Many of the cool ideas that have been brought everyday use by the computer industry over the last several decades were first contemplated at Xerox Parc. In particular many of the ideas that led directly to the Mac. One of the visions at Parc involved computing devices existing in three formats; tabs, pads and boards. (Think pda/phone, light tablet computers, and compute servers built into building with large interactive wall-mounted displays).
The ways we use computing do seem to be evolving in this direction. It seems like everyone I know carries a Tab (iPhone, Pre, Blackberry, Android), and we’re starting to see the promise of blackboards with Surface and wall-mounted analogs.
We are likely to receive a bastard hybrid of a tab and a pad from Apple some time soon. Certainly the rumor mill/slash pent up desire is all clamoring for such a thing; basically a jumbo iPhone/iTouch (duct-tape three iTouches together to get a sense). It will be another good step in the right direction. Still too heavy and a little small, and the battery life will suck, but everything else may be what we need.
A device which works better for viewing and lightly manipulating documents, which will already have a library of thousands of applications available thanks to iPhone app compatibility. This will allow a device to succeed that surely would have failed released on its own. The iPod made them able to own the online music business, the iPhone gave them an app store and a revenue stream from monthly subscribers, the iPad would give them the paid page-oriented content business that needs to arise to replace the vanishing dead-tree editions of everything.
This isn’t slam-dunk. Paid Internet content has a mixed history, mostly full of fail. A pad is large enough that putting it in your pocket isn’t an option, though we’re getting used to carrying some small device thanks to netbooks. We are also conditioned to talking on the phone the way you would with an iPad. But really we’ll be best off when Pads are cheap enough that you can have several around the house and the office and don’t need to carry it anywhere.
Incidentally, Apple has a history of playing with an idea in a low key way to let someone else take the brunt of any bad news. For example iTunes on Motorola phones is obvious in retrospect for the experiment (and sucker ploy) it was. Is the iTunes LP practice for interactive e-books? (There is some evidence that iTunes LP is not really what it is claimed to be.)
Tabs will continue to evolve. In the long run we need some sort of e-paper (no power draw when static) solution but with true print quality and in color. Current e-paper is a very nice step in the right direction but lacks color or even decent gray scale. There is better gray scale available on devices which we don’t see much of in the states yet, and color e-paper on prototype devices, such as the electrofluidic display created in Cincinnati or the display technology based on bouncing light back at different wavelengths by manipulating a physical surface (which sounded promising but seems to have disappeared). E-ink has color displays in its lab which are nimble enough to support video.
The progression is we’ve been trying for some sort of tablet computer for about 20 years and all of them have been intermediary steps to where we’re ultimately going; a light, near paper-sized wirelessly connected display. That ‘display’ won’t need much more than a browser as will will be used in conjunction with applications that are largely running elsewhere on servers.
Just add and stir; e-paper, ubiquitous wi-fi/3g, HTML5, cloud apps, fuel-cell batteries, and the Internet. None of which existed when we started down this path.