Any news on future release of OS4 netbook or on Natami?

[Hattig]

Tablets are primarily consumption devices, the user can consume various forms of information and entertainment. On screen keyboards are fine for basic uses, but not for longer periods of work. Luckily Bluetooth keyboards exist for most tablets.

However a netbook (especially a decent AMD based one) is actually far more useful if you are going to be doing anything more involved that consuming data and giving trivial input.

Both can co-exist in a household.

I think it's been around a decade since someone first suggested ARM as a possible AmigaOS target. A port back then could have led to AmigaOS being a major player in the tablet space by now. Too late now.

As for Natami, the team had a meltdown and they all went off to do their own thing. The NatAmi head person, Thomas, decided he wanted to do ALL of the work by himself for some personal achievement reasons. As far as I'm concerned it's pretty much dead, at least for the foreseeable future. FPGAArcade is the best bet right now.

[Hattig]

I've spent £130 on a 64GB Blackberry Playbook. Partially because it's QNX based, mostly because it's a ridiculously cheap price for a well built high quality bit of hardware that sadly didn't do that well. I can stick it in my bag, it's under a pound in weight (netbooks being around 3lb), and it will do most if not all of the portable things I want a device to do.

But, I have my netbook and my main laptop, and my main PC, and my home server, for all the other things.

[Hattig]

The question is what's going to happen when the novelty wears off, tablets are no longer "cool," and people start assessing them based on their actual usefulness and not just their specs compared with other tablets

Tablets are taking off as media consumption devices. If there's anything that the TV has taught us, it is that people love consuming media. Tablets are great at this. I see no reason for them to lose popularity.

However like TVs the upgrade cycle could be quite long, because there won't be a real need for the upgraded tablets coming out, much like if you aren't itching to buy the latest SmartTV because your current one is perfectly adequate. All tablets can do is get better displays, get lighter/thinner, and get faster.