Apple set to compete with Origami?

[live2sk8]

I've seen all the speculation that the iPod is in for a redesign, and that has got to be what Apple's recent touch-sensitive screen patent was for. People have also suggested that their next big product will be a new Macbook set to replace the 12" iBook/Powerbook and have tablet functionality.

But why not an Origami-like device? I know I've talked with quite a few people that think Origami is a terrible idea...too big to replace PDAs, too small to replace laptops. A tweener without a home.

But Apple has been known for rejuvenating and reinventing entire markets and market segments, so why not here? Capable ultra-portable laptops (such as Sony's 11.1" TX series) cost upwards of $2000. CNBC's first look at the Origami today said Microsoft plans to sell it for under $1000 and will run Windows XP (Tablet Edition you'd have to think). What would stop Apple from producing something similar?

Here are some reasons why I think this new ultra-portable tablet PC market will be huge:

1) College students, and even younger students: A laptop is all but required for most college majors these days and are certainly incredibly popular on any college campus I've ever seen. Tablets are nice, but have yet to catch on because they tend to be too expensive compared to normal notebooks and aren't really much easier to use or carry around than normal notebooks. A small, ultra-portable tablet device with an 8-10" widescreen LCD would be absolutely perfect for taking notes on and simply carrying around. It could not only replace regular, paper notebooks and binders but could also replace larger, clunkier laptops. Sounds like a winner to me.

2) Business people: Very similar reasons. The Blackberry/Palm/Treo all-in-one devices are so popular these days because they allow people to check their email while on-the-go (as well as browse the internet and such). Laptops are also still pretty common. This one device could replace both of those.

3) Entertainment/Pleasure: Not only do I think the Origami (and any similar device from Apple) is going to be huge among the business world and students, but also for regular people. GPS systems, mobile video players, and 'pleasure' laptops could all be replaced.

Those are just my thoughts. Any other opinions? I sure hope Apple comes out with something similar to the Origami Project...I'd be all over that, for one.

 

[NulloModo]

1) College students, and even younger students: A laptop is all but required for most college majors these days and are certainly incredibly popular on any college campus I've ever seen. Tablets are nice, but have yet to catch on because they tend to be too expensive compared to normal notebooks and aren't really much easier to use or carry around than normal notebooks. A small, ultra-portable tablet device with an 8-10" widescreen LCD would be absolutely perfect for taking notes on and simply carrying around. It could not only replace regular, paper notebooks and binders but could also replace larger, clunkier laptops. Sounds like a winner to me.

Laptops are hardly required for most college majors. Granted, I graduated from college in '03, but I never once even came close to needing a laptop. I was a double major comp-sci and music ed my first two years, just music ed my second two, and I never needed a laptop. I needed my desktop in my dorm room sure, but note taking was much easier with a pen and paper, and for comp-sci all of the programming projects were done on x-terms or via terminal on your PC into the campus servers.

3) Entertainment/Pleasure: Not only do I think the Origami (and any similar device from Apple) is going to be huge among the business world and students, but also for regular people. GPS systems, mobile video players, and 'pleasure' laptops could all be replaced.

if it is too big to fit into your pocket, it is too big for these applications. I have a HP iPaq 6515 right now (Cingular mobile GSM phone combined with Windows Mobile PDA) and I love it, it does all of these things very well. GPS, movies, MP3s, you name it, and it fits comfortably into my pocket. Even better, since it does it all, I only have to carry one device on me. The future is integrated cell phone/PDAs, not tablet PCs.

Tablets will probably always be around, but they are an ultra-niche market. Especially something as tiny as a 12" or smaller screen, that is too small to be a general use machine, too big to be something you carry with you all the time.

 

[live2sk8]

Laptops are hardly required for most college majors. Granted, I graduated from college in '03, but I never once even came close to needing a laptop.

Not to say that was a long time ago, but WiFi hotspots were much rarer back from 1999 to 2003 than they are now, thereby making a laptop much more useless. Today, most campuses have at least some sort of wireless internet access, and from what I've seen (personally) almost everyone takes a laptop when they go away for college.

I needed my desktop in my dorm room sure, but note taking was much easier with a pen and paper, and for comp-sci all of the programming projects were done on x-terms or via terminal on your PC into the campus servers.

