as well as a platform that gave the content the respect it deserves.” And from the looks and sound of it? They’ve succeeded.

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Be sure to click on the images in the gallery for the full-sized view. It’s worth it.

Call me a geeky comic book lover, but apps like this one are what I’m looking forward to when it comes to the iPad. The gadget won’t replace my computer, it won’t replace my TV, and it won’t replace any other device I’ve got around the house. But it will be what I sit down with when I want to catch up on some comics, magazines, journal articles, and what will be formerly known as “print” media.

The Two Wrong Ways To Make a Tablet

Posted by alect on February 4th, 2010 in RSS Feed and has No Comments

Tablets today are thought to be made in one of two ways: Upsizing a smartphone or downsizing a laptop. Many of these new tablets are decent, but both methods render something less than the perfect tablet.

These tablets—not the convertible laptops of the past decade, but real single-pane slate-like ones—are in various stages of development, and have various operating systems. You have your iPad, JooJoo, a bunch of Android tablets, HP’s slate, the as-yet-unseen Chrome OS tablets, the equally mysterious Courier, and the Microsoft-partner tablets that currently run a reasonably full version of Windows 7. You can easily categorize nearly all of these into two basic design philosophies: The iPad and Android tablets come from platforms originally designed with smartphones in mind; the Windows 7 tablets fully embrace the traditional desktop-metaphor OS; the Chrome OS and JooJoo strip out most of the desktop, leaving—perhaps awkwardly—just the browser.

But what about the Courier? If there is such a thing as a “third” option, it’s what Microsoft dreamed up over the last year. Microsoft, already has its fingers in both ends of the pie, but Courier represents a truly different envisioning. Could the tablet that we’ve really been waiting for come from Redmond? Maybe, but at the moment the fate of Courier isn’t clear at all.

Making Phones Bigger

First you have the method of taking a phone interface and making it bigger. That’s the iPad, the Android tablets and, in some modes, Lenovo’s Ideapad U1. Android tablets are basically doing an upscaling of the base Android interface, whereas the iPad also makes customized first-party apps to take advantage of the increased screen space. Both can theoretically run all the apps their little brothers can. Lenovo is also doing something very similar by creating a completely customized ground-up OS that’s sorta widget-based, which is basically a smartphone in everything but name. (When docked, the U1 tablet becomes a screen for a Windows computer, but that’s another story.)

So far, going up from a phone OS seems to be the better bet, compared to simplifying a desktop-style OS. But the phone experience is far from perfect.

When you work off of a smartphone base, you theoretically already have the touch interface locked in, because Android, iPhone, Palm and other smartphones now eschew the skinny stylus for your fat finger. It’s a more natural pointing device for a tablet, since you can hold the device in one hand while pointing at it with the other. If you were to use a stylus, you’d have to grip the tablet with your forearm, like a watermelon or a baby, in order to provide a stable enough surface to press down upon with a pen.

Also, because you’re working with a phone-up methodology, you get to sell a tablet relatively cheap by using high-end phone parts rather than low-end netbook parts. For example, you have Android tablets that are made from ARM processors and Nvidia Tegra graphics, which are basically meant to run high-end phones. Then there’s the Apple A4 processor, which is also ARM-based.

So for these manufacturers, they already have the type of modularized applications with minimal multitasking (in Apple’s case, basically none) that can run decently well on low-powered hardware. Plus, this type of system requirements basically guarantees that you’ll have a better battery life than the alternative.

Jesus already sung much of the praises of this approach when he correctly surmised that the iPad would have this style of operating system. But what about the negatives?

If you’re building a tablet from a phone OS, you would fail to have a completely stand-alone device, in the sense that a laptop is completely standalone. You couldn’t have file access to dump photos, video and other media onto, you’d have to sync it to something else once in a while to get everything you need. And you have to go through a marketplace instead of installing stuff like a computer.

There is also no real way for apps to interact with each other. There’s copy and paste on smartphones, and certain apps can read data files from certain other apps (like the contact list), but there’s no way to interact like dragging and dropping files across applications. In the iPhone, you can’t even multitask to work on two things simultaneously. You can on Android, but there’s minimal interaction between applications. That’s not saying it can’t be done, it’s just not so entrenched in the base OS or the base philosophy that application developers don’t do it very often. If the OS maker doesn’t do it, developers won’t either.

