OnTouch Magazine

M AY/J U N E 11

ONTOUCH MAGAZINE

How Star Trek Predicted the iPad Motorola XOOM

BIG TABLET ROUNDUP 9 Reasons the Killer Tablet App is the Browser Microsoft Surface 2 at CES

Hands-on Review

ONTOUCH MAGAZINE

M AY / JU NE 2 0 1 1 EXECUTIVE EDITOR AUTHOR 99 Things: 9 Reasons Why the Killer Tablet App is the Browser AUTHOR How star trek Predicted the iPad 23 Years Ago AUTHOR Motorla Xoom: Hands on with the World’s First Android Tablet AUTHOR Why Touch Devices will Replace Laptops in College Classrooms GRAPHIC ARTIST The Big Tablet Roundup CONTRIBUTING EDITOR

William Millar Jason Baptiste

Chris Foresman

Corinne Iozzio

Gianna Walton

William Millar Gene Parmesan

DESIGN & PUBLISHING

William Millar

Produced for Joseph Quackenbush’s Typography III class at the Massachusetts College of Art & Design. All images copyright their respective owners. Design © 2011, William Millar. Text set in Univers LT Std, Futura Std, Microgramma, and Briem Akademi Std.

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START UP A look at the current state of the tablet industry

99THINGS 9 Reasons Why the Killer Tablet App is the Browser

JUST IN We take a look at the newest devices on the market

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NINE T Y- NINE THINGS NEVER ENOUGH LISTS

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R EA SON S WHY T HE KI LLER TA BLET A PP I S T HE B R O WS ER

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he tablet market is exploding and exceeding everyone’s wildest dreams.

Apple is in the lead, but the Android tablets along with many others are on their way. In an interview back in January, I stated that “apps are bullshit for content”.

I thought it would be good to clarify that statement and explain my reasoning why the future of content on tablet devices is not going to be delivevtted through apps, but through one killer app: the browser.

“APPS ARE BULLSHIT FOR CONTENT”

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REFERRAL TRAFFIC IS LOST WITH APPS The majority of a content owner’s traffic comes from referral traffic such as search, share, and email. That traffic has and always will go back to the website itself. Even if a link is opened in the Twitter app, it is still showing that content in a UI web view. It’s close to impossible to have that traffic open up in a native app, which would require a user has it installed already. Sure, it could prompt the reader to download the app, but that is a painful experience. If publishers create apps instead of focusing on the web they throw out half of their traffic .

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READERS ARE ALREADY GOING TO THE SITE Readers are already trained to go to a publication’s website. Why should they be funneled through a website, told to download an app, and then navigate to an article?

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HTML5 IS CAPABLE TO DELIVER APP-LIKE EXPERIENCES Publishers want to deliver a great experience that can take advantage of what’s possible on tablet devices. The solution 9 months ago was to create apps that are essentially glorified PDFs and cost a ton of money. The new solution is to use HTML5 to provide the same type of experience and on the web.

HTML5 can’t do the crazy game enabled capabilities but it certainly can do many of the fast content effects seen in native content apps. Transforms, fonts, and more make it possible that the web can be indistinguishable from native apps. It’s hard, don’t get me wrong, but it’s now possible.

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FIXING THE “STUFF TO DO” PROBLEM When you buy a tablet, you’re given a new device and need “stuff to do”. Apps clearly fill that void by allowing you to play games, consume content, and more.

Sure you already browse the web, but you download apps because you know they are made for that device. Sadly, most of the web is not made for tablets… yet. By making the web tablet and touch friendly, it increases the value of tablets tremendously.

ON THE WEB, PUBLISHERS CAN CHOOSE THE ADS THEY WANT, DISPLAY THE CONTENT THEY WANT, AND GIVE UP A MUCH SMALLER PIECE OF THE PIE.

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HOMESCREEN FATIGUE Readers will only keep so many apps on their homescreen at one given time. You’re also competing against apps that will never go away such as ASafari, YouTube, mail, and more on a reader’s homescreen along with apps like Angry Birds and Instagram, that aren’t even content apps.

