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The bad ergonomics was my initial thought, too. A laptop is bad enough in that the keyboard and the screen is too close together, forcing you to either tilt yo
by lutorm 17y ago
The bad ergonomics was my initial thought, too.
A laptop is bad enough in that the keyboard and the screen is too close together, forcing you to either tilt your neck forward or fold your elbows to get your hands high enough, but at least you can angle the screen and keyboard independently. To be able to type comfortably, the surface more or less needs to be aligned with your forearm, but on the Ipad, that will put the screen at a 45-degree angle from your eyes.
That's in addition to the difficulty of touch-typing on a multitouch surface. I used to have a Fingerworks Touchstream (the original multitouch controller), and it was very difficult to type on without moving your hands slightly and ending up on different keys. (And it even had a row of dots to give you a tactile sensation of where home row was.) If you were in an even slightly unstable situation -- forget it; totally unusable on a train or bus.
I can see how it could be useful for watching videos or passive browsing, but not for any amount of extended typing.
- mechanical_fish 17y agonot for any amount of extended typing Agreed, but there's an ace in the hole: It apparently supports Bluetooth keyboards out of the box. I have literally been waiting for this for fifteen years: A portable machine that (a) lets me carry a little portable keyboard that can be separated from the display, and (b) doesn't also make me carry around a useless extra keyboard that is attached to the display. (I don't like laptop keyboards. They are almost as un-ergonomic as the iPad's virtual keyboard is likely to be.) Now if only we can get the thing to run emacs...
- stcredzero 17y agoA portable machine that (a) lets me carry a little portable keyboard that can be separated from the display, and (b) doesn't also make me carry around a useless extra keyboard that is attached to the display. HP's tc1100 already does this, and it's 5 years old.
- lutorm 17y agoAh, I didn't know about the Bluetooth. That's nice. Get back to me when you have Emacs and xterms working and I might consider getting one... ;-)