Is this a thread championing things like the low power SAM boards? Or older Macs and MOS? Or just some thread about how tablets and smartphones will replace a powerful multi-gigahertz i7 PC/Mac?
Well firstly all those little games on iOS or Android devices are pretty crap, if I want to play a game it will be of the minimum quality achievable via 360 or PS3 for a start if not better via a top end gaming PC. I have no interest in all this flash game rubbish shoved in front of me as some sort of replacement for things like even Battlefield 2 from 2005 *puke* If I want to play simple games there are 100,000 FREE games to play on emulators, and these games written in the 80s and 90s on various Commodore branded machines are better than crap like Angry Birds FACT.
So you can watch HD video on an iPad....so what? It's like saying you can get a BMW 1 series with the super powerful M engine and specification. Just because it is possible doesn't mean it's not full of FAIL. If I want to watch HD it will be via a 17" laptop screen/TV/projector via the PC. The bitrate for HD movies on these new devices is atrocious....only a hobo would think it looked OK on a 42" TV even when you can connect these devices in such a way.
Downloading....do I want to download the entire CD32 TOSEC via some ass raping contract on a crappy 3G connection OR dump it all straight onto a 5TB drive on a PC connected to a 120mb broadband connection hmmm. Also if you have ever tried to download a torrent with 1000s of files onto SD media you will know how full of fail this is too.
Anything creative, editing photos or even making a simple 2002 flavour website is not possible on such devices. And the tools are not available anyway even if you did want to code up a website on a tablet.
Whilst you can certainly use an iPhone/Android device to bid on a Ferrari on ebay using the net on such small devices is awkward clumsy and hamfisted thing again only idiots would argue is as good as using even a basic 1280x720 14" laptop. Convenient on the go sure, use it exclusively on such devices? Erm no.
The list goes on, it will be a long time before Microsoft suffer huge drops in sales due to tablets/phones making PCs obsolete. We had all this crap before when everyone was saying netbooks are the second coming, maybe a few idiots came in their pants over them but the reality was netbooks were barely useable hunks of s.hit to be honest. What's the screen size on the latest Macbook slimline model...oh yes exactly the same as slim and light laptops from last decade like the Toshiba Portege models with their 1.8" IDE drives.
So yes if I want to play oldskool games I have a C64 and Amiga (and 20 other machine formats) to play them on, if I want to watch videos I do it on a 150" screen powered by a laptop to feed it A/V data and if I want to make a phone call I have something called a phone. I could have played Doom on my phone in 2003....but why would I want to do that? If I was that desperate to play Doom on the train I would have purchased a Libretto 120CT 6" laptop the size of a Nintendo DS Lite
Obviously though there are plenty of fashionistas buying these things and conning themselves into believing this is the second coming, as radical and life changing as the Atari 2600 or Commodore 64. Whatever....marketing dept wet dream is all this stuff is.
