And while you can be sure I’ll be tracking Wednesday’s event coverage on GDGT Live and TWIT Live, I’m skeptical that Apple’s tablet device — or any tablet for that matter - will be a commercial success. Not necessarily because they’ll make a dud (possible, but unlikely), but because the very idea of a tablet computer seems unnecessary.

Still — I can’t wait to see what Apple has made.

Awkwardness

Although Apple will be getting all of the attention for its new tablet this week, it is far from the first company to take a crack at the form-factor. Microsoft alone has been pushing pen-based computers for at least eight years (I remember seeing Bill Gates demoing one at a technology conference in Fargo in 2002), and there have been various rumors of an Apple tablet for nearly as long. The product category has seen some success in niches such as law and medicine, but the average person has shown little interest so far.

Why? One big reason is size. There is a small size range — between 8 to 10 inches — that makes sense for a tablet screen. Any bigger and you might as well carry your laptop. Any smaller and you’re competing against the iPhone or Android-powered phones which already do a Good Enough job of running apps and providing connectivity wherever you are. The problem is that a 10-inch device is incredibly awkward. It’s too big to fit in your pockets and too small to comfortably get real work done.

Another problem is that, at least in the past, tablet functionality has been tacked onto existing interfaces and operating systems. Windows XP, Vista, and 7 are each capable of functioning on tablet devices, but from everything I’ve seen and heard, it’s not a great experience. Windows was designed to be used with a keyboard and mouse, and shoehorning stylus or touch technology to work with it creates a novel secondary form of interaction, at best.

Perhaps the best discussion I’ve heard on the basic problems facing the tablet form-factor is from the December 3, 2009 episode of the gdgt weekly podcast. The relevant section — which you can listen to below — is a few minutes long, and worth listening to.

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

Cost

Let’s make the easy to believe prediction that Apple’s table is beautifully designed and has a user interface to match — It’s a home run by every technical and aesthetic measure. That still levels the important detail of how much this new device costs. Apple doesn’t aim to be the price leader in any category (especially with a new product), so expect something in the $800-$1000 price range depending on storage and a few other “premium” features.

Again, the tablet is stuck in the awkward middle. You can get a Macbook for essentially the same price, or a netbook with a 10-inch screen and a keyboard for 1/3 the cost of an Apple tablet. Granted, it won’t be an Apple and the screen will suck, but for most people, price matters. But wait — there’s more! If rumors are true, not only will buyers of the Apple tablet pay the typical premium for the new product (that’s not a knock, by the way — I’ve happily paid it many times myself), but other ongoing costs.

First, it’s expected that just like with the iPhone and iPod Touch, Apple will use the iTunes Store to distribute and sell applications. If this is true, it means you’ve got to go through Apple’s walled garden for every program you put on your tablet — no open source apps, no “unapproved” apps, etc.

Second, it’s rumored that the new Apple device will be the premiere platform for reading books, magazines, and newspapers. If this is true, guess where you’ll be going to purchase or subscribe to this content? Yup — the iTunes Store.

Third, it’s likely the Apple tablet will come with the ability to use Verizon or AT&T 3G broadband to give you an internet connection anywhere. Let’s hope this is at least optional, otherwise that’s another $30–40 monthly subscription you’re required to pay.

Watching with Interest

Don’t misinterpret my skepticism of tablets with a desire for Apple to fail with their new product.  Sure, I have issues with their general lack of platform and application openness and the potentially high ongoing price tag for their tablet, but I hope they deliver an innovative device that forces just as much industry change as the iPhone did. I just think they’ll face a much harder sell than getting people to buy a phone or a laptop.

And while nobody has scored a hit with a tablet computer yet, if anyone can, it’s Apple.

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Palm hosted a press conference at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Thursday to announce a new mobile phone, which it named the Palm Pre. Prior to the press conference, technology enthusiasts almost unanimously staked the future of Palm the company on the reception they received at CES. Well, from what we’ve seen of the Pre, it looks like they’ll be around for awhile longer.

The Hardware

The Pre hardware has the best design and most polish of any previous Palm phone. It’s got a 3.1 inch screen with multi-touch, a physical QWERT keyboard, a 3 megapixel camera, built-in GPS, tons of radios (3G EVDO high-speed internet access, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth), 8GB storage, an accelorometer, proximity sensor, and more.

Uniquely, the Pre can also use a wireless charging system named Touchstone. You still need to place the phone on the dock, which magnetically attaches it for charging, but since it’s placed at an angle, it can still be easily used while docked.

The Operating System

The Pre’s software is what really excites me. It runs on a Linux-based operating system called WebOS. Much like the iPhone’s operating system, the design is very fluid. There aren’t any jarring transitions between screens — instead, screens shrink, grow, and zoom in and out.