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CONSISTENT CROSS DEVICE EXPERIENCE By focusing on the web, you can create a consistent cross device experience. It’s hard to create apps that will work across all touch devices, if not nearly impossible. By focusing on the web, you know that a reader will have the same consistent experience whether they are on iPad, the Xoom, or the TouchPad. The web is also a write once, deploy everywhere environment, where apps are not.

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THE WEB WAS MEANT FOR URLS The web was meant to have each individual piece of content have a permanent place in history. With apps there is no foot in the ground for a piece of content. If you want to directly link to a piece of content inside of an app, how do you do that?

You can’t. The web was built upon URLs and people sharing and linking to them.

If apps were to dominate the world, we’d lose that structure.

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APP STORES DON’T PROVIDE REAL DISTRIBUTION Publishers think that app stores are the holy grail for traffic and distribution, when they are in reality driving very little “new distribution”. App stores have horrible discovery. The best way to discover new content apps is through a pure search query. Odds are though, that if you love a media property enough to search for it in an app store, you already visit the site.

You are not a new reader. Social sharing provides real distribution.

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FOLLOW THE MONEY Apps and the keepers of the platform ultimately decide what a publisher can or cannot do. How much can they take for subscriptions? What data can they collect? When can they push an update? Going through intermediary app stores puts the decisions they can make from a business perspective in the hands of others. Those decisions, especially around monetization are the lifeblood of any publisher. Putting that control in the hands of a select few is scary and literally gives away the power they have. The most alarming is Apple’s decision to take a 30% cut of all subscriptions and making that a mandatory option. On the web, publishers can choose the ads they want, display the content they want, and give up a much smaller piece of the pie.

So where do apps make sense in the tablet world? With applications that exist PRIMARILY as an app, not as a supplemental app to a website. Examples:

TRANSFORMS, FONTS, AND MORE MAKE IT POSSIBLE THAT THE WEB CAN BE INDISTINGUISHABLE FROM NATIVE APPS. IT’S HARD—DON’T GET ME WRONG—BUT IT’S NOW POSSIBLE.

Flipboard and Angry Birds make total sense as apps. They take advantage of what can be done natively and don’t have web counterparts.

All content apps such as CNN, Huffington Post, and more are just extensions of a website, where their real traffic exists. They should not be apps. The same can be seen with apps such as basecamp and their recent HTML5 version of the site for touch devices.

It’s not a question of if, after talking to publishers of all sizes, but a question of when.

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HOW

O

STAR

: The Next ristic of Star Trek te ac ar ch ng sti re ne inte the original separated it from at th e on n— io at Gener d use of was its widesprea s— lm fi rly ea e th of series and most e Enterprisenels throughout th pa l ro nt co d se ba hsmooth, flat, touc s portable used for numerou so al as w ce rfa D. This touch inte lay Devices. onal Access Disp rs Pe or s, DD PA devices known as semblance to bear a striking re s al in rm te g tin pu These mobile com defined by its g device largely tin pu m co ile ob m Apple’s iPad—a . hscreen interface smooth, flat touc

TREK PREDIC T ED THE

iPAD 24 YEARS AGO

“ PEO PL E W O U L D CO M E T O M E A N D S A Y, ‘W H AT H A PPEN S I F I N EE D T O D O T H I S ?’ A N D I R EA I ZED T H E To understand the thinking that led to the design of the Star Trek PADD, we spoke to some of the people involved in production of ST:TNG (as well as other Star Trek TV series and films), including Michael Okuda, Denise Okuda, and Doug

PR O PER A N S W ER FO R T H A T W A S , ‘I T ’S IN T H E S O FT W A R E. ’ ”

Drexler. All three were involved in various aspects of production art for Star Trek properties, including graphic design, set design, prop design, visual effects, art direction, and more. We also discussed their impressions of the iPad and how eerily similar it is to their vision of 24th century technology, how science fiction often influences technology, and what they believe is the future of human-machine interaction.

