Tablet Review - which tablet is the best?

For testing/dev purposes, I purchased several tablets/web devices in the past 6 months.  Here they are in no particular order:

Windows SurfaceRT w/integrated keyboard
iPad 2, 3, 4 and Mini
Samsung Galaxy Note
Blackberry ?
iPod 5, iPod 3, iPod 2, iPod 4

I also have a macbook air, a desktop PC, and an XBox.

3 months later Here is what I'm still using and how:
Samsung Galaxy Note -
This is my phone, and I use it for all the tablet functions. Its fast, zippy, good UI.  Big screen, impressive as a phone and really handy as a tablet.  Its the only "pocket sized tablet" and I think the form factor and device are essentially perfect.  Its the most used device I have.

Macbook Air

I use this all the time, in fact, I'm typing on it right now.  Its light, but I can do graphics, video editing, sound editing, print/press stuff, coding, interactive design, powerpoints, excel stuff, word stuff...and the form factor is elegant and wonderful.  I think its the best PC I have ever owned.  I love how I can barely tell if its in my laptop case, the smoothness, the thinness, yet has a great keyboard for touchtyping and feels really solid.

XBox 

Its really, really easy to use.  As a PC gamer I miss the graphics quality a bit and the cheat codes,  but the tradeoff for cost and now that I know how to use the controller I find it much more efficient than the keyboard and mouse.  I have a few complaints but overall I think its a great console and I enjoy using it.

old iPod 4 (chrome back)

I stuck with my old iPod as my "bedside computer" because the chrome back just feels better than the new form factor.  I can access email, games, and get the iOS experience on it.  Plus moving to a new one is a bit of a pain thanks to the incomprehensible labyrinth of "iTunes" universe.  In spite of rendering their old devices "obselete" , Apple does make the upgrade process VERY difficult in my opinion, particularly on the iOS devices.

Desktop PC

If I have really intensive layout, coding, or complex projects that my Macbook Air simply cant handle, I tend to default to my old backup PC.  Windows 8 ruined it, and I cant stress enough to people to NOT upgrade to windows 8 unless you have to.  Stick with Windows 7...it was fantastic and I miss it terribly.  I dont tend to "surf the web" on my Desktop much, its mainly a workhorse.  Also its the hub of my data/media storage and archiving.  Regardless of the "mobile world" I will likely always have a desktop PC somewhere unless Mobile devices are eventually able to connect to massive data storage that is cheap, as well as any resolution display device...wirelessly.

Gathering Dust:

iPad 2,3,4

 I like the look of the iPads, but I honestly find them too heavy to deal with, I actually hate picking it up...its a chore. They are also fragile and easy to drop due to their heft.  iPad 3 - if I didnt need it for testing, I would have felt it was a huge ripoff considering the crappy video rendering...particularly when the iPad4 came out along with the mini.  The iPad 4 has really impressive processing power, and if I could run office on it I *might* consider using it with a third party keyboard, BUT, the AIR still kicks butt.

iPad Mini

MUCH better form factor than the other iPads, but still too big.  Its the wideness.  I'm spoiled with my galaxy note.  The device is beautiful and interesting, but I cant see having a use for it if you already have a smart phone and a nice laptop like the AIR.

Microsoft Surface RT

I Really wanted to like this device.  There was a promise of flash support, basically a full PC experience in a tablet with a really lean and mean keyboard.  The kick stand is really cool.  Its lighter even with the keyboard than the macbook air.  BUT....alas, the OS killed me.  Windows 8 entirely blows.  Putting that useless "metro" thing on it but shunting you to the desktop every time you needed any of the most common apps like all the office ones was really really disappointing.  Also the flash support was *only* for a handful of sites whitelisted by microsoft...again...a total burn.  I loved being able to type AND sweep the screen depending on what I needed to do and the little flappy keyboard was cool...but one of the things I really like about my PC is the fact that I can run any PC application on it.  The surface really couldnt.  I was planning to "upgrade" to the Surface RT pro, but the primary advantage of "lightness" goes away with that one, and its bulkier than my AIR too.  So, no go.  Surface sits collecting dust.



