Amiga as a Tablet

[CodeSmith]

Actually, right now the tablet PC is more of a solution looking for a problem.  Eventually people will start thinking of ways to take advantage of the form factor, and that's when it will really take off.  The tablet PC is now at its infancy, so the entire market is a niche.  If the AmigaTablet comes out within a year or so it will be a contender, regardless of what CPU it uses.  If it uses a low-power-drain CPU and a lightweight OS it will favourably compete with the big monsters (3 hour battery life? come on!)

[CodeSmith]

@ne_one:

Actually, I have a counter-example for you - Windows CE.  All Windows handhelds use CE, which is binary incompatible (and partly source incompatible, CE uses a subset of win32) with "big" Windows.  Yet my Ipaq interfaces pretty well with my Windows box.  If I had a Palm handheld, that would interface pretty well too, and it doesn't run anything remotely resembling windows.  Most Windows desktop apps assume you have a mouse and/or keyboard (and why not?), so they would be cumbersome to use on a Tablet PC.  If you're going to have to write a special tablet version, you might as well make it run on a different OS.  I believe that the important thing here is interoperability.  As long as I can plug the two things together, I don't really care what they're running.

[CodeSmith]

ne_one wrote:
@CodeSmith

"I believe that the important thing here is interoperability. As long as I can plug the two things together, I don't really care what they're running."

And on this (hypothetical) interoperable Amiga OS what would you be running in terms of applications that would justify laying out $1500?

See the issue?

Ahhh - but you see  :-)  a PPC or XScale-based tablet PC would not need a lot of memory, a huge hard disk or a monster battery, so it would be less than $1500 (besides the fact that I wouldn't spend that much on something unless I really wanted or needed it - that's a lot of bread!).  Another thing is that right now, the only software you'd want to run on the Tablet PC (besides the vertical market stuff like Amazon and eBay use) is Office for Tablet.  It's a nice enough set of programs, but there's not nearly as many programs as I can get for my desktop.  I suspect this is the reason 90% of the tablet PCs out there right now are regular laptops with touchscreens.

[CodeSmith]

@ne_one:

"People will buy tablets to run their favorite --software -- . Like PDAs, current models will increase in power until the delta disappears. A smaller, faster operating system is not going to change this. "

Oh, come on! this is EXACTLY why the Wintel world is in such a mess.  Why write tight, efficient software?  the prices of memory, hard disks and CPUs are going down all the time! get a faster computer, you bum!  :-)

Tell me this - why is it that my 1.3GHz Athlon with 640MB of RAM feels about as fast as my old 80MHz 486 with 8MB?  Because the software I'm running now is WAY less efficient than what I was running on my 486.  The standard response to this is "well, the stuff you're running now does a lot more".  OK, so why is it that when I run software that *is* optimized (like 3D renderers) I *do* feel the speedup? On my 486 I did not even dream of rendering anything more complicated than a few solids, on my Athlon I don't think twice about adding weird bumpmaps, CSG, etc.  And it still renders WAY faster than on the 486 (as it should).

Fast hardware is no excuse for sloppy software.

(I'm going to get lynched for this next statement) I believe we owe a lot to current software practices for the Amiga's legendary ahead-of-its-time performance - if software had been written efficiently all this time, there'd be no way anyone in his right mind could say "My A500 feels faster than my P-3".  Yes, the A500 *feels* faster, but that's because most current software *sucks* in terms of efficiency.  A 1GHz machine should wipe the floor with a 7MHz machine, regardless of how well the 7MHz box was built.  The fact that it does not do so all the time speaks volumes.