It’s been a while since I’ve blogged. The holidays thoroughly kicked my ass this time around, though I’m not quite sure why. In some ways, I was more organized than I had been in previous years – I didn’t need to go shopping on Christmas Eve and the majority of our Christmas cards arrived before Christmas day. Frankly, those two accomplishments are damn nearly miracles in and of themselves. Despite this, I found little time for “fun” writing from around Thanksgiving until now. It’s been a few days since I’ve been back from CES as I write this, having covered the expo for work (my job is awesome!). There wasn’t all that much Mac-related there and it was far less stressful than last year’s CES working for my previous employer. However, I was still exhausted toward the end of the week. I’m quite the introvert and meeting new people and being in large crowds regularly over several days at a time is tiring for geeky little me, not to mention the general craziness of CES and the evening activities that followed full days on the show floor.
The interface part is where I have the most trouble picturing the tablet. At CES, I saw a few of the new tablets with the NVIDIA Tegra 2 chipset that ran Android and they just felt like large cell phones. The on-screen keyboards were pretty much impossible to use with your thumbs since the device was too wide to be able to reach the middle keys, and the lines of letters were offset, making them impossible to type on with 10 fingers as you would on a normal physical keyboard. Of course, I’m not an Apple interface designer (and for good reason since conceiving of an elegant tablet interface eludes me) and I’m sure the bright minds of the software engineers and UI specialists at Apple have figured this one out. Well, at least I hope they have. Though I’m sure that Steve Jobs would never let a product that didn’t work elegantly out the door to begin with.
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