Bye 2010 Hello 2011

Originally posted on 12-31-2010

Good bye 2010, hello 2011.  This will be an interesting year for slates (they really shouldn’t have been called tablets, those are the old bulky ones and slate sounds modern too), smart phones and TV appliances.

I can say one thing for sure, I’m glad to be back to Apple and I think I might have went a little overboard …. nah lol.  I love my iPad and my MacBook Air.  So which do I use more?  I would have to say iPad.  Even though the Air is light it’s still more enjoyable using the iPad.

Some of the things we have coming in 2011.  We’ll start off the new year with CES showing us what is coming or might be coming. App store for Mac, iPhone coming to Verizon (about time), iPad 2, iPhone 5 and who knows what else for Apple.

When iPhone comes to Verizon it will be interesting to see how Android phones really do when it’s on the same carrier, other than AT&T.  Both Apple and Verizon needs this.  One of the main reasons Android has been doing so well is it being on many different carriers, this is going to change.  You can see, on my regular blog, what I think of the Droid.

On the slate front.  We will probably have a slew more of Android tables and then there is RIMs playbook.  I think they are finding it is harder than they thought.  There was a report that it only lasted a couple of hours on a charge, then there was a statement that it didn’t have power management yet, even so they are not going to get 3x more even with aggressive power management.  I can see it now, your ready a page and 10 seconds later it goes dim to save power.  Or they will have to turn down the processing speed.  Looks like it will not be out till May and the iPad 2 will already be out.

I would like to be there when Balmer announces their new tablet.  I would yell like last years hp tablet you showed.  Microsoft is way behind and it’s going to be a year or 2 to catch up.  I believe they are even going to start to use ARM processors.

Android shows promise but even Google said it’s not ready for tablets yet, that’s coming.  It’s still not very polished.  I also like it how people keep saying that it’s got a SD card slot to expand memory (which is wrong) / storage space.  That’s not totally true.  You can’t expand the main storage area by adding a card, it treats it like another drive.  When you run out of storage space, your out.  You can move Some programs to card, to free up main storage, but if you remove it then you can’t run it.  You know how much slower SD cards are over SSD, magnitudes.  I also don’t trust SD cards, how many times you had one where it had errors and needed correcting, possibly loosing pictures etc.  I’ve also seen a lot of them stop working.  For me an SD slot would only be good for moving pictures from the camera over.  I think we should start demanding that camera makers start putting in wifi and/or bluetooth and do wireless transferring instead of a card.

Even if you hate Apple you have to thank them for pushing technology forward.  I wonder how long it would have been before we would have seen a slate if it wasn’t for the iPad?  Microsoft has been trying for 10 years.

Go out and enjoy New Years Eve, see you next year 🙂