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Technology affects more and more areas of our lives. This area is to
comment on contemporary IT issues. The views expressed are not
necessarily those of Bluebird Software.
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Is the PC Dead?
Has the Personal Computer gone the way of the typewriter, valve
radios and wind up gramophones? Companies such as IBM Hewlett Packard
and Hewlett Packard seem to think so as IBM sold their PC division to
Lenovo in 2005 and HP have just announced they are pulling out of
manufacturing Desktops.
Steven Vaughan-Nicholls of Computerworld
surmises that “The powerhouse of the computing revolution was born when
IBM released the first IBM PC in August 1981. It died when Apple took
the market lead from Microsoft.”
The mains powered PC now offers few
advantages compared with a laptop or even a tablet. It used to be that
CPU’s ran hot and you could only get adequate cooling by using large
heat sinks and fans. Large hard discs were only available for PC’s.
Because of the heat and power problems, laptops had short battery
lives, and could only use slow CPU’s. Now, because of fast, low power
processors and high performance hard discs, not to mention long lasting
lithium batteries, Laptops have similar performance ratings to PC’s and are
now at similar or lower prices.
Other form factor computers such
as Netbooks, Tablets and E-readers, not to mention smartphones are
giving consumers what they want – Information wherever they happen to
be.
Does this mean the PC is dead? I believe there are several
important factors that will keep the PC market alive. In a
business environment where PC’s are networked, information is often
commercially sensitive and it is an advantage to have a system that is
not portable. Another is spam and
virus filtering so that with fixed PC's, IT managers can be certain that their systems
cannot introduce viruses from outside.
To the enthusiast, a PC is
easy to upgrade and repair, and to attach additional peripherals to.
This is generally not the case with laptops which contain many more
custom components. I think the PC will be with us for a few years yet,
but, perhaps like line fixed line telephones, be a utility product that
is out of the spotlight. |
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Zooming in on the Xoom
It’s a pity Xoom isn’t a real word
like Xerox has become. We Scrabble players could always do with more words
beginning with X.
However the Xoom is Motorola’s latest Android based
device. A tablet based on Android 3.0, (Honeycomb) Recently, I went to the
Motorola App Summit in London and got a chance to play with one.
About
the size of a slim paperback book, the Xoom will show videos, web pages,
take photographs and HDMI videos with cameras at both front and rear, tell
you where you are in space with GPS and of course, double as an e-reader. It
is a very nice piece of kit, and if you paid cash for an unlocked model,
would cost around £500. Pundits are not sure if it can compete successfully
with the iPad which costs only slightly more.
There are several
challenges developing applications for Smartphones and additional ones for
tablets. For a Smartphone you have to consider that the user may have
several applications open while taking a call, hopefully including yours and
will want to be able to continue where he or she left off. You have memory
use, battery drain and screen ‘real estate’ to consider as well as with a
touch screen, the user controls must be well spaced and intuitive in design.
For Tablets, you can’t just port over a Smartphone Application and
expect the user to be satisfied.
Small buttons scaled up from a
Smartphone become enormous on a bigger screen, and graphics which look cool
on a small screen look crude on a tablet. Then there is the question of soft
keys. It was pointed out at the conference that many people hold a tablet
with both hands, one at each edge and use their thumbs to type. This means
that the keys should be at the left and right edges of the screen – not in
the middle.
The Xoom has some advantages over the iPad. It works well
with Flash as well as HTML5 which also allows videos to be integrated
seamlessly into Web Pages and has a full Firefox Web Browser. One very
interesting area is the possibility of writing a Webtop application. This is
an application that uses web pages stored locally instead of being
downloaded from a server. For the developer, this means being able to use
well established web languages such as HTML and Javascript instead of a
writing a Java App. However, Xoom’s hardware features such as the camera and
GPRS do not currently appear to be available to apps designed like this.
So are tablets the way of the future – and has the Xoom got a future?
I keep thinking that some enterprising Taiwanese manufacturer will bring
out a very low cost tablet which will make premium branded products
irrelevant. This happened with the first PC’s. After IBM made their PC’s
there were a large number of manufacturers making PC Compatibles, all using
Windows 3.1.
The same thing could happen with Android. As Android is
Open Source, there will not even be a licence fee to pay. I expect to see
prices of Tablets plummet in the near future as these become almost
commodity items.
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The Key to Understanding
I think it must have been the invention of the typewriter which gave us multiple
functions for one key. If you pressed the shift button on the typewriter, you
got capital letters - if you cancelled the shift key,
you went back to small letters . A very neat solution which made the typewriter keyboard nearly half the size it could
have been.
We got the Hewlett Packard HP35 with two scientific functions to each key. Then we
got the Sinclair ZX81 with
four functions to every key. Micro-engineering was on its way…
Mobile phones allowed Nokia to compress over fifty two characters onto nine keys – but how far could this go?
We want pocket size products but with the ability to link seamlessly to our demands. Android phones now have Voice Recognition linked to Google search, so that if the phone only partly recognises what you say, Google will come up with a list of best matches – but is this the way forward ?
Only time will tell.
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