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Posted: March 1, 2018 |
If pen computing is your thing, the Surface Pro 3.0 is superb. This model introduces an N-trig active capacitive stylus for the first time (which means your old Surface 2.0 pen will not work): a powered pen with 256 pressure levels and a couple of party tricks. These include the click-the-top button, which wakes your Surface from sleep and opens Office OneNote (desktop or Metro version, you choose) ready for inking. Palm rejection means that you can write naturally without triggering touch events.For certain applications, design apps like Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop, OneNote, or certain field applications, Surface Pro 3.0 with pen is ideal. A surveyor, for example, could take snaps of a site or property with the built-in camera, insert them into OneNote, and make hand-written notes alongside.Pen computing is niche though, and despite the excellence of the hardware, Microsoft did not think hard enough about where to park the pen when not in use. It attached magnetically to the power input, but not firmly enough, so it will drop off and get lost. Alternatively, you can stick a pen loop to the keyboard, which is ugly but more effective, provided you always have your keyboard attached. As we mentioned, PCIe 4.0 is expected to be released sometime in 2015, but Neshati gave the PCI-SIG a little wiggle room. Maybe a little bit longer, he said. IDF13 To hear Intel tell it, the Next Big Thing™ in mobile computing will be the 2-in-1 (née convertible), which combines a traditional clamshell laptop form factor with a tablet that detaches from the keyboard, or flips, twists, or slides over it.The innovators at Intel and our partners have come up with the 2-in-1 – it's the best of both worlds, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich – or BK as he's referred to by his troops – said during his IDF keynote on Tuesday in San Francisco. It's a PC when you want a PC; it's a tablet when you want a tablet.On Wednesday, the general manager of Intel's PC Client Group, Kirk Skaugen, devoted a chunk of his keynote time to 2-in-1s as well – and he was equally effusive. We are creating a new category that combines the best of a laptop and the best of a tablet in a single device. Well, new is not exactly accurate. Dubbed convertibles, such devices have been around for some time. A few examples:There are many, many other examples of early 2-in-1s to be found – some that may have introduced new form factors before the examples we've listed – but if Intel's PC Client Group headman says that they're a new category, well, who are we to argue?What is unarguable, if Krzanich and Skaugen's statements that by the end of this year there will over 60 2-in-1 systems on the market priced as low as $349 are correct, is that the 2-in-1 form factor seems to be finding its sea legs. When people talk about having a 2-in-1 device that can truly compete in this marketplace, these are the products that are going to do it, he said.Perhaps, especially if this new wave of PC-tablet mashups are as capable as Skaugen claims. We want to have all the sensors, all the responsiveness, the touch, and all-day battery life of a tablet, on devices running x86 Windows, and not the less-capable ARM-based RT version. Skaugen characterized a typical 2-in-1 user running productivity apps running when in laptop mode and entertainment and content-consumption apps in tablet mode. Clearly, these not-new-but-renamed devices are the mullets of mobile computing: business in front, party in back. Comment Apple's keynotes seem to command more mainstream front-page press attention than ever before – but each time, there's less and less to report. Is the modern smartphone era limping to a close?Apple's announcements on Tuesday about the iPhone 5S and 5C were wearily predictable. Cupertino just doesn't seem to be where the action is any more.It is almost as if Apple and its arch-rival Samsung have exhausted themselves by suing each other around the world – and now look like two very knackered boxers agreeing to shuffle their way through the remaining rounds to the bell, rather than risk throwing big punches.From 2008 to 2010, Apple made stunning additions to the iPhone with each iteration – quite a feat considering that when it set out, it didn't really know how to make phones, and was learning along the way. Samsung then raised the market expectations further, with spectacular hardware, making the most of its imaging and displays expertise.