Also, because phones are a very isolated experience, App Stores make it much easier to find apps that are both customized for your device and safe to install. This is great for phones, since stability is important, but when you’re getting into higher-performance devices, you want the ability to choose what apps you want, not just pick from the ones that Apple or Google deem OK for you to consume. And since this kind of tablet is adapted from the phone ecosystem, that’s the only choice you have.

To have a very good experience on any sort of serious computing device (not a phone), you need interactivity. An example on the Mac is the way your Mail application knows if someone is online in iChat, and shows a little light by his name, telling you that you can just IM him instead of emailing. Interactivity like this is part of the base design experience of Courier, judging on the videos we posted. You can move parts of each application easily into any other application, and each piece knows what’s being dumped onto it. The current state of phones can’t, and don’t this co-mingling philosophy engrained into it.

Peripherals is something else a phone-based OS can’t handle well. You’re limited to a specific number of device accessories that needs to be vetted in order to ensure compatibility. Even the iPad, which has a few more accessories than the iPhone (like a keyboard), doesn’t have nearly the amount of compatibility as a desktop. A tablet needs to learn this lesson from desktops in order to be truly useful. Plug in a keyboard? Sure. A firewire camera to have the device act as a target storage device? Absolutely. Another tablet, so you can have twice the amount of display area? Why the hell not. Print? Yes.

All this stuff is doable on phone devices, if developers wanted to. Hell, anything is possible if you want it to be. None of this stuff is against the laws of physics, it’s just a matter of wanting to put it in. There’s no reason why these phone-based OSes can’t accept peripherals, multitask, and do everything better than a phone. It’s just against the design philosophy.

But not all of this is software. There are certain hardware expectations that can’t be met with the current batch of phone OSes. If you’re looking at devices on a curve, you have your phone, then your tablet, then your laptop and your desktop. As the size of a increases, your expectation for power does too, and battery life decreases in accordance. So theoretically, in a tablet device, you’d want to have one significant step up in performance over phones, which we’re not seeing in these devices. I’m not talking just running the same applications faster, with upscaled graphics, I’m talking entirely new things you can only do with increased processing power. Stuff like true multitasking, games that are actually noticeably better than cellphone games, light media editing (not as good as a laptop, of course) and media playback of all kinds, handling all sorts of codecs.

That’s right, people expect more functionality and power with that bigger screen. Android’s tablets run Android apps pretty fast, but not so fast that they’re on an entirely new level. Widget-ized computing may prove to be practical, something people need as a second device. But for anybody in need of real heavy-duty computing, like Photoshop photo editing or Final Cut video processing, the design of a tablet simply won’t do.

Shrinking PCs Down

Then, you have the people who have taken a windows-style desktop-metaphor interface and simplified it for a tablet. There’s the HP slate, which runs Windows 7 but, knowing HP, will come with a friendly TouchSmart skin to hide Windows from sight while you’re doing basic media and (hopefully) social stuff. There are various other Windows 7 tablets, including the Archos 9, basically just Windows 7 machines stripped of their keyboard. (Some have styluses.)

What makes no sense about the new crop of Windows-powered tablets is that they are based on a design concept that is already proven not to work. You’ll recall back to the first time Microsoft tried these tablets, with Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, around the turn of the century, and you’ll remember that although the premise was neat, the execution had no unique functionality, no specific base of great apps, from Microsoft or anybody else. It was just a regular laptop with a stylus interface thrown in. What has changed? Now you can use your finger, instead:

There are benefits: Excellent peripheral support, the ability to install custom applications, true multitasking and cross-app interactivity, enhanced media performance, etc. In short, everything you expect from a low-powered Windows laptop, you can more or less expect here. But that extra boost of juice, that ongoing background chatter, demand more on the system. The downside is that battery is never remotely as good, and you have to deal with old-world Windows issues, like slower boot times, sleep issues, and, yes, viruses.