The P.A.D.D., imagined by Jeffries and his team, has many similarities to Apple’s iPad

CTRONIC FROM “ELE ” TO PADD CLIPBOARD ’s Star Trek: The

1979 s, beginning with he Star Trek film sign, props, budgets for set de le ab siz d ha e, ur Motion Pict series original Star Trek e th , er ev ow H s. and special effect to fill starships ve the resources ha ’t dn di s 60 19 from the lays. s, and video disp with buttons, knob

T

According to Michael Okuda, original Star Trek

inated by large type and sweeping, curved

art director Matt Jefferies had practically no

rectangles. The style was first employed in Star

budget. “He had to invent an inexpensive, but

Trek IV: The Voyage Home for the Enterprise-A,

believable solution,” he told Ars. “The spacecraft

and came to be referred to as

of the day, such as the Gemini capsules, were

The graphics could be created on transparent

jammed full of toggle switches and gauges. If he

colored sheets very cheaply, though as

OKUDAGRAMS.

ST:TNG

had had the money to buy those things, the

progressed, control panels increasingly used

Enterprise would have looked a lot like that.”

video or added post-production animations.

Because Jefferies was forced by budget re-

“The initial motivation for that was in fact cost,”

straints to be creative, however, the original

Okuda explained. “Doing it purely as a graphic

Enterprise bridge was relatively sparse and

was considerably less expensive than buying

simplistic. “Because he did such a brilliant job

electronic components. But very quickly we

visualizing it, I think the original Star Trek still

began to realize—as we figured out how these

holds up today reasonably well,” Okuda said.

things would work and how someone would

Similar budget constraints meant creative solutions were required for ST:TNG as well. “We

operate them, people would come to me and say, ‘What happens if I need to do this?’ Perhaps it

had a much lower budget than the feature films

was some action I hadn’t thought of, and we

did,” Okuda told Ars. “So, for example, I looked

didn’t have a specific control for that. And I

at the production process of making a control

realized the proper answer to that was, ‘It’s in the

panel, and I said, ‘How can I make this as

software.’ All the things we needed could be

inexpensive as possible?’ Having made those

software-definable.”

decisions, ‘now what can I do to make it as futuristic as posible?’”

What could be simpler to make than a flat

What Okuda realized is that with physical hardware interfaces, each function has to be designed into the interface from the beginning. But by imag-

surface with no knobs, buttons, switches, or other

ining that software could re-configure the

details? Okuda designed a user interface dom-

interface as needed, the writers were able to

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to look G was designed Interface in ST: TN ugh that t seAnsible eno bu x, ple com y ver could feel that “[they] the viewer would fly a starship.” to w ho t ou re figu

imagine any function that needed to advance the

orders using what were referred to as “electronic

plot, and the production artists could create a

clipboards.” These rather bulky-looking (by

“software” interface to perform the specific action.

Since the props weren’t functional, no real code

today’s standards) boxes had a sloped top with a large area for writing with an attached stylus, as

needed to be written. “We were free to imagine,

well as a few light-up buttons. Lt. Uhura often

‘What if you do this? Or what if you just touched

used one in her role as communications officer.

that and it became a helm panel?’” Okuda said.

Still, the design of the user interface on the

For ST:TNG and beyond, Starfleet used touchscreen PADDs. The thin, handheld devices used

various control panels was influenced by user

the same interface as the control panels and

experience considerations. “What I tried to do

Awe wanted to make them sleeker, slimmer, and

was create something that, at a distance, looked

way more advanced than the electronic clip-

like it had a macro-level organization,” Okuda

boards were on the original series,” Okuda said.

told Ars, “and when you got closer, there

But PADDs were much more powerful than

appeared to be an additional overlay of organi-

electronic note pads. “We realized that with the

zation on top of that. The viewer would imagine,

networking capabilities we had postulated for the

looking at it, ‘If I study this close enough, I could

ship, and given the [hypothetical] flexibility of the

figure out how to fly a starship.’”

software, you should be able to fly the ship from

Avid viewers may remember that officers on the

the PADD,” Okuda said.

original Star Trek took notes or signed off on

“ WE ALWA Y S FELT T H A T T H E CL A S S I C O KU DA T-BAR GRA PH I C W A S M A L L EA B L E, A N D T H A T YOU COULD S T R ET CH A N D R EA R R A N G E I T TO SUIT Y O U R T A S K, J U S T L I KE T H E I PA D , ”

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Controls on ST:TE NG were large ma surfaces with int lleable eractive graphics . Visual motifs included colorful objects, a big bla ck background, rounded corners, and pas tel colors.

