Hi Sigurd,
I do believe the future includes the long overdue tablets but the ones that came out a few years ago had one major flaw, they ran an operating system from a desktop PC - MS Windows in those days. The recent success of the Apple iPAD, I think comes from the fact that it uses the simpler operating system found on the iPhone, the iPhoneOS (please do not shorten to iOS as some people do - iOS is an IBM midrange operating system previously known as OS400).
I expect the market to be flooded with cheaper Android based tablets by Christmas, again Android is a phone OS, not a desktop OS. I believe the Dell tablet is to be called the "Tab" others may be called slates.
These devices are an example of making technology simple for the average user, something the IT industry should have been doing for the last 20 years - the technology has been there but industry and commercial considerations have stopped it happenning.
As well as using scaled up phone OSes, these tablets tend to use the same phone processors - the A4 in the case of the Apple product and the snapdragon in the case of Android tablets - neither of these processors run x86 instructions and so will not be able to run eComstation.
So while we have a few tablets like the Lenovo X200T that use an Intel processor, these will be very rare in my opinion.
What these tablets do deliver is a simple machine where the user doesn't have to be a "geek" to understand how things work. Even Microsoft with their upcoming new Windows Mobile Phone 7 OS have based this on their Zune music player OS not on the desktop Windows 7 OS, so the tendency is away from desktop OSes for mobile devices onto simpler, more locked down proprietary OSes.
If we want to run eComstation on these devices, the simplest solution is to use an RDP or VMC "app" on the device back to a system running eComStation. I have already done this with my Apple iPOD touch (the Apple iPAD is simply a jumbo sized Apple iPOD touch) and it works well, except the iPOD touch's screen is too small to really use eCS - the tablets may well be an acceptable size - and yes touch translates into mouse movements when you use one of these devices, without any changes being needed to eComstation.
well, there's my 6 penneth!
Ed.
I do believe the future includes the long overdue tablets but the ones that came out a few years ago had one major flaw, they ran an operating system from a desktop PC - MS Windows in those days. The recent success of the Apple iPAD, I think comes from the fact that it uses the simpler operating system found on the iPhone, the iPhoneOS (please do not shorten to iOS as some people do - iOS is an IBM midrange operating system previously known as OS400).
I expect the market to be flooded with cheaper Android based tablets by Christmas, again Android is a phone OS, not a desktop OS. I believe the Dell tablet is to be called the "Tab" others may be called slates.
These devices are an example of making technology simple for the average user, something the IT industry should have been doing for the last 20 years - the technology has been there but industry and commercial considerations have stopped it happenning.
As well as using scaled up phone OSes, these tablets tend to use the same phone processors - the A4 in the case of the Apple product and the snapdragon in the case of Android tablets - neither of these processors run x86 instructions and so will not be able to run eComstation.
So while we have a few tablets like the Lenovo X200T that use an Intel processor, these will be very rare in my opinion.
What these tablets do deliver is a simple machine where the user doesn't have to be a "geek" to understand how things work. Even Microsoft with their upcoming new Windows Mobile Phone 7 OS have based this on their Zune music player OS not on the desktop Windows 7 OS, so the tendency is away from desktop OSes for mobile devices onto simpler, more locked down proprietary OSes.
If we want to run eComstation on these devices, the simplest solution is to use an RDP or VMC "app" on the device back to a system running eComStation. I have already done this with my Apple iPOD touch (the Apple iPAD is simply a jumbo sized Apple iPOD touch) and it works well, except the iPOD touch's screen is too small to really use eCS - the tablets may well be an acceptable size - and yes touch translates into mouse movements when you use one of these devices, without any changes being needed to eComstation.
well, there's my 6 penneth!
Ed.