Quote:
Originally Posted by Penforhire
I'm not seeing why you resist the tablet, aside from price. Price will come down. Not only that but Apple's investment in high-resolution iPad screens will make them more common in other brands. Maybe Google's rumored tablet will be your huckleberry?
|
I think the theory is that the tablet's bells & whistles drive the price up--that there's no reason to pay extra for a multi-media game device when all one needs is to read & annotate ebooks.
The issue is that "read & annotate ebooks" is the pricey part of the software; "play movies & games" is pretty much off-the-shelf code at this point. It doesn't cost extra to include those features, and people who don't want them can ignore them. Plenty of apps are potentially useful for academic & business purposes: calendar management, TBR-list tracking, reviews (whether you put those in yourself, or get a feed from a site somewhere), citation-makers, etc. And there's no way to say "this device supports academically-focused apps, but not game apps." (It could maybe not have a quality video chip--but that means excluding the option of watching vids as part of academic research.)
The only way to have a "purist" academic tablet is to make a complete walled garden... and Apple, with no intention of limiting its customers to just students, constantly gets its walled garden attacked, rooted & infiltrated.
Making a device with features of great use to academics: Great idea, and possibly could be made profitable.
Making a device that can *only* be used for the specific academic purposes the designers imagined: Lousy idea; great way to go bankrupt.