STAR TREK DREAMS

L

ike the PADD, Ap ple’s iPad and ot her iOS devices are designed largely around the idea that the software defines how the device ca n be used. “Nothi ng compares to th e almost alive interface of the iPad,” Doug Drexler told Ars. An ardent reader of scienc e fiction from the age of 10, the iP ad’s touch interface was so mething he had long expected. “I think my attitude was, ‘It’s about time!’” he said.

“

I

think that anything that has no apparent

mechanism yet delivers a big punch is either futuristic or, if you are from the Middle Ages,

a visual effect. It’s implemented brilliantly on the iPad and the iPhone.”

Drexler said that to him, the iPad is “eerily

magic,” Drexler explained. Advanced alien

similar” to the PADDs used in Star Trek. “We

devices on the original Trek series often had no

always felt that the classic Okuda T-bar graphic

discernible mechanism. So touch interfaces seem

was malleable, and that you could stretch and

like magic. It’s also slightly eerie, as you have the

rearrange it to suit your task, just like the iPad,”

sensation that this thing is aware of you.”

he said. “The PADD never had a keyboard as

Even Okuda was impressed with how natural

part of its casing, just like the iPad. Its geometry

and fluid the interface of the iPad feels in use.

is almost exactly the same—the corner radius, the

Actions that involved complex post-production

thickness, and overall rectangular shape.”

effects on a PADD actually seem easy on an iPad,

“It’s uncanny to have a PADD that really works,”

he said. “There are a lot of things that are very

Drexler said, unlike the non-functional props

easy to do in a prop, but actually very difficult to

made for the TV series and later films. “The iPad

do in reality,” he told Ars. “For example, pinch to

is the true Star Trek dream,” Drexler told Ars.

zoom—that was relatively difficult to do even as

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LEAP A QUANTUM

iving se of use as a dr kuda identified ea oducnology that the pr factor behind tech driving for the future—a d ne sio vi en am tion te idered berr y himself cons factor that Rodden

O

essential.

“IT’S UNCANN Y T O HAVE A PADD T H A T REALLY WORK S. T H E IPAD IS THE T R U E STAR TREK DREA M .”

“

One thing that informed not just the PADD, but

the overall technology, was that Gene Roddenberry wanted the new Enterprise to be visibly more advanced then the original Enterprise,” Okuda said. “Roddenberry had the wisdom to realize that ‘advanced’ didn’t mean ‘more complicated.’ He actually wanted things to be much simpler. So we took that to mean that it was cleaner, better user interfaces, fewer buttons, fewer things to learn how to operate,” he told Ars. Touch is a natural interaction for users, and lends itself to greater ease of use. Executed well, it can make devices more accessible, in a shorter period of time, to a wider user base. “The average user can pick up an iPhone or an iPad, and with 30 seconds of instruction, they can use it,” Okuda said. “Maybe not in great detail, but for them it’s still a functional device.”

Early personal computers weren’t known for ease of use. “I grew up with IBM PCs, using them, and being comfortable with the DOS operating system,” Okuda said. “But at the same time, I was frustrated with the fact that I had to think the same way the designers and programmers did.”

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The Mac changed all that, Okuda told Ars. “The very first time I saw the Apple Macintosh, it was an astonishing quantum breakthrough. Here

time. Within a few minutes I could learn how to use it; that was my ‘ah-ha moment.’”

Both Michael and Denise felt the same “ah-ha

was someone beating their brains into guaca-

moment” when using an iPad. “The iPad, that

mole in order to make this machine easy for me

kind of interface, represents a quantum leap over

to use,” he said.

the interface in the original Mac,” Michael told Ars.

Denise Okuda, Michael’s wife, didn’t come

Okuda expressed frustration that so many other

from an art or technology background before

devices had been designed for the technology

working on Star Trek. She became more involved

and not the user. By way of example, he de-

in design and art direction with Michael’s help

scribed how easily his parents would typically

and her comfort using a Mac. “When I first sat

give up after trying out some new technology.

down at a DOS-based computer, I wanted

“Yet, you hand them something simple like an

nothing to do with them,” she explained. “That

iPad, and the learning curve is very short and

changed when I used a Macintosh for the first

thepayoff is almost immedate,” he said.

