View Single Post
Benson's Avatar
Posts: 4,930 | Thanked: 2,272 times | Joined on Oct 2007
#472
Originally Posted by nilchak View Post
I see this vision failing majorly (don't get me wrong, I understand what you want personally). But if the aim of the tablets is to carry over all (or most) desktop apps to a portable device and only that (so that we have a LOT of apps), then it is doomed. There has been many such devices (Zaurus to start with with Debian ported over, many Windows based MID's) where desktop apps have been ported (or the whole OS in fact). But porting an app is only half the job. The actual part is making it usable, and that is where this paradigm fails miserably.

Why, oh why would a general user want the full featured desktop app on his little 4" screened device ? I mean would I want the tablet apps to be ported over to my little 2" phone next, just so I can have access to most popular apps on every device ? That IS NOT the point of mobile devices.

IPhone interface (and I am not praising iPhone here, so lets not go there) is an example of mobile devices having its own unique UI and UX which should be distinct from its desktop application.

Mobile apps can compliment the desktop apps in function and extend it that way, but just porting a desktop app to a mobile platform, UI and all, does not a mobile application make.
Well, some of us just don't like carrying laptops everywhere. If you don't have the desktop apps on a mobile device, you have to bring a laptop to use them; sure, some tradeoff has to be made for usability, but you can't ditch the laptop if your mobile devices only have complementary apps.

Now I recall a big argument over whether NITs are laptops or not, and I really don't want to start that again, but I think there's a bigger market for a device that's both a hard-to-use laptop and a slick mobile device than either one alone.

Last edited by Benson; 2008-09-24 at 20:34.
 

The Following 4 Users Say Thank You to Benson For This Useful Post: