iPhone is a tablet computer
Dave Winer in Scripting News for 7/3/2007:
This idea snuck up on me. I was watching an Apple ad on TV, while washing dishes, so I caught it at an angle, and lost the sense of scale, and thought the iPhone was a tablet computer. Then I realized that it is!
Indeed. The only thing that hides this fact is the form factor of the iPhone. If it simply were bigger, let's say A4 or Letter size, then it were completely obvious.
That phone runs Mac OS X and therefore it would be capable of running every app out there for the platform. The only question left is the old problem of text input. The phone has a virtual keyboard on screen and maybe that would be ok on a larger tablet as well. I can imagine typing on such a on-screen keyboard. You would lay down the tablet on the table and, if the keys are of proper size and have proper spacing, then it would not be that different at all. Of course the feedback of real keys would be missing, but that might be ok for short texts such as an email. I guess nobody expects to be able to write a book on a tablet computer. But it would be great for research, browsing stuff, to control other devices in the living room, at a work site or elsewhere. So why not?
Another interesting use case for such a tablet would be for a small group of developers during sprint planning. Instead of having a bunch of people with their laptops open (too much distraction) they would pass around a tablet. Maybe teams using Savila will do that in the future?
