“When I picked up my iPhone over the weekend, I had an epiphany. I was using the LinkedIn app to confirm an invitation to connect, and it hit me: This is the future of mobile computing, the mobile web — the mobile experience,” Brian X. Chen writes for Wired.
“No, I’m not saying the LinkedIn app is the future per se (that’d be silly), but rather the overall concept of it,” Chen writes. “The LinkedIn iPhone app is, in my opinion, better than the actual LinkedIn.com website. Same goes for the Facebook app compared to Facebook.com.”
“The Facebook and Linkedin apps are two key examples of popular services whose iPhone apps outdid the websites they were trying to ‘port.’ They’re two gems glistening brightly for the future of mobile,” Chen writes. “Now that we can have experiences like these on a bigger touchscreen, with the iPad and the horde of tablets that will follow it, we can expect computing to become much easier than what we’re accustomed to today.”
“The iPad opens a path for an improved web experience for everyone. As soon as the iPad and its competing slates are in people’s hands, we’ll see a host of websites tailoring their content for touchscreen tablet browsing, and it’s going to be far more pleasant than the web experience we’re used to today,” Chen writes. “Have you seen Flickr’s mobile website lately? Or YouTube’s? They’re both far friendlier, simpler and to-the-point than their original websites, and they’re plenty functional.”
Chen writes, “The iPhone and the iPad give web developers an excuse to break free from traditional user interfaces. As a side effect it’s also pushing developers to ditch old, outdated web standards, such as Adobe Flash, and embrace newer ones like HTML5. Thank goodness, because we’ve been needing a change. Cleaner, friendlier, intimate UI may sound like a step backward, but it’s not. There are huge implications.”
Full article, in which Chen correctly states that “we’re all heading with Apple into the future of computing, and it’s looking quite bright,” – recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: A few more article like this, Brian, and we’ll forgive certain idiocies that you’ve committed in the past.
If netbooks can do a thousand things but cannot do even one thing right; and if the iPad can do 10 things but can do them all right, which do you think I would choose? Of course, the iPad. What’s the point of the netbook having tons of features but I don’t ever need every one of them? Remember Microsoft Office? it’s crap and it sucks.
It needs quite a serious technical background in order to make a usable “simple” UI… Certainly not a step backwards, that’s sure!
Ballmer:
“$499 for a tablet? It doesn’t even have keyboard!
No, I like our strategy.
You can get a netbook for 200 to 400 dollars, and it’ll do Flash, it’ll do Norton Anti-Virus, it’ll do Windows… “
The netbooks I have seen are of little use for real work. The trackpad is a nightmare, people have to use their fingernails. The iPad is a trackpad. The keyboard is very small and hard to use, iPad’s soft keyboard my not be much better, but it can’t be worse. Games suck, they are not made for low power processors or small screens, and you need a controller. OK netbooks are good at video chat, I have been able to do video chat 11 years and have very few friends that actually use it. Netbooks are not notebooks, they may run the same software, but not very well because the software was not designed for them. iPad will put a big dent in that marked and the PC people know it.