The Pre also appears to be the most connected smartphone out there. It features a syncing system called Synergy to keep contacts and calendars synchronized between it and Gmail/Google Calendar, Facebook, and Outlook. Similarly, it has a single inbox for multiple types of messages — email, SMS, Facebook, instant messaging, and others.

The Pre features an notification system it calls the notification bar that informs you of new events while minimizing interruptions. It initially reminded me of the Growl notification available on Mac OS, and looks like this:

The Applications

I can’t find a list of 3rd party applications yet, but there is supposed to be an Amazon MP3 store available at launch, and an app store similar to the iPhone’s. The development kit, called Mojo, sounds extremely cool. It lets developers build applications using common web tools: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This opens the Pre app market to a whole new group of programmers compared to Android (Java) and the iPhone (Objective C).

What it means, in the end, is that the Pre will be much more open than the iPhone and more accessible to developers than the Google Android platform.

Availability

The Palm Pre is going to be available exclusively from Sprint sometime in the first half of 2009. Pricing is unknown at this point, but it’s expected to be comparable to the iPhone ($200-$300 range).

Since Sprint and Verizon use similar EVDO/CDMA technology for their networks, it’s much more likely that Verizon will see the Pre available for Verizon long before we ever see the iPhone.

If the Pre does make the jump to Verizon, I could easily see this replacing my Blackberry.

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So anyway, the details. Amazon just launched a multi-year initiative with manufacturers that they’ve dubbed Frustration-Free Packaging. For a short, but growing, list of mainly toys and electronics, your purchase will ship in the same recyclable box it’s delivered in, minus the excess plastic shells, wire ties, bindings, etc. Not only does this make for a more pleasant experience for the customer, but it saves the manufacturer packaging costs and gives Amazon and its delivery partners a more uniform size for storage and shipping. Best of all, it’ll save tons of plastic and cardboard from having to be shipped to homes, only to them be transported again to a landfill.

Retail packaging is a relic of the traditional product distribution channels, and serves no purpose online, where you only see that packaging designed to sell you days after you’ve made the purchase. This has been a long time coming, and I applaud Amazon for taking the lead. Here’s hoping the others follow.

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Still AT&T Only. North Dakota Still Out of Luck.

When I wrote about the first iPhone announcement 1 1/2 years ago, I mentioned how it was going to only be available for the AT&T (then Cingular) wireless network. This is still the case, and the wireless provider still has no presence in North Dakota, so us North Dakotans are out of luck yet again.

With Verizon’s purchase of Alltel last week, North Dakota will effectively have one statewide wireless provider, creating a monopoly for Verizon in the state. And while I’ve had terrific luck with their service and coverage, more competition is always better. So, maybe we’ll see AT&T move in to challenge them, but I’m not holding my breathe.

I think the best chance of us seeing an iPhone in the upper midwest would be for Apple to make a CDMA compatible version. But, this could be years out, if ever, due to their exclusivity contract with AT&T. Or, maybe our dreams will finally be realized when all the wireless carriers migrate over to Long Term Evolution (3GPP LTE) in a few years.

Or, maybe not.

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I give up. In any design, once you learn how to do something once, you should be able to do it again. This is really horrible.

That is design guru Don Norman talking in a New York Times article about a poorly designed Kodak digital picture frame he was trying out at a Best Buy store. Norman is the author of the classic book The Design of Everyday Things, and the new release, . If you’ve ever had the pleasure of using a crappy Chinese TV or DVD player remote with row after row of identical buttons you never use, you know what he’s talking about. Devices with poor design tick me off to no end. The only excuse for it is pure laziness.

As devices get “smarter” and are embedded with more intelligence, Norman suggests that predictable behavior on part of the machines will put us humans at easy, and help us to hate them a little bit less.

I’m not going to attempt to write a review (haven’t had my hands on it yet) or rehash features here — both have already been done more times than I care to count. Apple is advertising over 300 new big and small features in Leopard, but I want to talk about a couple that have similar implementations on other operating systems but are transformed by the polish, execution, and attention to detail that Apple is famous for. Those two features are Time Machine and Spaces.

Time Machine vs. Volume Shadow Copy

The most talked about new feature in Leopard has got to be Time Machine, the built-in automated backup and restore application. I’ll be the first to admit that disaster recovery is unsexy and complicated for most, which is why hardly anyone actually does it. People shouldn’t have to learn the difference between incremental and differential backups, or go through the trouble of scheduling jobs and deciding what files to include. I’ve sporadically burned CD-ROMs of documents and copied important files to my USB thumb drive, but a full system crash would be big trouble for our family. Time Machine ends the need for these ad hoc backup methods by automatically copying files to an external hard drive whenever they’re changed and keeping a version history of them. It removes every excuse for not backing up your Mac, except for spending the cash to get an external hard drive.

