Review: Air Display turns iPad into pricy secondary display

$499 for a 9-inch secondary display? Before you write it off as a terrible idea, read on. The iPad and Air Display may surprise you.

<a href='http://meincmagazine.com/apple/reviews/2010/06/review-air-display-makes-ipad-into-pricey-secondary-display.ars'>Read the whole story</a>

 

[wanorris]

Standardizing our multimedia content into something more friendly to iPads/iPhone/Android whatever is something we're working on currently, we agree.

It amuses me that Apple has so affected content in this way. If it was anyone else, HP say, who was saying "please put your content in H264!", we'd scoff and continue using Flash (even if FLV is just an MP4 container these days)

That's because HP was never a trailblazer.

I remember using an HP slate tablet back in what, 2004? Maybe 2005. Either this, or a close variant: http://www.tabletpc2.com/Review-HPTC1100.htm

The iPad may be a better tablet (in a variety of ways), but for the life of me, I can't see how it's more trailblazing, coming years later as it does.

 

[wanorris]

Back to the topic at hand, this is a really cool idea. Another useful mode it would be nice to have: use it as a zoom mode, with the ability to pan to different locations on the screen and zoom in and out on details.

Also, I'd love to use this with control surfaces for virtual music instruments, as the world's most elaborate "programmable remote" for an HTPC, etc. Or to run older Bioware-style RPGs, for that matter.

If this were available for Windows 7 and used the Win 7 multitouch support effectively, I would definitely consider getting an iPad.

 

[wanorris]

Ok, basic tablet history 101:

* Apple released their first tablet PC in 1993. Work was started on them in 1987. ARM as created by Acorn and Apple to provide a CPU for them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PenPoint_OS was there first. This was released in '92: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:700T , and there were others.

This is one of the cases where Apple really is an innovator. They just cut their loses for a while because the technology just wasn't up to the job, and unlike Microsoft, they couldn't afford to throw millions away with a CEO's hopes about the future at the time.

Apple was definitely a serious innovator back in the first 10-15 years of its life. I mean, the Apple ][ was hugely innovative. Apple may not have invented the GUI and mouse, but Jobs' single-minded focus on putting them together into a working, saleable package was huge, even if the first version (the Lisa) fell flat. Totally agree. And the Newton may not have been first, but it tried to do some really hard things and solve difficult problems. It was totally ahead of its time.

Since Jobs came back, though, it kind of seems like Apple has been more focused on releasing "masterpiece" versions of things that already exist than on blazing new trails. They but on Unix, they built on the Next development framework, they switched to off-the-shelf Intel CPUs and other straightforward PC components, they released an MP3 player that was a bit late but was immaculate.

It's also one of the cases where Bill Gates was right about the importance of tablets - he always saw it as the future. Just MS's execution of it so far has pretty much sucked because they're coming at it from their desktop/mouse-replacement legacy.

I'd say there's a couple issues Microsoft ran into with Tablet PC, which had some good point.

1. Working with a full-blown x86 Windows PC is a problem. There's a ton of things you have to jam in that small box, and making it a tablet actually requires more resources than a normal PC. The net effect was that Tablet PCs were chunky, slow, and usually suffering from terrible battery life. Worse, there usually weren't tablet versions of apps, because all the Windows software already ran on it, so most apps were clunky. Apple had a better choice of base platforms, and also better timing -- which wasn't a coincidence, because Apple tends to keep things under wraps until they think it's good enough to ship.

2. Microsoft was trying to solve real-world data entry problems, hence the pen. They wanted something you could use to easily take notes with and to perform general purpose computing tasks on. By contrast, the iPad is designed pretty much purely as a consumption device. It is arguably less efffective for data entry than the iPhone is, given that you pretty much have to lay it flat on a table to type decently on it. By coming up with enough interesting media consumption and game-playing tasks for it, Apple has sidestepped this problem altogether, and has thus produced a highly popular device so far.