ultra mobile pc
Ok so I across this tidbit via digdotus, one of my favorite sites of the day that I visit seemingly every 3-4 hours it seems like. Anyways its a story of a 12 year girl taking the ultra mobile pc for a test drive. Now to me the UMPC is a small beefy tablet, running windows tablet os, and it has a few bonus features. Essentially its a tablet pc really, and so what about that i guess is the first thing that comes to mind to me.
Sure its more portable but after going thru and experiencing the 1st & 2nd gen tablet experiences not much has really changed here. 2nd gen tablets are taking on more characteristics of their laptop brotheren in the sense that I see less sheer slates in play these days and far more 2nd gen convertibles (the screen flips around). In fact all the tablet pcs I know of, rarely ever use them as tablets. I'll get more into that later.
Back to Kim's experience article. See her experience here.
Ponder.
Ok my beef. Again this is a tablet pc on a small screen. My biggest beef here, or problem I have with this box is that basically the hardware aspects have changed but the OS and UI haven't. Alias Sketchbook and Art Rage are about the only apps out there in tablet land that really take a radically different approach to the UI.
Watching the youtube piece just makes me think about the various hand gestures that we are forcing upon ourselves to meet the UI's interaction requirement. Just watch the hand move and from position to position and think to yourself, is that natural?
The UI is made for a mouse, not for a hand. Thats my beef. So sure here's yet another product designed for mouse + keyboard interaction slammed into a seemingly small friendly supposedly better more mobile design that has a touch screen yet the end user is still crippled by a OS + UI designed for a mouse and keyboard.
Its destined to fail, upset and frustrate the hell outa people. Maybe Kim's small hands and fingers can get to that File / Open / X document window better than my fat fingers can. Just watching the youtube video alone makes you just wonder did anyone at microsoft really consider the fact that all these gestures to write "hello all" were worth it?
This is the part that irks me about microsoft, they haven't revealed any major changes to the UI since the tablet has appeared 2-3 years ago. Sure they've made minor changes to stylus interaction, or keyboard input access, but the gist of the UI is still primarly based in a world of using a physical mouse and keyboard, and it reflects that. I would love to see the Art Rage people do their take on the whole entire OS look and feel and see what a real tablet / hand interaction UI might look like.
So to me, no real changes, same OS, same UI, smashed into a construct that cant really deliver properly.
Sure a brand new UI would be really really risky, I agree, I mean yer talking about non-mouse interaction. Mice interaction is sooo fine tuned and my finger interaction is a helluva lot more messy. But helllo if thats the reality of usage, well umm lets design for that. There's been little strides i see on microsofts part to truly innovate the concept.
So its neat, i give them that. Its another extension of the laptop, congrats. Thats about it. Until the UI can really support the interaction of a physical hand, fingers, gestures, provide the proper feedback and so on, only then can you really truly make the leap into something new and really grab that seamless interaction aka "it belongs" like elements.
Ok now looking at another youtube clip I do see they have some skinned elements on top of the OS. The PSP like movie center UI is better, but the touchpad, the interesting alignment of using the two far corners to show off their startrek like UI interaction areas... interesting, and i'd have to see them in play more before I'd really talk about them. I would wager that is about the most advanced idea i've seen them come up, but it only effect the UMPC, doesnt seem to play into the overall tablet design.
I think its safe to say that apple is making some strides in the tablet arena as well. They are considering it, and they are debating all the various aspects, and you can bet full well that they will be addressing these issues and either developing a finger gesture layer to go top of it the OS or better. Or if anything the may simply release their version of a tablet mac generation 1. But I hope they've learned a bit from the short comings of the tablet pc series.
I'm not a tablet pc bashed by stretch. I've used them extensively in the field on research probjects. We've first gen HP slates in play, and four toshiba's. We apply them in instances they fit. But they still have a long ways to go. I would even forsee using something like the UMPC in research testing and analysis, especially as a kind of field recorder device, that i could see, but I'd design my own apps to sit on top of it to work with hand better thats for sure.