Blackberry Playbook

Honestly I had to google "blackberry tablet" to even get the name for this abysmal piece of junk.  The OS reminded me of a $149 GPS no name device I purchased a long time ago...clunky, incomprehensible, and full of pointless junk.  Its small but heavy, has a huge wide frame around the screen that is "touch sensitive" for some odd reason...as if that somehow adds value. It was so bad I only used it to bring up my test websites but its barely been on at all. 

Were I to recommend a purchase to a fledgling geek, I would strongly recommend:
Galaxy Note as phone, Macbook AIR, iPod.  You also get to be aware of everything on all devices.  I'd recommend a nice big and configurable desktop PC if you can fit it somewhere in your house, and use it for media server etc as well so you can keep most of your big files there.

The rest I would "pasadena" including all the iPads.  If you can ONLY have one device and that one device CANT be a phone for some reason, the iPad mini would be a nice thing to have, particularly for a child or older person new to computers.  Otherwise get a Galaxy Note.  It really is the "everything device" and is by far the most important device in my collection if you go by use...closely followed by the AIR, and I dont leave home without either of them.

Flash finally dies.

I was recently asked this: "...does iPad/Tablet delivery have a significant importance to your company plans?"


My posts have been all about flash up to now, but in the past 6 months I've experienced a shift and moved to "the dark side" of HTML for a number of reasons.




It started with a number of website examples demonstrating what HTML/Ajax/Javascript are capable of now, particularly when coupled with WebGL.  It wasnt at the level of flash, but the differences were subtle. 

THE SQUEEZE

Client / Server Communication
Ajax in particular was an eye opener for me, the ability to communicate subtly between a client and server without impacting the user experience was always a deal breaker for me and HTML, and Flash is particularly adept at it.  Once I really got to understand Ajax, it became clear that Flash's primary technical advantage was quickly leaving.


3d rendering
Flash is still a great 3d tool, but the technology is coming under fire for licencing fees that occur after 50K users, so its "light and flexible" smallness suddenly developed a big looming wart.  Conversely WebGL is getting better and better, as well as canvas 3d, CSS, and other alternatives are looking really good and getting increasing access to hardware support.


Developer tools/workflow
Flash's key strength has always been the ease of development - from idea to working prototype.  The iDE (integrated developer environment) tools for 10 years were without match, but Adobe has quickly moved to build on that and move into HTML/Javascript based technology as it quickly becomes capable.  Now we have Edge, Edge Reflow, and many non-Adobe based developer tools that collectively kick butt.

iOS
I had always thought flash vs html was about a rivalry between Steve Jobs and Adobe, and that could very well have been the case.   But blocking flash on iOS really accelerated the demise of flash on mobile, and eventually instead of fighting, Adobe rolled over and killed the player on Android. 




App Stores - Temporary Reprieve?
App stores provided a reprieve for flash in a philosophical sense, as one could still use it to build apps as well as desktop.  BUT, the App stores presented a plethora of difficulties for any serious development.  App stores simply have too much arbitrary power and no accountability to developers, and the fear (warranted or not) has disillusioned them.  The "long tail" of developers simply cant make enough money off the app given the massive dev cycle, red tape to wander through, and the chance your app will be summarily "denied" for some violation of a clause in the interminable and constantly changing Apple Developer Agreement.  This shows up less on the Android side, but so do the users.   Long story short, App stores are not a long term, sustainable market for developers.  They are a stop-gap (make hey while the sun shines)

Meanwhile, the model for charging for things on the web has changed too.  App stores tried to "control the flow of money" but thus, if you bought an app/service on one device, you couldnt use it on another.  Microsoft's answer was to try to own all the surfaces/devices...and this is quickly materializing as a case of doing everything badly instead of one thing well.  I'd sum up windows 8 that way after having owned an XBox, PC, MS SurfaceRT, and a windows phone and trying to get them to interoperate.   My PC now is much harder to use (thanks windows 8), my surfaceRT is collecting dust - as are all my tablets thanks to the Android Galaxy II phone I have.  So, as a business, I'm coming to realize that money/distribution of product or service flow needs to be controlled by the company/portal, not some third party, or they cant assume the risk of doing business...its a fundamental truth that will essentially kill the app stores.   