The main functionality of Time Machine has been around for decades: In the end, it’s just a backup program. Microsoft has similar technology in the last couple of editions of Windows called Volume Shadow Copy that basically does the same thing. But, because it’s hidden so well in the operating system, I’m guessing that 9 out of 10 people have never even heard of it. Unfortunately, the feature is largely inaccessible to home users since it requires either a Ultimate, Business, or Enterprise edition of Vista, or a combination of Windows XP and a server running Windows 2003. Also, shadow copies in Vista appear to be stored on the same disk as the operating system by default — an absolutely horrible idea if your goal is keeping a safe backup.

So, the idea is the same, but Apple’s execution and attention to detail are way, way better than Microsoft’s. Just look at these two screens: Which one would you rather interact with?

Spaces vs. Virtual Desktops

The other new feature I want to hit on is what Apple calls Spaces, an easy way to create separate workspaces to organize your applications and windows. This functionality too, is nothing new. Users of UNIX and Linux based OSes using the X Window System have been able to take advantage of virtual desktops for decades. Historically, these features have been poorly implemented and directed toward advanced computer users.

Apple appears to have put a lot of thought and work into Spaces, making it what is probably the most polished implementation of the virtual desktop idea we’ve seen so far. Take a look at this video to see how it works in action.

Getting to the Point

Under the hood, modern operating systems all provide the same types of services and functionality. What makes OS X different is that it’s polished. Apple has paid attention to the small details and taken much effort to make things easy and intuitive for users. So, it’s true that Apple has copied ideas from Windows, and from Linux too. They didn’t just do quick ripoffs though — they dramatically improved the experience. And, when Windows and the Mac OS seem to be looking more and more alike, that polish, those small details, can make a big difference.

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What is it? Basically, a box fan with a mosquito attached to the front of it. Flip it around so that your CO2 (or your dog’s, livestock’s, etc.) blows out toward the bugs. Then, when they come to get you, they get sucked into the trap, unable to fly against the breeze. It’s a similar idea to the Mosquito Magnet, but apparently works better, and for about 1/30th of the price.

I like the simplicity of this, and hope it’s as effective as the website claims. Let me know if you give this a shot!

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Stanford Magazine has a great article on Tufte in its latest issue, which you can read online. It tells of Tufte’s love for Galileo and many other, what led him to publish his own work, and some of his inspirations.

It’s a great read — worth a look!

The presentation was given in Japan, which is why you’ll notice the Japanese at the bottom. I think it actually adds to the beauty of the slides…

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Having created web sites and applications for a number of years now, I’ve developed a pretty good nose for bad design. Sometimes I find little things that bug me, and other times they’re blatant and obvious. I’ve decided to highlight some of these frustrations on this blog so that maybe, just maybe, this problems will be fixed someday.

The first offender is Symantec’s MySupport site, a place where you can submit and view support tickets for the company’s products instead of spending over 1 hour on hold (and counting) with their 800 number like I am right now.

Here’s the ticket submission form, the main reason for using MySupport. Look carefully at the lower right where it’s highlighted in red (click on the image to see a bigger version):

Whoever made this form didn’t put any thought into it. Notice those three buttons. The one you want, the one that submits your problem to the Symantec help desk, is sandwiched between two buttons that have destructive actions. Both “Back” and “Cancel” delete everything you’ve entered in the form. It’s way too easy to accidentally click on one of these instead of the submit button.

I know this because it happened to me. I spent close to 15 minutes entering all of the license keys and product codes they ask for in addition to detailing the specific problem I was running into. Then, I went to submit my request, only to end up at the previous page — I clicked the “Back” button instead of “Submit”.

What’s so frustrating is that it doesn’t have to be like this. Arranging the buttons so that “Submit” is isolated from the others doesn’t take anymore work than how they’ve currently designed it. It’s pure laziness, and it shows a lack of concern for Symantec’s customers.

This is especially frustrating when you think about the context of the form. If I’m going through the trouble of creating a MySupport account and then logging a detailed technical problem I’m having, chances are I’m probably not that happy to begin with. They should be making the process as simple and easy as possible instead of creating more bad will.

I have no doubt I’ll have plenty more of these examples of bad web design to share in the future. If you’ve got one yourself, drop me a line in the comments.

Just an update: As I’m finishing this up, I’m still on hold with Symantec’s “customer support”. That’s 1 1/2 hours and counting. Thankfully I can do other things (like writing this) while I wait…

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