Can tablets, 3D move beyond niche markets? | Bangkok Post: tech

COMPUTER Currents

Forget the iPad for a moment and consider that the tablet revolution started a decade or so ago and never went anywhere. Today tablet machines occupy a fairly small niche market. People just don't want to interface with a machine using only their fingers on a touch screen. Once the novelty wears off it is back to the notebook or PC computers.

Imagine if the business space was occupied with a tablet machine of some kind. If there is a keyboard, mouse and screen attached then it is just another computer. Without these it is an inefficient way to manage a business. If you are doing a stock take then a tablet PC can be an excellent tool. If you are performing a business audit it may not be the best tool to use.

The same thing goes with touch screens. The world has been there, done that and again this is a niche market though the multi-touch technology is nice when it is implemented properly.

Then there is the latest fad: 3D. Three-dimensional TVs, Nintendo DS units, Sony PlayStations and the list goes on. It seems that if it doesn't have 3D stamped on it somewhere the tech media is not interested in it. For a start the headsets and glasses are expensive. Then there is the current availability of 3D programming, games and other content. Unless the media producers get on board the concept will die a quick death. Like many I enjoyed Avatar in 3D but it wasn't brilliant. I enjoyed the 3D teaser more than the technology implementation in the movie.

The technology is still raw and apart from those TVs in The Emporium, unless you have glasses it won't work. You get a couple of pairs for "free" with your TV purchase but for the whole family you need to shell out for the extra pairs. It remains to be seen how well the media industries support this technology.

Industry news

Microsoft has silently slipped a Firefox extension onto user machines via an automatic software update. In a recent patch update MS released an update for its various browser toolbars which included an entire add-on for Internet Explorer and an extension for Mozilla Firefox. As it has done so in the past this happened without asking the user. Since then they have changed the update to get rid of the silent toolbar install. Microsoft called this "a bug." You can stop laughing now, they really said that the whole Bing toolbar install thing was a mistake and given their past history in these things I'm sure that at least one person believed them. The update was flagged as important, not optional and the fact that the uninstall button was disabled was, I am sure, yet another oversight. It is also worth noting that MS did almost exactly the same thing a year ago with a service pack for .NET framework that pushed a FireFox add-on with the uninstall button disabled. Perhaps this was a one year memorial?

Apple recently showcased HTML 5, something that Steve Jobs has declared is the future for graphics, video and presentation, and, of course, that as such Flash is history. The showcase demonstrated what appears to be Apple's position and showed what could be built on the Web using HTML5 and JavaScript. This might have been fine, except that it only worked with Safari. It is not that the demos wouldn't have worked with, say, Firefox or Chrome but that Showcase wouldn't let them. It checked to see what the browser was, and if not Safari, you saw a pop-up telling you to download it. Remind you of anyone?

The Showcase itself is cherry-picked pieces of HTML5 that suited Apple's agenda, namely the video and audio tags and Cascading Style Sheets working together with JavaScript. This has now annoyed both the Mozilla and Opera camps adding them to the list of those becoming increasingly annoyed with the new Apple under Jobs.

Most computer people have heard of Adaptec the adapter and storage company. It has recently changed its name to ADPT Corporation and will be focusing on "capital redeployment and identification of new business operations" under Steele Partners. In other words, the once well known company has faded into obscurity like so many before it.

I have noticed that the prices of Apple items like the iPad and iPhone 4 are creeping up in some places. An iPad in Australia, for example, is around $1,000 for the 32GB model. You can get a very nice notebook for that money.