Finally there is facebook.  Id wager the little webbrowser integrated in the facebook app on mobile is an increasingly common means of browsing the web.  If you could dial your phone, access your contacts, and browse the web(as you can now) with facebook's app, all a phone would need is the facebook app.  Facebook doesnt need to have a phone, they could simply *be* every phone.  And is any phone on earth not going to support facebook?  I doubt it.  HTML thus works inside facebook's browser and means if you are building HTML based apps, services, or experiences, people don't need to leave facebook at all.  Since any site that allows login supports facebook login (except google and microsoft of course),  Facebook rules the web.  While google is wasting time ignoring facebook and making yet another dumb thing in their list of dumb things..."glass".  Lets see..."wave", "plus" , "buzz", "glass" etc. prove that Google simply doesnt get the web anymore.  Its not about a giant dewey decimal system, its about connections between human beings and their collective wisdom.  But I digress...

So Flash and really app stores, and every closed market/technology is literally getting squeezed from every conceivable direction by pure technological evolution - in almost every way.

As I've always said, if a technology came along that "did flash" better than flash, I'd jump on it.  In the past 12 months I think its come to pass, and so I've jumped. 

Flash was king, now its HTML/Javascript/Ajax.


I admit it, but I was right before, HTML wasnt ready.  Now it is, and I'm not an idiot. :)

Flash vs HTML is actually Browser vs OS

Flash and HTML are, to anyone who regularly uses them both, not inherently conflicted at all.  They actually work quite well together...and to companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Adobe...perhaps too well.

A few years ago a project called "Aviary.com" presented what could be considered a complete replacement for photoshop.  Given the power recently bestowed on the flash platform tools, it was possible to build almost any application one could think of in the browser itself, and this was proven by Aviary and later project Rome by adobe (rome.adobe.com). 

This likely caused significant fear in the hearts of all software-for-profit folks who could see a big enough picture to realize their incredibly hard work and high investment projects could now be relegated to the same low status of a website.  No more big install, no more background running, and now subservient to the browser.  The OS itself could then become nothing but a wrapper to the web browser, which would now control the user experience and eventually free itself from the OS in low cost PCs.  Google has uniquely taken this dream and run with it, and is already selling what is essentially just that, a 250 dollar laptop with nothing but their browser based "chrome" on it.  The only thing you pay for in that case is the physical object.

Both the Rome and Aviary projects have either cut features or moved to an app model since originally released, as you can see on their websites, but one can see the potential there to utterly decimate the market for what is currently a $600 graphics program available as a standalone app (Photoshop), particularly if they managed to get a look at the earlier iterations of these projects.

Thus one could see how it might be perceived as necessary for software companies to, by all means possible, slow or stop altogether the flow of feature rich functionality to the browser and keep it where it belongs...a content viewer and nothing more.   As many pay-wall websites have come to realize, it's *incredibly* difficult to get people to pay for a website, but consumers continue to pay hundreds of dollars for what they perceive as "software", and some dollars for what they perceive as "mini software" AKA an "app", even though an app may have as much or more functionality than any standard shrink wrap software product.  The main thing is, we're still physical beings.  We need stuff on a shelf to show for what we bought, and websites cant offer this.  All they can offer is yet another password to remember.   I think that is why the app store has the "icon object" display that gives a sense of ownership to the person who bought some apps as the app stays ever present, reminding the user of all they own.


It's important to not confuse the "Cloud" with a browser based experience.  The cloud is routinely accessed by non-browser based applications the same way the browser accesses it.

