Thread: What features are REQUIRED in a Maemo TABLET?
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allnameswereout is offline allnameswereout
2009-05-28 , 13:53
Posts: 3,397 | Thanked: 1,212 times | Joined on Jul 2008 @ Netherlands
#26
Originally Posted by johnkzin View Post
No, it does not.

What you need in order to run all desktop apps (including Open Office) is an accurate pointing device, not specifically a stylus.

For example, my Samsung Q1 Ultra, while it does have a stylus... it also has a thumb-joystick that can be used as a "mouse" ... and as a result, I found that I almost never used the stylus.

The HTC shift has a small trackpad at one end of its tablet screen. You could use that, or a trackball, as tablet size substitutes for a mouse or stylus, in the same way that you do on a desktop computer.

The requirement: precision pointer for some operations. A stylus is just one solution for that requirement.
Touchee! On my Thinkpad I almost never use a mouse, and if my Nokia E71 had a pointer device like that it'd be easier to use, I think.

(Ofcourse you'll hear the game people screaming over any of such design choices.)

Also, multi touch allows zooming which works well once you're used to it. Besides the obvious example of MobileSafari try for example LogMeIn Ignition on an iPhone/iPod touch.

First you have to think what are we aiming for, reading or reading+writing? Some people merely want to read Office documents (reading a .doc is since long free on a Windows OS using a MS utility; you do not need MS Office for that). If you also want writing you need a real Office program but I think most people do not wish to run 'OpenOffice.org' for that purpose. They want a lightweight office suite optimized for the OS. The code could be (partly) based on OO.o, but the end product is certainly not the same, because the UI of a program has to be optimized for the hardware. While a tablet or smartphone is portable it has a lot less CPU cycles available, it can handle less I/O, and the screen size is different. So you need to optimize applications for speed. To put it friendly... OO.o is not known for its non-bloatedness... but even if we neglect that issue we still need a UI optimized for Maemo. If you do not care for such optimizations then you're more running a Linux desktop than an embedded OS optimized for a Maemo tablet. As I said, LogMeIn Ignition is great because it does its best to make the user able to use the limits and advantages of the device to fullfill a job. It is optimized for the purpose. OO.o pristine/vanilla is not, and is therefore not something to be taken seriously. Yes, really nice you can run that, you're free to do that, please enjoy, but its not to be taken serious for the general public...

Gosh in hindsight what am I wasting time on, some here will root for Adobe Photoshop on their tablet neglecting that people are programming photo editting software for mobile devices [such as] iPhone. No, they are not 1:1 Adobe Photoshop, because else Adobe would simply port Adobe Photoshop to iPhoneOS. We don't hear about people using GIMP there either. Because its a ridiculous thing to do.
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Last edited by allnameswereout; 2009-05-28 at 13:57.