Comment 180 for bug 527458

On Fri, Jun 18, 2010 at 02:29, Perky <email address hidden> wrote:
> I can see from Mark's view that there needs to be an alternative to
> tooltips on tablets.  However, at the moment such devices are 'toys'.

Not just at the moment, IMHO. You can't turn a car into an airplane -
that is different things, even if both are invented for transport.

By definition a netbook or tablet will always be substantially
different from a desktop or laptop PC.

Therefore netbooks or tablets will IMHO never replace a real laptop or
desktop. I simply can't go to holiday with my whole family with a
Ferrari - even if it looks cool and may go fast (under the appropriate
circumstances), it simply does not offer enough room.

While you could do web-surfing and email with your netbook, doing CAD
or writing long documents etc etc is simply not efficient with a small
geeky device.

On the other hand, when in inventory where it might be sufficient to
type a few numbers (or just use a built-in barcode scanner) and read
some necessary information. - Here a tablet could fit very well and
better than carrying a laptop.

> In comparison to traditional laptops/desktops they are not as good for
> getting work done (depending on the work).

Indeed - as explained above!

> This will probably change as
> they mature many years down the track, and you never know - getting work
> done may end up being more productive on a tablet

I don't think so even in mid-term future because of physical conflict:
A small mobile device can never offer a big view (maybe with
projecting it into the air only) and a small keyboard is simply not as
easy to handle as a bigger one that fits more the human hand. BTW: I
do not think that speech recognition and related technology will get
stable within the next years, as I notice that neither fulltext
indexing does (which is more important yet).

> I can also see that to develop a tablet
> version of Ubuntu will be tricky because of the small userbase - perhaps
> that is why some 'experiments' are appearing in desktop versions of Ubuntu?

Isn't it possible to display several things different depending on the
device? - Maybe in the future the device can recognize, where we
looking at and displaying the tooltip then - that would be the
equivalent to hovering with the mouse. ;-)

Anyway, the clear mistake that is done is for the sake of good user
experience on the netbook, productivity on laptops and desktops is cut
down. Maybe Mark thinks, that Ubuntu has more chances on the netbook
market than on the desktop market and therefore concentrate on that.
But seriously, a netbook is a nice thing, I might carry with me when
going to a conference to have less luggage, but for daily work nobody
would use it. And I find it a big mistake to concentrate just on that
as I think that business is interested in saving plenty of licence
fees.

--
Martin Wildam