In the mean time, Adobe is quickly expanding the capabilities of AIR and Flash to compete with the classic major application development platforms offered around Java and C++, and subsequently many of the most popular apps on mobile are actually created with AIR and Flash then compiled for the particular device.  So by no means is flash "dead", what's really being actively choked to death (most recently by Adobe themselves) is the concept of flash running in a browser with all its power and capabilities instead of as purchased standalone applications, IE where the money is.

In the mean time, the W3 (largely controlled by these interests + Google) argues about how to keep the features of HTML limited enough that it cant get out of control like flash did, and become a full blown feature rich application development environment.  Aviary did have an HTML5 image editor available but the page has since been 404'd:  http://www.aviary.com/html5 , probably because it clearly conflicted with their business model. 

The question is, will flash just be the first of many of these kinds of technologies that put high degrees of capabilities anywhere?  No one but the independently wealthy volunteer force of the open community would have any motivation to maintain something like that, but it may indeed be inevitable in a free market, either the reigns will be taken off of flash by forces outside of Adobe or we'll see HTML 5 rise to the capability at some point in the future.  Either way, this is all nothing but a smoke screen and no particular technology (flash, java, html5) etc, is inherently bad and to be avoided.  If anything it just means one should use the tool that best suits the business model one has.

addendum:  Google Chrome OS supports flash - its integrated into Chrome OS.

http://support.google.com/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=108086

Clearly Google sees the browser as the future, and if one were to thus "hedge their bets" on a particular technology that would allow them a single codebase for all devices and OS's, flash is certainly the winner at this point in collaboration with AIR.

Coders - our most precious resource.

I recently read an article talking about the scarcity of good coders who are constantly under ever increasing demand.

Good coders become scarce due to retirement, getting hired by competitors, or starting their own venture.  I've personally experienced lost opportunities to hire great coders from each of these things, particularly the last one. 

Often as well good coders tend to form collectives that bill as an agency rather than individually, and while sometimes this works in the short term, my experience indicates that these kinds of organizations often prioritize strictly on cash being payed at any given time, and have no loyalty or affinity for any particular client.  Especially clients who are suffering change and need that creativity the most, but can't necessarily provide extra financial motivations.  They also tend to reserve their top folks for internal projects that will ideally get them out of the service industry and into the royalty collecting business.

Additionally, these pressures are exacerbated by a decrease in educational quality and a general lack of interest in the passion for disciplines around coding. Of course there's always a "nerd" around, but the demands are increasing exponentially while the supply is stagnant or even on the decline.

So I have some general heuristics to mitigate some of these things.

1. Hire coders internally and treat them as well as you possibly can.  Give them whatever motivation they need to stay - mainly a sense of control and ownership of their products, as well as every incentive you can to keep them engaged and enthusiastic about the project. 

2. Let them brag.  Often I've seen coders want to share their code with their community of peers, but a closed, proprietary code base makes that impossible and that frustrates coders.  They constantly pull from the open source community, and often find pride in contributing to it.  If any of your code base can be "open sourced" and kept in the community as part of the collective knowledge of mankind without jeopardizing your competitive advantage…work to find and exploit those things.

3. Leverage the unpopular.  Right now flash, for example, is suffering a lot of bad PR due - clearly - to fear around losing short term perceived financial gain of moving the app/game market to walled gardens instead of keeping it open and free on the regular internet.  The truth, however, is that flash developers are legion (over 3 million of them), and write in a highly standardized language (almost identical to java, C++, PHP, C# etc.) that ports to any and all devices and app stores OR the www, and since the flash platform is so well designed and intuitive with the capability to be a single code base deployed across platforms, they LIKE using it.

