Market Currents
If consumers want their PCs and mobile devices to sport similar user interfaces, Google (GOOG)...
-
Saturday, April 28, 2012, 12:11 PM ETIf consumers want their PCs and mobile devices to sport similar user interfaces, Google (GOOG) might have a problem. While Microsoft (MSFT) is using its Metro UI to bridge Windows 8 and Windows Phone, and Apple (AAPL) is adding iOS elements to Mac OS X, Google's PC OS efforts have gone nowhere. Separately, Steve Wozniak (podcast) praises Nokia's (NOK) Lumia 900, and declares Windows Phone "more beautiful than the other platforms."
Other date
TECH ETFs IN FOCUS
Latest Tech Articles
This news story has 32 comments:
It is just stupid to dumb down a highly evolved and useful desktop interface to a mobile UI - if someone wants that they will use a mobile device.
STOP PUSHING THIS computer makers -
Android is already the world's leading overall mobile platform and growing rapidly. I don't think Google's knees are knocking.
I'm convinced that we are a lot thinking so.
If all you ever do with a computer is surf the web, it may not matter much.
But think about trying to do something complex on a tablet like writing and debugging code, drawing schematics, or even just adding a lot of fancy formatting to a document -- it'd take FOREVER on a tablet OS compared to a simple keyboard and mouse on a desktop or laptop computer with Windows 7 or OSX.
There's only so much time one can spend marveling at the "magical"ness of one's iPad before one realizes that doing more than very basic things simply takes a lot longer than it does on a real computer.
When I have a lot of work to do, the last thing I want is a desktop computer with a touch screen and only one button.
http://onion.com/IySTGl
Sort of. I agree 100% that most people barely use the capacity of their home PCs or Macs. I think there was some study a few years back that said something like 95% of home computer usage was a few basic things:
- Web
- Email
- Media (pictures/movies)
- Basic documents
And a tablet is fine for this kinds of thing (for consumption, less so for production).
However, touting Jobs' "brilliance" on this is an overstatement, as until just recently, iPads required a PC or Mac to activate and synchronize, so he clearly wasn't going after this "telecomm" market as a primary focus.
And, even for those simple things, the tablet is still less efficient than a real computer, if for no other reason than the keyboard, which is difficult to type quickly on even after a lot of practice. If you read any article on being productive with an iPad, even written by the most fanatical of fanboys, the first step is always to get an external keyboard.
Soon there may be support for a bluetooth or WiFi mouse that can be used for tablets too...basically turning the tablet into a laptop. :)
Agree.
Tablets (even laptops) are fundamentally for consumption.
Desktops can consume, but have the key abilities to produce.
Personally, I think the need for seamless operating system similarity between mobile devices and desktops is vastly overblown for two reasons:
1) I can now access anything I want or need on my desktop just fine through the cloud and/or remote-access programs, and Google synchronizes all of it automatically, even now.
2) Because we are vastly consumption-centric, people have little or no need to peruse their own desktops for media unless they're in some infinitesimally-small niche of producing content, which isn't otherwise accessible on the Internet.
Because of the foregoing, I believe any claims that Microsoft, as it attempts to invade the mobile space, poses a major threat to Android will prove unfounded. In fact, I think Windows mobile penetration will be completely ineffectual in slowing down or stopping the Android juggernaut.
You mean like this?
http://bit.ly/IP7jkO
This type of device has been around for a number of years, but it has yet to gain popularity. The price is perhaps one issue, but this keyboard has the same problem as the tablet keyboard itself: no tactile feedback.
Then I would buy Nokia shares hand over fist!
As many have posted, they wouldn't use anything else even if it were free (or, worse, they were paid to use it).
The smart-phone and smart-tablet segments have been won by Apple. The issue for competitors is the degree to which end-users only really need a smart-phone and smart-tablet.
Are you kidding me? I have a Lumia 900 and wouldn't trade for an iPhone if my life depended on it!
The windows phone is better than iOS hands down.
Speaking strictly about the operating systems...while I've not used a Windows Phone 7 device, I have used Android phones, and I do think that Android is better than iOS.
What's not better is the Android app store. And I hear the Windows Phone app store is even worse.
I keep my iPhone basically because of the apps. Every 6 months or so I poke around the Android market to see if my must-have iOS apps have mature equivalents, and that has never been the case yet.
I have not yet developed any mobile apps personally, but I've read many articles about how developers make much more money with the Apple app store than in the Android market.
To paraphrase a popular slogan of the past: "It's the apps, stupid."
As a user, I can only hope that iOS becomes more like Android and/or WP7, or the development community gets enough carrots to move over to those other platforms.
If Apple were driving these initiatives instead of Microsoft , then it would be hailed as genius. Let's see what Apple offers us when their new products come out later this year. Will their new iphone even have 4LTE capabilities?
Apple is increasing showing us that they are not ahead of the curve.
The original article is on a site called anewdomain.net: http://bit.ly/Km9fQj
And his clarifying comment is below:
Steve Wozniak
April 27, 2012 at 12:00 am · Reply
Wrong. iPhone is my favorite phone. I did give my opinion that the Windows 7P phone had superior visual appearance and operation cues that were also more attractive. In my opinion, it sets the mark for user interface. I would recommend it over my Android phones given that it doesn’t yet have the breadth of apps. I surmise that Microsoft hired someone from Apple and put money into having a role in the UI and appearance of some key apps. I also surmised that Steve Jobs might have been reincarnated at MS due to a lot of what I see and feel with this phone making me think of a lot of great Apple things.