Re-inventing the notebook
For a long long time I was entirely convinced that tablet computers would never amount to anything. My rationale for this belief was simple and grounded in reality: tablets don’t have keyboards. The keyboard will continue to be weapon of choice for bulk text entry until voice recognition is reliable. This won’t happen until true AI is achieved. Which may be never. A tablet with a keyboard, I smugly opined, is called a notebook. QED. There were other reasons: finger as pointer is tiring, and the fingertip is a blunt instrument requiring large targets. But along came the iPhone, and the UI was reinvented finger-friendly. You still do get fingerprints all over the screen, but people seem to get over it.
The bit about the keyboard remains true, though, but what I’d forgotten is while bulk text entry may be a major use of computers, it is far from the only use. Quite a lot of user time is spent consuming bulk text entered by someone else, with very little text entry occurring even during a search.
When you need a keyboard, you really need a keyboard. And not a crappy little notebook keyboard – you need a full sized keyboard with decent sized keys, a numeric keypad, the cursor key cluster, the whole song and dance. These are widely available for about $20. They plug into a USB port. So if your tablet has two USB ports, you can plug in a full sized mouse and a proper keyboard. Carting these is a nuisance, but nowadays they’re commodity items. So you leave mouse and keyboard at home and at work, and you don’t bother to cart them around. If you go to someone else’s office your chance of being able to borrow these items is 100%. And WiFi is ubiquitous.
It’s not that tablets are better. The world has changed. Their time has come.