Three iTablet needs, three need-nots, and three things that’d be nice to have.

by WyldKard on January 21, 2010

The reason we’re so enthused about ’s rumoured tablet computer is because its proposed mobility suits our lifestyle. Simply put, our MacBook Pro is too big to comfortably cart across the country often, and our doesn’t offer key functionality that we need in our road-warrior lifestyle. While there’s already some middle ground in the likes of a smaller MacBook, or even moreso in the overpriced MacBook Air, the iTablet proposes less power in a smaller package. The key with the iTablet will be in how balances trade-offs, because their goal will be to ensure that the iTablet feature pendulum doesn’t swing too far in the direction of the , nor to the MacBook. This is consistent with the concern, mirrored by John Gruber, that the iTablet simply won’t offer enough over the to justify the price.

It’s eyebrow-raising that “too big” and “too expensive” were the major knocks against the Newton, and here we are facing the arrival of the mythical Tablet, which, according to the Wall Street Journal, has a big 10-inch diagonal screen and will cost around $1,000. But I’d argue that the Newton wasn’t too big, too expensive, period — I’d say it was too big and too expensive given what it offered.

For the iTablet not to succumb to the Newton’s fate, it has to set itself apart from the . This is even more important when one considers that the iTablet will most likely run on the same version of OS X that the and iPod Touch do. There will need to be some key differences in OS load-out, however, and these differences become quite clear when we’re on the road with only our , and consider what we can’t do well.

Three things the iTablet needs.

1. A readable screen size: The is small for a reason, and while certainly capable of browsing the web, the reality is that non-mobile pages are still inconvenient to browse at length. There’s a reason that mobile web pages are often preferred on the , and why apps designed to replace web interfaces are designed with a different interface in mind. This issue has already addressed, of course, because the iTablet’s screen is expected to be 10″ long diagonally. Arguably, this means that few users will need to zoom in on full-size web pages on the iTablet’s screen to read the respective content. Would a 12″ screen be better at this? Sure, but 10″ should be manageable, while anything smaller offers questionable benefits.

2. User-defined multi-tasking: When Backgrounder came out for jailbroken iPhones, it changed the way we did business. It didn’t play as important a role in our use of the before we picked up a 3GS, but now it’s an invaluable tool for us. We can run Pandora in the car while getting directions from Navigon, or we can jump back over to the iPod app to switch podcasts without having to restart Navigon (it still doesn’t handle podcasts properly). We can leave a game to check on e-mail, and jump right back in with nary a delay. The funny thing is, when we’re using Backgrounder, we rarely do it with more than a couple apps at a time. This is revealing: while people would love native support for third-party apps to have multitasking capabilities like the core apps do, most people don’t really need to keep many apps open in the first place. So even if the iTablet has a much slower processor than what we’re used to in a MacBook, it shouldn’t matter too much. As of right now, the 3GS already meets our requirements for horsepower as far as multitasking is concerned, so a slightly more powerful processor would be sufficient for most users.

What may want to consider, if they haven’t done so already, is letting users define a limited number of applications to run in the background. Say, a user can launch a given app, and via some gesture, send that program into a multitasking state. Maybe a small bar at one side of the screen has three empty boxes, and when a program is told to run in the background, its icon is sent to occupy one of these three boxes. That way, users can see which apps are running in the background, and with another gesture, stop the background process for a given app, whereupon its icon is removed from one of the three multitasking boxes.

Since we’re bloggers, we’ll use a typical blogging workflow as a perfect example for this. We launch Byline, our RSS reader. We drag its title bar to an empty multitasking box. We return to the springboard and launch a photo-editing app, and also drag its title bar to an unoccupied multitasking box. Finally, we do the same for the WordPress app. We can now jump back-and-forth between these applications by simply clicking on one of the multitasking boxes for the application we want to switch to. This allows us to easily copy content from Byline into WordPress, mock up graphics to do same, and voila, no needing to launch applications again and again just to switch between them. When we’re done with an app, we press and hold its icon in the respective multitasking box, and the icon explodes in a of virtual dust as the application closes. This type of multitasking would make the iTablet a much more efficient work-buddy than the is today.

3. Decent text input: Dan Moren wrote a great piece collecting various text input methods that the iTablet could use. Regardless of which method goes with, we’ve said for some time that text input is the ’s greatest weakness. This is where the iTablet can really set itself apart from the , because most travelers will want some easy form of text input, and ideally one that doesn’t drop a giant virtual keyboard across half of one’s screen. Netbooks may have cramped keyboards, but at least they stand out of the way of the already-small display. A 10″ screen may be of a sufficient size for viewing full-screen content, but if half that screen is used as a keyboard, that 10″ will seem unreasonably small.

We figure that a bluetooth keyboard approach is the most logical, though definitely expect to have something up their sleeve as far as a unique input method is concerned. Without this, the iTablet doesn’t seem like it would offer enough, especially when one can buy a Macbook for around the same price.

Three things the iTablet doesn’t need.

1. A cellular data connection: The has 3G data for a reason: it’s a phone. In a world where every telecom is on LTE, and it’s ubiquitous across the country, then it makes sense to slam LTE-capable into the iTablet. In the meantime, there’s already the , which has the capability to tether its cellular data connection to any nearby computer. (AT&T just has to turn the feature on.)