The entire point of a small, lightweight tablet. It's much easier to take notes via pen and paper than on a keyboard. If you can carry around that notebook, you could carry around an ultra-portable tablet. In fact, you could carry around 1 ultra-portable tablet rather than multiple notebooks, not to mention have a much easier time organizing those notes.

if it is too big to fit into your pocket, it is too big for these applications. I have a HP iPaq 6515 right now (Cingular mobile GSM phone combined with Windows Mobile PDA) and I love it, it does all of these things very well. GPS, movies, MP3s, you name it, and it fits comfortably into my pocket. Even better, since it does it all, I only have to carry one device on me. The future is integrated cell phone/PDAs, not tablet PCs.

Have you seen the leaked promotional video for the Origami Project? A GPS system is most useful in a car, and a simple docking station would allow for that. Not sure how its size would in any way prevent you from sticking onto a docking station on your dashboard.

And while I am sure you enjoy watching movies on that little 240x240 screen, I'd hardly call that the ideal size for a video player. Not to mention the additional cost for storing any video of reasonable length. We are talking about a device the size of your average portable DVD player with something like a 30 GB microdrive in it. Same thing for MP3s: good luck storing more than a handful of songs on there.

And what about entertainment laptops? I wouldn't call an iPAQ a replacement for entertainment laptops (multimedia, web browsing, games, etc).

 

[NulloModo]

Not to say that was a long time ago, but WiFi hotspots were much rarer back from 1999 to 2003 than they are now, thereby making a laptop much more useless. Today, most campuses have at least some sort of wireless internet access, and from what I've seen (personally) almost everyone takes a laptop when they go away for college.

Well, UD had wifi over the entire campus then, but it was really needed, there are labs everywhere, and well, yeah, that was enough for me. Well, unless I was stuck in the ed building and had to use the G3 MacOS 9 labs, damn, those sucked hardcore.

The entire point of a small, lightweight tablet. It's much easier to take notes via pen and paper than on a keyboard. If you can carry around that notebook, you could carry around an ultra-portable tablet. In fact, you could carry around 1 ultra-portable tablet rather than multiple notebooks, not to mention have a much easier time organizing those notes.

You have a point there, but handwriting recognition needs to get a lot better and fast to make that a real option.

Have you seen the leaked promotional video for the Origami Project? A GPS system is most useful in a car, and a simple docking station would allow for that. Not sure how its size would in any way prevent you from sticking onto a docking station on your dashboard.

Anything with that big a screen is still impractical to stick on the dash of your car. Well, maybe if you drive a buick or a cadillac, but if you drive a compact mazda like me, it would take up half the windshield space

And while I am sure you enjoy watching movies on that little 240x240 screen, I'd hardly call that the ideal size for a video player. Not to mention the additional cost for storing any video of reasonable length. We are talking about a device the size of your average portable DVD player with something like a 30 GB microdrive in it. Same thing for MP3s: good luck storing more than a handful of songs on there.

And what about entertainment laptops? I wouldn't call an iPAQ a replacement for entertainment laptops (multimedia, web browsing, games, etc).

Well, for extended trips, a long plane ride, etc, I would just take my laptop. For wasting some time when I run out of work to do at work it is much easier to pull something out of my pocket than to have a tablet PC in a shoulder bag. The one drawback of the iPAQ (as well as the PSP for that matter) is that there is no video-out port to hook it up to a larger display when one is availible, if they would fix that flaw, it would be perfect. And yeah, SD cards are expensive, but I can put a day's worth of entertainment on a 2gig SD card, microdrive support would be a huge plus though.

 

[live2sk8]

I definitely see your point, but I am just saying that if some company could improve on things such as handwriting recognition all the while creating a device you'd rather take on a long trip or use in place of a laptop, or one that would be more convenient for that matter, then tablets could be much more successful than they are now. Don't forget hard-drive based MP3 players (and just MP3 players in general) were considered impractical before the iPod for a number of reasons (including size, storage ability, etc). If any two companies have the capacity to reinvent (or hell, just plain invent) an entire market, it would be Apple and Microsoft.

 

[esr2]

i think there's a reason most of the popular tech sites are pretty much chinding microsoft, this is a very hard sell. and as mentioned, many campuses have had wifi for over half a decade, such as my school, bringing it online back in 2000. I've not seen a huge tablet explosion, psp explosion, etc. I have seen (working fromt the vantage point of the computer sales on campus AND student life) huge increases in the amount of ipods and 12" ibooks sold, and those sales are more budget based in terms of the ibooks. nah, i'm not really seeing a compelling reason for these sort of machines, and neither are most people who've had their hands on them thus far unfortunately.

-esr

 

[live2sk8]

Who, besides CNBC w/ their first look at them today, has had their hands on one?

No one as far as I knew.