TODAY: SC IENCE FICT ION, T O M O R R OW : REALITY

T

he same general

concepts behind the PADD doubtle ss had some influence in the eventual deve lo pment of the iPad But science fictio . n often inspires ne w technology, an d many devices that we now take for gran ted appeared in Star Trek.

CONTINUE

READING O N PA G E 8 9

The iPad optimize s a malleable int erface, personal size, and natural gestures to provide a seamless user experience.

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ON REVIEW motorola

OOM

HANDS ON WITH THE FIRST REAL ANDROID TABLET

W

e’ve been anxiously awaiting the

Motorola Xoom’s arrival ever since we groped it at CES. The first dual-core tablet! The first tablet to use Android’s tablet-only Honeycomb OS! The first Android tablet that doesn’t immediately make us think “look at that giant phone!” And, yeah, the first legitimate iPad competitor, period. What we found was a great tablet--not a “promising” product, but a tablet that is seriously fast, fun to use, well-designed, and very pretty (when was the last time you heard “pretty” applied to Android?

what’s new

GOOGLE APPS We already knew that Google was pushing panel-based app formatting for Honeycomb. When you first open Gmail, for instance, it may look just like it does in iOS, but the experience is much more seamless. In message view, the left-most column of the screen houses a list of items in a folder (say, your inbox), while the right two-thirds displays an expanded, threaded conversation view; if you ask me, the Honeycomb format trounces even web-based Gmail. In both Mail and Gmail accounts, the main folder-view allows you to drag-and-drop messages in and out of folders. The Maps app has a similar layout; instead of imposing a search pane and results over the entire screen (as in cellphone Android), it keeps a list of place entries to the leftmost third of the screen, so you can see a snapshot of the location and its, well, location, side-by-side, just as you would on the web.

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the good

The 10-inch Xoom is both the first tablet to hit stores that runs the Honeycomb version of Android, which Google has designed specifically for larger screens, and the first boasting a dual-core processor (Nvidia’s Tegra 2) to handle heaps of tasks at once.

(This will become the standard soon; BlackBerry’s Playbook and likely the next iPad will also have dual-core processors.) Google has shown off the Xoom as the flagship of this new generation of Android devices: the first true Android tablet, running the first true Android tablet OS.

TABBED BROWSING Waiting for a Chrome tablet? Here’s a worthy substitute. If you know the Chrome browser, you know what’s going on here. Honeycomb’s web browser is delightfully powerful, a supercharged version of the Android browser that has much more in common with the desktop Chrome browser than Google’s previous mobile efforts. You can keep several tabs open simultaneously, including “incognito” tabs that keep your history private. I was sure when I opened the New York Times, CNN, ESPN PopSci.com and others all at once that there would be substantial lag when toggling from window to window, but that was happily not the case. It also syncs with your Chrome bookmarks and automatically logs into the primary Google account on the Xoom, so you can hop right into any Web apps.

BUTTON-LESS-NESS Google has touted Honeycomb as a button-free experience, which made me skeptical at first (I like the oneclick-to-home on the iPad and other iOS devices), but I was quickly proven wrong. In video playback, for one, there’s nothing to see but screen; and it only takes a quick tap on the lower or upper edges to pop the navigation and menus back up. The same goes for reading ebooks: ain’t nuthin’ but the page in front of you.

There is one physical key, though, it’s just not on the face; in fact, the placement of the power/lock button on the upper-left corner of the device’s back is unusual but near-perfectly placed, right where your pointer finger falls when gripping the slab.

CAMERA

HARDWARE

The camera refresh in Honeycomb is long overdue. When using the rear-facing camera, the captured image takes up about two-thirds of the screen, with the image controls remaining handy on the right, letting you adjust white balance, flash, color palate and scene modes without bouncing in and out of pop-up menus. One click (or tap, or whatever) also swaps between the rear-facing five-megapixel sensor and the front-facing two-megapixel sensor.