There’s also the issue of supporting CDMA if they decide to work with Verizon. CDMA doesn’t let one use data and voice at the same time, which would be an issue for consistent functionality if released a CDMA on Verizon, but this is hardly an issue for the iTablet (since it wouldn’t have voice service anyway). Instead, the issue is one of customer satisfaction: if the iTablet is linked to Verizon, current customers who are tied to AT&T will be annoyed at having to get a second data subscription. Even if the iTablet were capable of both CDMA and GSM, so it could work under any of the major cellular services, one must wonder if this would be a solid business move. More likely, would leverage the iTablet as yet another gadget to compliment one’s life with. If the iTablet doesn’t sport cellular data, then users will still need to get an to enable tethered data access on the iTablet. It’s a win for , and with so many iPhones out there already, one wonders who would seriously complain if the iTablet required an for data. Verizon hold-outs shouldn’t be too displeased either, assuming that the will eventually head to Verizon in 2011. In our opinion, the iTablet should be carrier neutral, insofar that it doesn’t support any cellular data subscription natively, and instead piggy-backs whatever the user’s is on.

2. GPS: Look, the iTablet is too big to sit in one’s windshield, and it’s too big to cart around while hiking in the back-country. Sure, one can argue that the costs are negligible at this point, but so is the benefit to having GPS in the iTablet outside of location-based apps. Again, doesn’t want the iTablet to replace the . There’s no reason couldn’t integrate sharing of GPS data to a computer tethered to an , and that sounds like a much more reasonable business solution than throwing GPS into every device that’s not a desktop. After all, most use cases for the iTablet will be indoors, anyway, and that means not having a GPS signal in the first place. (Besides, tethered to an ’s data connection, the iTablet could use cell-phone triangulation to roughly determine location regardless of GPS availability.)

3. Ports: With the iTablet using the AppStore, there’s no need for an optical drive because we wouldn’t be installing anything from CD or DVD. wants people to use iTunes, and since most mainstream media can be acquired there, there’s no reason to let people rip optical media for playing on the iTablet, either. Maybe will allow wireless sharing of a drive from another computer (just as the MacBook Air can do), just to rip media in iTunes, but the feature isn’t really necessary. There’s also no reason to attach USB devices other than an iPod/, so while we may see a USB port for this reason alone, there’s nothing else we would expect to see connecting to the iTablet other than a magsafe power cord. Of course, we could just as easily see finally integrating wireless synchronization of iTunes over wi-fi, so we can easily envision the iTablet without a single USB port also. Assuming still requires the iTablet to tether to a computer running legacy iTunes, the question of a USB port is clear.

Initially, we proposed that the iTablet should have a mini display port, but with the realization that the device would be built around the mobile version of OS X, this seems less likely, since apps will be built around a certain resolution. Even with resolution independence built into apps, all attaching a large monitor would do is scale the existing graphics up to a larger size, not allow one to actually display more content. Perhaps there would be some benefit to this if text could be scaled down on a per-app basis when a larger monitor is connected, but we just don’t see many people doing something like this, even if we would.

In the end, chances are good that the iTablet will not have a single port to its name other than a power connection, be that a magsafe connector or a typical iPod interface if the iTablet is designed to synchronize with legacy iTunes.

Three things that would be nice to have.

1. No need to tether to a desktop: The isn’t a stand-alone product, even though many users probably use it as such. However, for the to truly shine, it needs to be tethered to a computer with a full-fledged OS, if only for the to interface with a full iTunes library. Sure, the can be used to purchase movies and music, but its limited storage means that older content needs to reside somewhere and the isn’t quite there yet. Never mind that the will even complain when certain downloads fail, telling the user to try again via iTunes.

The iTablet, hopefully, will stand on its own: it should serve as a device that iPhones can tether to, and not become yet another gadget that needs to be synchronized with a computer running a full-fledged version of iTunes. That would likely call for a magsafe power connector, versus the typical iPod connector a tethered device would have.

Of course, as a stand-alone media device, one would expect the iTablet to have plenty of disk space, so we’d expect to see a fairly large SSD drive. The MacBook Air sports a 128GB SSD HD, and we’d expect to see at least that much storage capacity in the iTablet, so it can hold most user’s complete multimedia libraries.

2. Front-facing camera: The idea of a device with a 10″ screen being burdened with a rear-facing camera is just silly. The iTablet won’t have a camera in the same sense as the , but we can definitely see how it might sport an iSight to use iChat with. In fact, with better text-input features than the , the iTablet will most likely sport iChat for quick, real-time communication. The ability to enable video-chats, however, would be nothing short of gangbusters.

3. Greater connectivity: If the iTablet had everything already mentioned, it would already be a pretty spectacular device. But with greater integration, thanks in part to a more evolved Mobile Me service, the iTablet could leverage features like Back to my Mac to grab files remotely, perhaps even to add such files to the iTablet’s own iTunes library (such as grabbing ripped mp3s remotely to alleviate the lack of an optical drive). With rumours that iTunes may well come to the in the near future (as well as iWork), there’s some hope that Mobile Me will become a true competitor to the various free -based services, and the iTablet is the perfect platform to showcase such evolution.

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