Pleco Desktop and netbook trend towards touch

caesartg

榜眼
The combination of portability and usability is why I've been so excited about Netbooks for the past couple of years - to use one affordable device for mainstream usage and Chinese study at home, in the park and on the bus. To be able to take it out during the day and plug it in to a monitor when I get home. Of course, the trend towards larger screens (10 inch plus) doesn't help portability. The major obstacle for me to want to use Pleco on a Netbook though is the device needs to have touch, needs to be one-hand-holdable (I.e. a tablet), with a reasonable size screen plus video out port to limit the damage long study sessions on a Pocket PC have done to my eyes already and for quick lookup, a fast start (I.e. I can flick it on and off fairly quickly).

The closest product to meeting all of this and generating some excitement in its own right is the up-and-coming Asus Eee T91 (and big brother T101):

The main difference between the T91/T101, apart from screen-size, is that the T101 has a near-full-size keyboard good for sustained use, but many hands-on commentators say that the T91 is the perfect compromise for size and portability and I use a wireless keyboard at home with my PC anyway, so for me not a big issue. Year abroad language students might also be able to make good use of an optional built-in GPS (Google Earth yourself) and TV tuner. Seeing as it's built here in Taiwan, hopefully there will be a bunch of handwriting-recognition tools in there too.

Asus won't be the first to bring out cheap touch-screen netbooks but it certainly seems to be the one that is investing the most resources in it, in terms of software and their future line of Eee PCs. I'd love to see them succeed as it should result in a greater range of ways to study Chinese through IT. I'm hoping to get one anyway when they come out here in the next few weeks.

In Taipei and Tokyo, I've seen a few manufacturers pitching touch-screen netbooks and Sony and Apple might also be working on one themselves (there are growing rumours about both companies sourcing netbook-sized touch-screens from Quanta).

Mike - were touch-screens to be the new mainstream feature in netbooks, would you then see a worthy market for a Pleco Desktop?

Cheers

Ben
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Well I'd reject your basic promise that I don't see desktops as a worthy market now - I simply don't see them as being as essential to our business as handhelds, since we already have an established business in handheld software and don't have one on desktops. If somebody shows up at my doorstep with a briefcase containing a $1M no-strings-attached investment in Pleco most of that money would probably go towards developing a desktop version, but as-is, with the percentage of the handheld market comprised of Pleco-friendly devices shrinking, the leap to iPhone is pretty much essential to our future survival, and as at the moment we can't do more than one project at a time, iPhone has to come first.

As far as the larger question, though, once you've got a 9-inch netbook with a touchscreen that doesn't require a keyboard, you're really looking at something that's as much a PDA as a desktop - ignoring the differences between their operating systems, a 9-inch touchscreen Eee has at least as much in common with an iPAQ 210 as it does with, say, an iMac. So this gets into the very exciting area of handheld-desktop convergence, something that we absolutely have to embrace in the longer-term as the barriers between handheld and desktop platforms start to break down.

For the more immediate future, though, a widely-available touchscreen Eee would be an excellent incentive for hurrying out a "preview" desktop version consisting of the Windows Mobile version recompiled to use the exact same UI as on WM but run on "desktop" Windows - we held off on doing that before starting iPhone for various business / support-related reasons, but it's still not going to take very long if / when we do decide do it. It wouldn't be a very useful piece of software on a large-screen laptop / desktop, but on a 9-inch netbook it wouldn't feel too cramped / awkward at all.
 

gato

状元
31 million iPhones have been sold so far. I would be interested in how many Eee PC have been sold. I would side with Steve Jobs, that if by "netbook" we mean something that people will carry with them on a daily basis, then the iPhone form factor is probably the largest it can be. Anything larger would be unwieldy and impossible to carry in your pocket. iPhone is already quite a bit larger than many cell phones. Therefore, by that definition, iPhone is the most successful netbook on the market right now.
 

caesartg

榜眼
Thanks Mike - that makes sense. Fair do's on pulling me up on my 'would you then see a worthy market...' statement - I wasn't conscious I was putting words in your mouth but indeed I was. :shock:
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
gato - exactly, the latest phones (new-generation ARM chips like the one in the Pre and presumably the one in the '09 iPhone) are already pretty close to netbooks specs-wise, and with the expected release in 2010 of an Atom chip for mobile phones (i.e. one with lower power requirements and an integrated chipset) they'll be even closer soon, not to mention theoretically capable of running desktop apps without recompiling. Leaving laptops as little more than docking stations, or at least that's one possibility - slide your iPhone into the space where the trackpad would go and bingo, you can even run it on an untrusted / public terminal using the iPhone for any sensitive input / security confirmation.

caesartg - no problem, I can certainly see how some of my comments could come up as unenthusiastic - I've been frustrated for years about the slow pace at which we finish products, and the speed with which they become obsolete (at least platform-wise, we're still very much state-of-the-art in other respects).
 
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