So, by exploiting the ignorance in the market about what flash is / does, we can get developers who are eager to use the language because they enjoy it, and still have code that is easily translatable and reusable under almost any architecture and discipline.  In short, we're investing in the skill set and discipline of coding, rather than a particular architecture, and while our competition is "wound up over HTML5" we can zoom past them with superior technology that delivers in less time and for less cost.  Check out these stats if you're convinced "html5" is the future.  News: its not actually anything. Do some homework on what it actually is, and you'll see its really got nothing to do with flash at all.

4. Understand good coders can't really be off-shored, particularly senior ones.  A senior architecture designer has to have the ability to understand the cultural context and language of the market end user AND the sophistication of the architecture and nuance of the technology.  Having "less expensive" coders work offshore can work in very special circumstances but often if a coder is fully qualified and happens to live in an area where cost of living is lower, they can be easily poached by any of the competition and will thus be able to demand wage parity anyway.  Geographic location of the coder really should be close to both you and your customers, particularly if you are less than willing or able to have an intimate understanding of your own code base.

Competitively, having a group of coders as the primary investment instead of thinking of the core product as some body of code is far more agile and adept at flexing to market demands and opportunities.  If the coders are always there, then at any time code can be dumped and rewritten without worrying about engaging and educating a new vendor or contractor.

In short, if you plan to be a sustainable company with long term viability and ability to flex and evolve with market demand, invest in people - your coders, and dont ever get too attached to your code base.  Coders are the most precious resource of any company today.

Flash Shrugged

Lately I've been experiencing even more HTML5 concerns, recently over the android 4.1 announcement by Adobe that they won't be supporting it.

My theory on the strategy here is that Adobe is simply following the money, and realizing that the developers actually paying for their tools are likely employed by or working on projects that are not free or ad supported.  Their projects are most likely well funded and involve some kind of subscription model that provides real value to end users that those end users are willing to pay for, be it an Appstore app, or a PC application that is membership or premium based.  Sure, they might have lost leaders, but in the end they have to charge for services or they cant continue to buy the expensive tools like Creative Suite etc.

Adobe themselves are obviously aware of this as they are offering their services in a subscription model, and those of us working in the training industry have been using this kind of model for years, and likely represent a large portion of Adobe's paying customers.  Adobe doesn't (and shouldn't) be interested in AS 3 developers who simply skim off the .swf technology and use tools like FlashDevelop or writing open source free code bases.  That community of free laborers contributing to the common good is great, and all, but they dont pay the monthly bills we all have, and we all gotta eat.

So what happens when Adobe abandons the browser?  Well its not bad news for adobe developers, it certainly isnt the death of flash. Quite the opposite actually.  Adobe is simply cutting off the free flow of support and help to freeloaders who dont pay them, and concentrating on supporting their paying customers.  Its a wise, prudent business move for adobe.  The people who SHOULD be worried are the HTML 5 nuts themselves, because they just lost a serious heavyweight that keeps users in the browser paradigm.

Browsers are entirely unnecessary.  One can use twitter, facebook, CNN, Youtube, and many others with standalone apps or desktop applications like Facebook Messenger.  If mobile is indeed a bellwether, then think about it, who uses facebook in a browser on mobile devices?  I certainly dont, I use the free facebook app.  And, I cant help but notice the URL's I launch, and the videos I watch all happen inside that app.  As the app grows, I have less and less reason to leave it on my phone.

By kicking sand in Flash's face, the HTML5 crowd has unnecessarily lost a great ally in their battle to keep the browser relevant and open.  Flash represents a HUGE amount of content, and now that the flash community has been sucker punched by the HTML5 community, they have taken their ball and gone home, and the browser is left without a ball.  The content available on the browser for Android just went way down.

So if there's little of interest on the browser, it will simply become less and less interesting for users, and less frequently used, until they are rarely opened at all.  This is already the trend on mobile devices and I see it occurring on PC's as browsers continue to fight with each other on standards and take *a geologic era in tech terms* to get to consensus on relatively insignificant feature updates.