HP has worked hard to sell the concept of the touch PC with their TouchSmart platform. We have seen the desktop all-in-one TouchSmarts running multitouch Windows 7 but there wasn’t a lot of software for them. Now, HP appears to be pinning its hopes to the slate, presumably giving a nice “tablet” interface on top of Windows 7 when you need it, but with the ability to pop back into desktop mode when you don’t. That’s fine, better even, but it’s not a coherent computing experience.

Since it’s ultimately a desktop OS, it’s not designed for the type of input schemes you have on tablets. Besides, what happens when something running in the background crashes or demands attention? Nothing will shake you from your tablet reverie like an unexpected alert from the good people of Norton that your PC is in grave danger of being violated. Unless the tablet-friendly environment is more than skin deep, like the ones phone developers now use to hide Windows Mobile, the whole thing is a wash. By delaying on the Courier and promoting Windows 7 touch tablets, Microsoft’s making the same kind of mistake that made WinCE devices (Windows Mobile) slow and clunky. They’re offering up their standard base operating system and just telling people to add a skin on top, which is not the way to a tablet revolution.

Desktop Lite: The Browser-Only Approach

Frankly, we’re not sure where to put JooJoo and the mysterious Chrome OS. Their philosophy? Why design a whole new OS when you can take the screen most people stare at most often—the web browser—and effectively limit your OS to that. Sure, web apps are only going to get better, richer. But this approach seems to take the limitations of both the phone and the desktop-metaphor OS, with almost none of the benefits of either.

Everything we’ve seen from the Chrome OS, both early on and more recently, suggests that it is typical white-on-black boring Google desktop style. We hope there’s a trick or two up its sleeve, because if it’s just a Chrome browser in a box, it might suffer.

We know more about the JooJoo. What’s nice about it is that, presumably like the Chrome, its browser is a real WebKit PC browser, not a skimpy mobile one, so it supports Flash and Silverlight, and therefore Hulu, YouTube in HD, and other great video experiences. It does have a 1MP webcam, as well, but it’s only for “video conferencing,” if and when a browser-based video Skype comes along.

What We Need Is a Third Approach

The tablet operating system problem is one that no one has actually solved in the thirty-something years of personal computing, even though tablets have been in the public’s imagination for at least that long.

The biggest players, Apple, Google and Microsoft have huge investments in both desktop and mobile software, and seem to attack this tablet problem from attacking with both Android and Chrome OS. They’re all using their previous knowledge to get a head start. This is bad. Neither of these two solutions is optimal.

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Surprisingly enough, it’s Microsoft—preoccupied as it is with mobile and desktop—that’s perhaps closest to this golden mean of tablets.

If you watch the Courier video above, you’ll notice that it’s an entirely new class of interface. It doesn’t have anything reminiscent of applications, which are the way phones do it, and it doesn’t have the traditional windowing (lower-case) for programs, which is what desktops use. It’s kinda just one big interface where everything talks to everything else, where you can do stuff in a natural way that makes sense.

Or take a look at this video. Again, it’s neither phone nor desktop—it’s designed with finger pointing in mind, optimized for this middle-ground in screen size. This is just a concept render, but it serves the point: We’re looking for something completely new with an interface that “just works” for the device, giving you features from the desktop-side such as multitasking, serious computing and the ability to run any app without having to go through a locked-down application store funnel. But we also don’t want to sacrifice the gestures, fingerability or light-weightness that you gain from smartphones.

It might never happen. It takes years and massive amounts of manpower to create a new operating system. Microsoft’s taking forever just getting Windows Phone into the 21st century. While we have faith (somehow) that Microsoft will revamp its mobile franchise in its 7th iteration, it’s unlikely that they would also then push out an entirely new operating system anytime in the next few years. More problematic is the recent insistence by Steve Ballmer at CES that Windows 7 tablets are the solution, when they very clearly are not.

If not Microsoft, then who? Apple and Google have already shown what they plan to do in the tablet space—and their operating systems may grow and develop in ways only hinted at now. The iPhone platform is not bad, and if they can break through the glass ceiling described above, it could be the answer. Google Chrome OS could also manifest itself in unexpected ways, even if we currently don’t have too much optimism. Until that day arrives—or until the unlikely event that an upstart designs a seriously revolutionary OS and accompanying hardware platform to deliver it on—we’ll have to make do with our big phones and keyboardless laptops.