Honeycomb aside, the Xoom is the most well-thought-out tablet I’ve ever tinkered with. While it ships as a 3G and Wifi device, a SIM card slot on the top will allow it to connect to ultra-fast 4G once the Verizon LTE network rolls out later this year. Its memory is also expandable up to 64GB via MicroSD card (it ships with a hefty 32GB). Its dual-core 1GHz Nvidia Tegra 2 processor is also well up to the challenges presented by multitasking media; I never noticed as much as a blip in any of my playback or load times, and everyday use was buttery smooth.

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c o n t i n ue d

the good

84

NOTIFICATIONS AND SETTINGS Honeycomb has taken the notifications bar from the tippity top of the screen and moved it down to the lower righthand corner. From here, no matter what app you’re in, you can see when there’s any activity anywhere else on the device. A new Google Talk message, for example, pops up in its own small box alongside a thumbnail image of whoever sent it. The same goes for emails and tweets, though they’re accompanied by the app logo, instead of a face, and it’s a nice use of the larger screen real estate compared to a smartphone.

Tapping the digital clock opens a full list of notifications, and lets you delete them one by one or as a group. From this window, you can also access all the system settings, something which you (annoyingly) could only do from the homescreen before.

KEYBOARD The on-screen keyboard is as close to a match for the iPad as I’ve ever used. The keys are well spaced and plenty large. My only complaint would be that the Alt options are only available on a handful of punctuation keys; rather than a long-press on the Q to pull up the numeral 1, you have to switch back and forth between views--a trick Honeycomb should have borrowed from its immediate Android predecessor FroYo, for sure.

WIDGETS I’ve always found widgets on smartphone Android to be too overwhelming for the small screen. To get any useful at-a-glance information from, say, your Twitter feed, the widget itself must bogart an entire homescreen. Not so in Honeycomb, which Google has positioned as a champion of widgetry. YouTube thumbnails, my Twitter feed, tiled Web bookmarks, and the native music player all fit comfortably on one pane.

RECENT APPS AND MULTITASKING Beside the virtual Home and Back buttons, which persistently appear at the bottom-left corner of the screen, is the Recent Apps list, which expands into a stack of the last five apps used alongside a thumbnail of the last screen you were on. This column made toggling between apps almost instantaneous; I, for example, hopped quickly between Maps (where I was hunting for a nearby restaurant) and an email--a task which would have taken a healthy amount of double-clicking the home button on an iPad to accomplish.

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TOO MUCH CLICKING Honeycomb relies more on the user to do the navigating than iOS does. I found myself endlessly back-clicking in and out of screens (if I left the Gmail app while changing its preferences, hopping back to Gmail from the homescreen or another app would drop me off at the preferences screen, not the inbox), and Honeycomb leaves all the decisions about what to see completely up to the user--something that’s especially a drag when trying to play back video.

the

The most prominent example is the YouTube app: At first glance the Honeycomb YouTube channel blows the iPad out of the water, presenting a circular gallery of the most popular and top-rated clips.

Click though into any of those videos, though, and the shine starts to come off the apple; rather than taking advantage of its screen size (and processing oomph) and launching a fullscreen video, Honeycomb’s pages instead feel more like YouTube’s website; the video is tiled in a three-inch box in the upper-lefthand corner, with metadata below and related links to the right. It takes an extra click to explode into fullscreen, even though that’s what most users would want to happen.

I also sometimes found it tricky to figure out how to adjust various settings within apps. There are multiple places where you might find the buttons to let you do things--there’s the taskbar at the top of the screen, which changes not only app to app but also within apps depending on what you’re doing, but there’s also a menu button that pops up on the bottom every once in awhile, and then there’s the ability to long-press sometimes but not other times. It never confused me for too long, but there are definitely times when you think, “Now how do I do this...?”

bad

DESKTOP SYNC

APPS

There’s still a lot about Honeycomb that feels manual next to iOS, with desktop syncing being a perfect example. Despite the refresh to the tablet music interface, the desktop client experience is still clunky, though admittedly easier than previous Android versions. A quick download of the Mac-only Android File Transfer software led to nothing more than a directory of folders living on our Xoom. Syncing libraries then became a long game of drag-and-drop in 4GB chunks. The control of putting files only where you want them is nice, but babysitting it, not as much. We’ll admit, we’re spoiled by the autonomy iTunes takes on, syncing files on its own in the background. It’s likely that third-party solutions, like the media software DoubleTwist, could make this a less manual experience.

