It will have some battery sucking Intel chip in it, some over the top amount of RAM and a terrible price. This will join the number of successful Windows 7 tablets, where the tally is currently sitting at

0

Seriously, please take MinWin or Windows Phone 7 and build it especially for a tablet device. The Windows desktop user interface was not built from the ground up to support input from touch or gestures so why does it make sense to slap some stupid custom Toshiba software to bandaid the problem?


The real value is in .Net + Silverlight and the powerful as well as flexible Windows kernel (MinWin or Windows Server Core) to bring the affordable and powerful tablet computing to the Windows ecosystem. Could you imagine a great and well thought out touch based UI built in Silverlight and leveraging .Net? It’d be a very compelling device for developers selling the embedded market.

So here’s what IDC is predicting the smartphone market will look like in 2015.

Basically IDC is assuming

• Windows Phone will just take the place of Symbian because of the Nokia deal. Assuming that the Nokia brand is so strong that it demands loyalty and Nokia will continue being one of the very few players that can manufacture cheap smartphones that people will flock too.
• That assumes Nokia is the only one capable of getting processor intensive Windows Phone to run on dirt cheap hardware.
• BlackBerry who seems to be pretty much dead in terms mindshare amongst consumers in 2011, either is able to keep on limping long enough to have some market share in 2015 or has some ace up its sleave that IDC knows about.
• iOS will somehow slip more places that BlackBerry

I think the only thing they got right is that Android will be the dominate player, purely by saturating the makret and nothing else.

If I was a company using IDC for business intelligence, I’d start looking elsewhere.

IDC Press Release

Just because Apple created the in-out homescreen experience doesn't make it right & it doesn't need to be something apps adopt. But alas, apps feel that users would love it they jumped from homescreen to another just to execute the task the app is meant to truly deliver.

Never mind the wild concept of the app instantly delivering what the user wants to achieve, let's them leave to choice from 5 different options before they can actually achieve something.

Like this shopping centre app, I imagine the idea of a shopping centre app when you launch is when you need to find a certain shop. Maybe right away show a directory or a map showing where you are in the centre with an obvious search bar to quickly pinpoint your destination?

Let's be honest, how many people who go to a shopping centre care about sharing it with their friends or reading some news about a shopping centre? If you're going to try and build an experience around your shopping centre don't palm it off to a section of your app; from the moment you start the app have it all connected. You open the app with a map of the place, a convenient search bar to quickly locate places and place pins on the directory map showing where cool sales are on offer.

And don't create a homescreen if you haven't go enough icons to fill it, making it look like it's my job to somehow fill the homescreen with your pseudo apps. I was really disappointed by the switch in design by Urbanspoon to the homescreen design. You use Urbanspoon to find cool places to eat at when you're stuck or in need for something to eat; so that's what it should open with. Open with the Shake to find feature and then use the tab bar at the bottom to offer other features like search and nearby. Urbanspoon bills itself as being able to help you find places to eat it; so it's not really helping when the user has to make a decision on what do in the app before it can help you.