Either way, there's at least one person (me) who's looking forward to this

 

[NulloModo]

I definitely see your point, but I am just saying that if some company could improve on things such as handwriting recognition all the while creating a device you'd rather take on a long trip or use in place of a laptop, or one that would be more convenient for that matter, then tablets could be much more successful than they are now. Don't forget hard-drive based MP3 players (and just MP3 players in general) were considered impractical before the iPod for a number of reasons (including size, storage ability, etc). If any two companies have the capacity to reinvent (or hell, just plain invent) an entire market, it would be Apple and Microsoft.

Size is a very personal factor though. My laptop is a 15.4" widescreen (I think, whatever the Dell D800 is), pretty much a brick for its size, and I can carry it, plus a spare AC charger ang cable, a 50" ethernet cable, a replacement floppy drive that hotswops for the CD-R (how I wish it was a DVD-R), a spare battery, 5 or so CD-Rs, and a couple folders worth of useless but required paperwork without difficulty. I never weighed the total package, but if it was 20 lbs+ I wouldn't be surprised. Weight doesn't matter to me as long as I don't have to sacrifice functionality.

As I have said before, I have a cell/PDA in an iPaq 6515 that I can get my e-mail on, use IE on, use mobile Word, Powerpoint, Excel, etc, without problems. If I need just basic computing it is in my pocket all the time. The handwriting recognition on windows mobile (and Palm for that matter, I have owned plenty of Palm devices before I bought this) is still bad, and it is none to good on tablets either, which is the ultra-major thing to overcome, especially for people like me who have crappy handwriting. I can deal with the thumboard most of the time (beats the hell out of T9 input) but for taking notes, it would suck, I would still rather do it pen on paper, or buy one of those USB pens that you can plug into your real computer and let it do the recognization later.

EDIT:

If Apple would release a PDA/cell phone with good handwriting recognition and a thumboard (plus GSM tri-band and next-gen data compatibility) I would be all over that, and buy it, a MacBook Pro (providing they come out with a 17" unit, or a 15" with better resolution), and an iMac in a heartbeat. Alas, right now, for what I do, I have to stick Windows.

 

[Alias]

2) Business people: Very similar reasons. The Blackberry/Palm/Treo all-in-one devices are so popular these days because they allow people to check their email while on-the-go (as well as browse the internet and such). Laptops are also still pretty common. This one device could replace both of those.

Ever use a Black Berry? Its a little larger than a cell phone. I love mine, great at work. I can reply to e-mail in seconds. I can't imagine having an 8-10" widesreen strapped to my hip. Something like that will never replace th Blackberry.

 

[StOCK]

i'm in college right now and a laptop is far from neccesary, out of the 10 classes i've taken/am taking so far i've only seen ONE person with a laptop, and that was an ibook. there are few classes in which note taking would be easier than on paper, and it's not by much.

i doubt these 8" tablet pc's will fly much, no guy will carry around a small bag which looks like a purse, a heftier messenger bag with a more powerful 12" laptop w/keyboard just makes A LOT more sense than an underpowered, keyboardless 800x600 tablet.

 

[esr2]

i guess we should just all agree that these will be as wildly successful as we predicted and saw tablet PCs to be.

-esr

that said i did pull the old tablet out of the moving box it was sleepign in (under a clip board) and play with it for a bit... then returned it back to its home, the novelty having worn off.

 

[synergyo1]

Laptops are hardly necessary in college. I had a powerbook my freshman year and never once did I utilize it for what I intended. There are so many computer labs around campus that there is no point lugging around a laptop.

I don't see Origami doing any better.

 

[Jpitzo]

yes, laptops are actually very frustrating in college , especially in math/science majors ( try to do some line integrals in word ) . I had one for about three months my freshman year....sold it and bought a desktop heh.

I am, however, interested in the origami. I had a friend that carried his tablet around everywhere with him and while I thought it was a novel idea, it also had a 14" screen and probably weighed 5 lb's. I think if these things are reasonably small ( can fit in my shoulder bag, but not my pocket) I would be interested. If your like me and writing everything from a lecture down is the only way you can remember it you end up filling about 4 three subject notebooks a semester....this would cut down on that...and hey....I might even study then

 

[Rocketpig]

Ever use a Black Berry? Its a little larger than a cell phone. I love mine, great at work. I can reply to e-mail in seconds. I can't imagine having an 8-10" widesreen strapped to my hip. Something like that will never replace th Blackberry.

I agree. I never see something of that size replacing my Blackberry. My Blackberry is extremely functional, is small enough to fit in a pocket, and does 90% of what I would use the UMPC for.

That's not saying that the UMPC won't become more functional, but GPS and Wi-Fi being more prevalent is necessary for that to happen IMO.