Android tablets need Android tablet apps. Hopefully, that’ll come in time, but at the moment, there are precious few apps (and the continued absence of a Netflix app) in the redesigned Honeycomb Android Market that are expressly designed for Honeycomb.

Not even major apps like Facebook, Kindle, and Twitter are ready, which makes the platform as a whole feel slightly half-baked. Regular Android apps work on the Xoom, but as any iPad owner who’s tried to run an iPhone app will tell you, it’s not a particularly fun experience. Smartphone Android apps look zoomed-in and blurry on the Xoom, and require the use of the Menu button that’s mandatory on Android phones but has been eliminated from the Xoom. (Luckily, Honeycomb can just add a virtual menu button next to Home and Back, but it’s still awkward and inconsistent with the rest of Honeycomb.) It’s unfair to brand the Honeycomb app situation “bad,” since the thing hadn’t even hit the market at time of testing, but it’s something about which customers need to be aware.

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alone them talking to their devices,” she said. While voice may very well be one possible input method, she believes there will still be some kind of silent input method that won’t disrupt the environment. Otherwise, she said, “you can get into problems when you put technology above people.”

Michael also noted that voice input is generally inefficient. “Natural language is, I think, going to have some significant limitations.” Still, what new frontiers are out there for interacting with computing devices?

Okuda believes that removing the touch requirement will bring new advances in gesture-based control.

G

“

“Once you don’t have to touch the screen,” he told Ars, oing back to the original series, when you look at 45 years ago, look at the communicator they

“I think another window is going to open up.”

Something similar to the 3D gestures used to manipu-

used,” Denise Okuda said. “It’s really mind-blowing

late video and other data in the film Minority Report

when you look at things today, like the iPad—we

could become commonplace, though perhaps not while

were using those on Star Trek,” she told Ars.

standing in front of a huge translucent display. “That

Drexler sees examples of real-life technology that

looks good on camera,” Okuda said, “but I think when

were likely influenced by technology used on Star Trek

the technology is available, there will be a way to put it

practically everywhere. “Swiss army knife-like cell

in a desk or something to make it workable.”

phones, impossibly thin wall-sized TV screens, GPS de-

Drexler referenced another sci-fi film, The Termina-

vices that nag you with voice, body scanners at airports,

tor, for his more succinct prognostication: “interactive

voice recognition, remotely operated fighter planes,

ocular HUD.”

surgical robots,” he said.

Whatever the advances, though, focusing on the end

But all three are convinced that more advanced user

user will be the driving force behind the true innova-

interaction is just around the corner. Drexler mentioned

tions. “As devices get more powerful, hopefully we will

“TH E C O MP L E X I T Y S H O U L D B E ABST RACT ED — SYNT HESIZED DOW N TO THE SIMP L ES T P O S S I B L E I N T E RFACE FOR INST ANT GRAT IFICAT ION” voice recognition, something used extensively in Star

continue to see things being considered in terms of the

Trek to communicate with a ship’s computer. The iPhone

user’s time and learning curve, rather than the power of

has the somewhat limited Voice Control feature, and

the machine,” Okuda said. “The complexity should be

Android-powered smartphones can use voice to input

abstracted, synthesized down to the simplest possible

text anywhere in the system. Voice will be an impor-

interface for instant gratification, with the shortest pos-

tant input method, especially for those aren’t able to

sible learning curve—that is the wave of the future. At

type or otherwise use their hand, but neither Denise

least, it should be,” Okuda told Ars.

nor Michael Okuda think natural language will be the evolution of human-machine interaction.

Denise noted that in public, giving voice commands to a device would in many cases be considered rude.

“I don’t want to hear people’s phone conversations, let

MAY/JUNE

55

BIG

THE

10.1” × 6.8”

9 . 8 ” × 7. 3 ”

10”

TABL 9 . 5 ” × 7. 3 ”

9.4” ×

D E V I C E

S I Z E

9”

SCREEN SIZE

MOTOROLA

SAMSUNG

6”

GALAXY 10.1

vs.

