Do You Wanna Touch

Great thoughts Jeff, thanks for sharing. From a business perspective it makes sense to position Surface as a laptop replacement. I hadn’t thought about until you called Surface RT a laptop killer. Tim Cook once said he’d rather cannibalize Mac sales for iPads, rather than have somebody else do it. Microsoft could be thinking the same thing.

It seems to me a major criteria is emerging. Do you need to manipulate text? So far, selecting text has proven to be difficult in the touch world. Replacing the precision of a mouse pointer with a finger has not gone well. Any thoughts Jeff, on the ease of moving words, sentences and paragraphs around?

We use this keyboard htp://amzn.to/RARwZr to go with my ipad / nexus 7 (whichever one we are carrying). Keyboard case is fantastic. Haven’t tried the surface keyboard yet but when its connected, what happens when you’ve finished your mails etc. and then you want to surf or read a book? Do you pop the keyboard off? With this bluetooth keyboard, I simply switch power off…

Any thoughts Jeff, on the ease of moving words, sentences and paragraphs around?

iOS does this best, but it’s still fiddly as hell to select text with a big giant finger. Android, although quite decent in 4.0 and beyond, is still terrible at text selection. Surface (and Windows 8) is in the middle there.

Even with the best touch text selection in the world, it wouldn’t be great, because fingers are just too big for it.

Is Surface’s appeal really that it makes the accessory part of the deal?

There’s a difference between a third party bluetooth iPad keyboard accessory with no real connection to the product, and a first party item that was designed in from the very beginning.

You can be damn sure Apple will never, ever, ever, ever, EVER release an official keyboard accessory for the iPad. It’s the same unnecessary extremism we’ve seen from Apple before: the one button mouse, the Mac that shipped without cursor keys to force you to use the mouse to navigate, the single ridiculously overloaded home button on the iOS devices, etc.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/02/the-one-button-mystique.html

I kept doing typewriting speed tests to see how fast I could get with the touch cover and I could never get past 55% of my speed with a regular keyboard.

I agree in spirit:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/10/the-keyboard-cult.html

However…

Even 55% of full keyboard speed is several orders of magnitude ahead of where you’d be using a full size tablet touchscreen keyboard. For context try repeating those tests with the on-screen touch keyboard. :slight_smile:

Apple already released a keyboard for the iPad, though it’s discontinued now. Not enough people bought it.

Apple already released a keyboard for the iPad, though it’s discontinued now. Not enough people bought it. - Tewha

They didn’t discontinue it -> http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_ipad/ipad_accessories/keyboards

They did discontinue this one: http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/28/apples-ipad-keyboard-dock-case-and-other-accessories-get-hands/

Those Apple keyboards listed on the site are not specifically made for iPad: they are general purpose bluetooth keyboards.

Hello,

In my view all these devices are awesome to browse content. I’d like to see people trying to write code or even blog posts on their iPads. Not gonna happen anytime soon. IMHO laptops are here to stay.

Atmosx:
In my view all these devices are awesome to browse content. I’d like to see people trying to write code or even blog posts on their iPads. Not gonna happen anytime soon. IMHO laptops are here to stay.

Yield Thought, I swapped my MacBook for an iPad+Linode
http://yieldthought.com/post/12239282034/swapped-my-macbook-for-an-ipad

How the iPad 2 Became My Favorite Computer
http://technologizer.com/2011/12/05/how-the-ipad-2-became-my-favorite-computer/

:slight_smile:

Hello,

I found this to be a very eye-opening post that dives just a bit deeper than many of the other Microsoft Surface RT blogs I have read. As a current computer science student, it’s interesting to see ideas in the technological community like yours weigh a new product’s impacts on technology and users. At first I was interested to see the struggle companies have had through the plethora of sizes of phones, tablets, and laptops. Yet when you said “reviewers think Surface is intended to be a tablet killer, but it isn’t. It’s a laptop killer,” I realized that it’s a whole new type of competition. For the past 30+ years, users have revolved around the technology: going TO the desktop to type something, going TO the TV to switch channels. Now technology is revolving around us; our phones and tablets and even our 3G internet/wifi follow us around during the day. As you have said in your other posts, laptops simply don’t offer the lightweight, portable, touch-interactive solution that our tablets do.

Even though the Microsoft Surface may be a glimpse into the future, I would say the tablet needs to improve a lot more before making a lasting impact. I saw that throughout your post, you talked a lot about the hardware of the Surface. I agree that this hardware may very well propel Microsoft into the future, but what are your thoughts about the software itself? Do you believe that Win8 is some sort of “Frankenstein” system that needs to catch up to the hardware? Yes, the Surface may create the ability to have an amazing fusion between touching and typing, but is the software really ready for it? When I used Windows 8 on tablets, I found that it was painstakingly difficult to touch small buttons in corners and menus because they were artifacts of the days of their mouse-based OS. In the same way, I still see the same possible problem with the keyboard. The fact that Microsoft still included their keyboard shows that their OS (as well as many others) may be in a phase of the already but not yet; technology is not advanced enough to transfer our multidimensional words and ideas into bits and binary code. Would you agree that we will continue to need keyboards in the future or side with Apple in that keyboards are unnecessary for tablets?

Jeff, what are your thoughts on the new Samsung Tab - the one with Note capabilities - http://www.samsung.com/us/mobile/galaxy-tab ? Is there a future to writing with a pen on a computer, especially for “medium sized” entries (more than a twitter, using your fingers, but less than a few pages of text, requiring a keyboard) - a typical blog reply, for example…

With some minor exceptions, tablets are consumptive in nature, not productive. To get any real work done, you need a keyboard. Period. Full stop.

Once you equip a tablet with a keyboard, then you’ve started down the slippery slope towards and clunky, underpowered notebook, only with a very inefficient (for most real, getting work done, apps) mode of input.

Sure, tablets are flashy, but they are media consumption gadgets - an Internet media spigot.

And in a business setting, much of what you’ll need to do will require Citrix or some other means of running Windows-based apps on the tablet, which is especially cumbersome and frustrating.

Ultimately, tablets are really awesome to have mostly because the companies who profit from the sales say so. They are radically over-hyped and often end up as expensive paperweights.

Canonical has been wanting to do something like this for a while with smart phones with Ubuntu for Android. I think it would be really interesting if they can make it succeed. It’s too bad Mark Shuttleworth and company don’t have the same kind of resources Microsoft does.

Keyboard + Mouse + Touch is the trifecta. They each do certain things best, but none does everything good enough for all-round productivity.

So how long before I can expect to replace my dual 28" LCD’s with multi-touch panels?

Inexorable reductionism: We will eventually all be using computers implanted in our bodies that integrate with our visual cortex and sensory nervous system. ETA: Within the next 20 years.

Absolutely no reference to Ender’s Game in any of these comments? Unbelievable. Well, anyhow, Card called that shit. I’m now hooked to your blog, btw. Great reviews.

Do you find the missing Context/Right-Click key on the keyboard cover problematic? I use it a lot on my lap/desptop but maybe this is a different enough experience that it isn’t an issue? I have only tried it in store so far.

I love the written word, and I love the IBM Model M keyboard. I haven’t yet tried a tablet, but I have an Android $ell phone and I -hate- it.

My opinion based on few months experience using Windows 8 as an accountant- in the context working with office documents using MS Office 2013, mostly data crunching in excel :

Touch UI looks cool and simpler, but when you start to work with it, all those glitches look redundant. Touch inputs happened for few minutes only (to open program, data, and preparation) but after that you spent hours working with keyboard and mouse.

For eq. how can you make all MS Excel functions become touch based? How to replace F2 to edit a formula? How to choose the table format? Finger touch is too crude to select those tiny icons in Ribbon interface. Ribbon already eats a lot of vertical working space in low res 14" screen (1366X768 - this resolution i believe already common for most enterprise-wide deployment). This is worsened by fact that all screen aspect become vertically narrower these days (moving from 4:3 to 16:10, and now 16:9).

Of course you can always turn off this Ribbon-interface, but it will negates all its ease-usability and purpose (I am quite comfortable with them now, it just need some learning curve). I cannot help thinking MS will change the UI by enlarging those already-cluttered icons, which eventually will eat even more space. This situation is really a mess and unpractical. I think they have to redesign the ribbon and core UI altogether. Thats A LOT of things to do.

For office documents manipulation, especially for MS Excel and Word, using mouse and keyboard are still the king. As long as Microsoft cannot make their Office UI become adaptive to touch based input in such a way that enable us to work faster and more natural compare to mouse-keyboard input, they can forget about notebook and desktop with touch functionality.

The company which could see things right is, ironically, Apple. They first introduce high res screen in notebook (Macbook Pro Retina) and they still holds on 16:10 screen aspect ratio. It make ribbon interface look beautiful and working with large tables become such a joy experience. And they stick with the philosophy that touch interface in notebook and desktop is still not in its prime-time, at least for now. The downside is higher enterprise-wide deployment cost compare to MS in term of hardware and software.

If it doesn’t have a keyboard, I feel that my thoughts are being forced out through a straw.

This opinion assumes that the keyboard is the only relevant way to input text on a device. I think that the keyboard have reached evolutionary dead-end too. The only reason they are still present is that they are so common and widespread and they are very easy to learn.

But imagine some other ways to input text that we probably will see in near future:

  • voice input which works in a noisy environment like in public transport
  • hand and face gestures (like in deaf language for example) – using Kinect like device
  • some kind of shorthand or steno keyboard on the back of the tablet (still using keyboard but it small and is out of sight)

If there is a company which succeed to implement some of the above in an easy to learn way the keyboard will go in history.

No I do not want to touch. I have very sensitive skin. I can handling pushing buttons but rubbing things gives me significant pain within about 15 seconds. I can type and move a mouse although that can become painful. Rubbing is simply off limits. I have a stylus and that works sort of but it is not the same as touching. I wish this whole rubbing/touching technology thing would just go away. I don’t want to be in pain.