WIRED Magazine has been covering the “tablet revolution” very well. Today, it summarized early reviews on the iPad. More importantly, however, WIRED has some very interesting thoughts on why tablet computing has the power to be truly revolutionary. It gathered views from 13 writers. See the full story here. Not surprisingly, Kevin Kelly and Nicholas Negroponte have some of the most expansive visions for the impact of the tablet. Some excerpts provided below:
Don’t think of them as tablets…. Think of them as windows that you carry. This portable portal will peer into anything visible. You’ll be able to see into movies, pictures, rooms, Web pages, places, and books seamlessly. Many people think of this sheet as a full-color, hi-res, super ebook reader, but this viewer will be about moving images as much as text. Not just watching video but making it. It will have a built-in camera and idiot-proof video-editing tools, and it will also serve as a portble movie screen, eventually enabled for 3-D. You’ll “film” with the screen! It will remake both book publishing and Hollywood, because it creates a transmedia that conflates books and video. You get TV you read, books you watch, movies you touch. Kevin Kelly
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And it’s not just for bed. Would you have ever imagined how many people walk around looking at one hand? Texting is replacing talking, and thumbs are replacing lips. Laptops, meanwhile, are not mobile. They are nomadic. You have to sit down to use one and do battle for a connection. Standing with a laptop is entirely unsatisfactory.
Tablets are therefore the new frontier. They are the new book, the new newspaper, the new magazine, the new TV screen, and potentially the new laptop. Something you carry — and, yes, something you can lose.
The real beneficiaries, however, are not you and me or the thousands who will soon queue up to buy the iPad. The undeniable beneficiaries of tablets will be those who have no alternative, those who have no books, no libraries, and in many cases no schools or electricity. I mean the nearly 2 billion kids in the developing world. Nicholas Negroponte
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The iPhone shows that loads of people want rich-media networked devices with them everywhere. Like a tablet, the iPhone is a one-app-at-a-time full-screen experience, where the interface is determined as much by the apps and the device itself as it is by the OS. By dint of its bigger screen, a tablet is immersive enough to spend hours with — and yet it’s still intimate. A laptop is a work device, an arm’s-length, lean-forward experience. A tablet, in contrast, is a personal device, something you cradle and lean back with. Chris Anderson