Lots of very successful and internet based communities already exist in proprietary clients, like Steam, Games for Windows, Second Life and its various iterations, Facebook, countless apps in the Android market and Apple app stores, and if you're looking for rich online experiences, this is where the trend is going, not towards HTML.  HTML is a tired, limited technology that simply cannot evolve fast enough to keep up with consumer demand, and flash shrugging its shoulders and walking away hurts it more than it cares to understand or realize.

Another reason why HTML5 is entirely irrelevant to flash

http://vimeo.com/19970665

Demonstrates flash running on Android and IOS via the Scaleform player, proving that avoiding flash on mobile again is not a technical constraint due to limitations with flash, its a political situation and always has been.  As with all technological evolution, we can always count on it getting more complex, feature rich, and meeting demands placed on it over time.  The HTML 5 "debate" was always based on an imaginary constraint that Apple simply made up, but here we can see it being reduced to dust by reality.

So viva flash, its got a long future ahead of it as a display technology.  Of course, viva HTML 5 too, its also got a long future ahead of it as a different kind of display tech for those who dont like using flash for whatever reason.  Its not a contest, I certainly never felt it should have been necessary to denigrate html technology in order to defend flash. 

facebooks logical killer will grow up inside facebook

I wanted to get this down for posterity, I've been saying this for months, but dont have an early record of it and as I watch it happen exactly as I predicted it, I should get it down, I think.

Branchout today is a "linkedin" killer that is growing up inside facebook.  Instagram grew up inside facebook and  was perceived as such a threat by facebook that they bought it for 1Billion.

The new market is this mysterious mountain thats always been there, I call it the "human interaction mountain" that up to recently has been something a lot of people saw value in, but only a few managed to begin to wrap their heads around it.

Google and Wikipedia were early adaptors, building the roads and trails to it, and documenting how it got their, and describing it, and they've built their fortunes on that defining process.

Facebook went in and cut off all the trees, and managed to "harvest" all the wood products and that has led to a trillion dollar IPO possibly.

Apple has built the cars and infrastructure to navigate it.  Instagram and Hipstamatic and Twitter obviously found value in areas where facebook wasnt, but its still as I'd consider on the surface of this giant mountain of data.  This is because all of these services allow for sharing and consuming of what is essentially 1 way non interactive content.

I would lump gaming in here too, because while it is interactive, the relationship between the user and the content simply loops, and ultimately the user is going through a series of pre-programmed motions and the game scope is not effected by individual users.

Branchout and Linkedin have begun to scratch that surface and go a little deeper, and content through programs like that, which enable new content to literally form out of relationships between the users.  Facebook has some of this concept in "pages" and "groups" but it is all still very generic, beginning stages.

I think the real deep market that exists and represents a much lower hype, longer lifespan market that will be resistant to commoditization is this deeper "mining" of the mountain.

This means more sophisticated product offerings, more complex models that literally discover and mine various kinds of data models that are for now largely unknown, but thanks to the Googles, the Facebooks, the Apples, these new models are more discoverable than ever.

on a somewhat related note:

If this interests you, there is more down this rabbit hole.  The "giant data mountain" that is essentially made of human interaction and information itself, is not only abstract, but quickly merging with the physical world, which is one reason why its particularly important.  Right now, using any 3d printing system, we can convert pure data into physical objects. These can be artistic expressions, physical tools or parts of tools, and even human organs (kidneys, bladders and other organs have already been successfully implanted for years)

The "word became flesh" is more true than ever.  This kind of merging of physical and data is where we are headed, and these interactions will more and more rapidly be indistinguishable from our physical world as "we" become the data we create and interact with.

This is why, to me, the understanding of the relationship of content and human interaction is crucial and a massive investment/market opportunity.  Soon it will "be" the market, literally.  The most valuable product will not be a physical commodity, it will be ideas, connections, algorithms, virtual systems.  We're literally witnessing the dawning of an entirely new reality, and the market leading visionaries are capitalizing on it now so they can be positioned to be the custodians of this new reality as it continues to evolve.