Today, the pair cream off almost 100 per cent of the hardware profits to be made, and most people look no further than some model of iPhone or some model of Galaxy S when choosing a phone. But the risk-taking is gone: they now copy themselves.Perhaps the lack of innovation is simply the consequence of corporate profit-skimming. Perhaps you and I would do the same thing if we were running either company, given the happy position we would be in. Apple has the brand and the much stronger app marketplace, while Samsung has the distribution and throws a range of Galaxys at the market across every single conceivable price point. Both corporations are in strong, if not quite unassailable positions.But the warning signs are there. Samsung reportedly held crisis talks this after sales of the Galaxy S4 failed to meet its expectations, Apple iPhone sales have declined for the past three quarters, and, well, Peak Apple. Samsung piled on gimmicky and slightly creepy features like eyeball tracking, simply because it could. Apple's user-facing innovation (the A7 64-bit chip is the real star of the show) entails building in a fingerprint scanner - a commodity laptop part for the past 10 years. Indeed, the only radical moves by Apple are adding colours to a slightly cheaper (but certainly not cheap) iPhone and rejecting NFC (or Not Fcking Connecting, as it's known around here), which is a technology flop. Not so radical, then.The stark truth is that smartphones, like computers, were only ever a means to an end – and once the services and apps markets matured, the smartphone itself became less ... important. It didn't really matter what access device you were carrying. The PC reached a point where the devices became beige boxes competing on price, and the smartphone era is drawing to the point where it doesn't really matter what black rectangle you're carrying – provided it accesses the services and apps you want. Fetishising the access devices is as strange as thanking LG or Panasonic for creating BBC2. No wonder both Samsung and Apple are looking at new higher-margin peripherals such as watches. Back in the Steve Jobs era, the Apple founder looked around at industries which had ignored digitisation and networks and sought to place Apple in the chain, helping to create new markets. For example, the iTunes Music Store gave the major labels the long overdue kick up the bum they needed – which almost all will now acknowledge. That kind of ambition died with Jobs, it seems.Surely nobody – not even the most avid fanboi – now believes that Jobs left four years of new products in the pipeline, as his biographer Walter Isaacson reported in 2011. Assuming Isaacson was inspecting Apple's lab in 2010, the first three years will soon be up. Which raises the question: is anything left? IDF13 Intel has announced that four of its OEM partners will have new devices based on the company's new Haswell chips and running Google's browser-based Chrome OS on the market in time for the holiday shopping season.
Or, as Intel software and services headman Doug Fisher described it during his keynote at the Intel Developer Form on Wednesday, the holiday selling season.Three of the devices that Fisher unveiled were Chromebooks. One, a 14-inch Chromebook from Chrome OS veteran HP, was built from the ground up for Chrome, he said. A second, smaller Chromebook from another vet, Acer, he described as having a slick, light form factor, and the third Chromebook was from Toshiba, which is new to the Chrome OS market. All three, he said, will have an all-day battery life of nine hours.The fourth device was not a laptop, but rather a cute li'l Chromebox not unlike the Samsung Chromebox, from another new member of the Chrome OS party: Asus. It can be used at home, in a kiosk, call centers, for zero-maintenance management, said Fisher.The three Chromebooks powered by Haswell chips, he said, improve battery life by 50 per cent, performance by 15 per cent, and we're greater than 2X the competition in performance. Fisher said that Intel is working closely with Google on Chrome OS optimizations for Intel chippery. We're optimizing the kernel, he said. We're optimizing drivers. We're working in WebKit and [Google's WebKit fork] Blink to optimize that experience – the browser. All aspects of the platform we're optimizing, to ensure that you get the best performance on Intel.Lest you think that Chrome OS, Chromebooks, and Chromeboxes are niche players in the mobile market, Google's chief of Android, Chrome, and Google Apps Sundar Pichai joined Fisher on the keynote stage to disabuse you of that notion.Chrome OS represents a new form of computing, he said. We are seeing great momentum there. External analysis estimates that they already represent over 25 per cent of the sub-$300 category. They're big in education as well; they're now deployed in over 5,000 schools in the US, which represents over 20 per cent of the school districts.Fisher contributed to the onstage Intel-Google lovefest, as well. Our engagement with Google is very broad indeed, he said. We have well over a thousand engineers working across Android and Chrome to bring these great devices to market.
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