APPLE

XOOM

vs.

IPAD

vs.

4”

10.1”

2”

0”

.34”

THICKNESS 0”

9 .7 ”

10.1” .51” .5”

0”

9

.32” .5”

0”

.54 .5”

0”

WEIGHT 1.31 lbs

PRICE

$499 $599

1.34 lbs 1.61 lbs

$599

$499–829

1.50

$499 $599

LET ROUNDUP 9.6” × 5.9”

× 7. 5 ”

9.1” × 6.2”

10”

7. 6 ” × 5 . 1 ” HP

LG

TOUCHPAD

vs.

G-SLATE

vs.

BLACKBERRY

GALAXY 8.9 vs. PLAYBOOK

6”

4”

9 .7 ”

8.9 ”

4”

0 lbs

SAMSUNG

9”

8.9 ”

.50” .5”

0”

.34” .5”

0”

$599

$469 $569

2”

0”

.40” .5”

1.04 lbs 1.39 lbs

7” 0”

.5”

0.90 lbs

$499–699

THE

BIG TABLET ROUND TABLET

PROCESSOR

FRONT MANUFACTURER

OPERATING SYSTEM

GALAXY TABLETS 8.9 & 10.1

1 GHz dual-core NVIDIA Tegra 2

CAME

3MP SAMSUNG

ANDROID 3.0 HONEYCOMB w/ TouchWizUX

XOOM

5MP

1 GHz dual-core NVIDIA Tegra 2

MOTOROLA

ANDROID 3.0 HONEYCOMB

iOS

IPAD 1 GHz dual-core ARM A5

APPLE

TOUCHPAD

iOS 4.3

webOS

Dual Core Qualcomm APQ8060 Snapdragon @ 1.2 GHz

HP

0.9MP

1.3MP

WEBOS 3.0

G-SLATE

2MP

1 GHz dual-core NVIDIA Tegra 2

LG

ANDROID 3.0 HONEYCOMB

PLAYBOOK

3MP

ARM Cortex A9 dual-core @ 1GHz

R.I.M. BLACKBERRY

BLACKBERRY TABLET OS

DUP

SENSORS

BAROMETER TABLET? IN MY

B

BACK

ERAS

STORAGE

! ?

Y H W UT

Barometers are instruments that measure atmospheric pressure—essentially the weight of the column of air between you and the top of the atmosphere.

As you'd expect, atmospheric pressure decreases rapidly as you ascend in the atmosphere. In fact, it drops pretty quickly—reducing to about half its sea-level value just 5.5km up in the air. As a result, atmospheric pressure readings are used to detect altitude.

CARRIER

16 GB

2MP

32 GB

TBD

64 GB 16 GB 64 GB 16 GB

0.3MP

64 GB 16 GB 32 GB

TBD

64 GB

5MP 5MP

16 GB STEREOSCOPIC 3D

2MP

64 GB

32 GB 64 GB

3G (TBD) 4G (TBD)

3G 4G

32 GB

16 GB

3G 4G

3G 4G

32 GB

N/A

FLASH SUPPORT

3G 4G (SOON)

32 GB

2MP

NETWORK

WI-FI ONLY 3G/4G MODELS ANNOUNCED— RELEASE DATE TBD

A B C G L M

3G (SOON) 4G (SOON)

AT LAUNCH

SORT OF

(FULL SUPPORT COMING SOON)

NEVER!

AT LAUNCH

COMING SOON

AT LAUNCH

Accelerometer Barometer Compass Gyroscope Light sensor Magnetometer

AVAILABLE APPS A B C G L M

200,000

A B C G L M

200,000

A B C G L M

350,000

A B C G L M A B C G L M A B C G L M

iOS

6,000 webOS

200,000

4,000

M A R C H/A P R I L 11

ONTOUCH MAGAZINE

MICROSOFT

S U R FAC E CES Preview

We Don’t Need Tablets, So Why Are We Gobbling Them Up?

IPAD–A BLIND USER’S PERSPECTIVE Google updates to Honeycomb 3.1