CEO and cofounder, ngmoco
Cool and Connected
Is the tablet a new mobile computing device? Well, yes, it is, by default. But what is most interesting to me as a gamemaker is the impact that it can have in the least-mobile entertainment venue the home. Aren't home games played on consoles? Yes. But for years, more and more players, especially teens, have been migrating to laptops and Flash gaming. The Web has become not just a viable venue for games but also one of the most vibrant.
The iPhone 3GS is already far superior to the Nintendo DS or PSP and is approaching the performance level of the Wii. A tablet that is powerful enough to handle great games and portable enough to take anywhere with an immediate library of tens of thousands of inexpensive or free experiences from the App Store will be serious competition for laptops.
Of course, the netbook was supposed to replace the laptop and be used by millions around the world. Forget the netbook. Its a slow, clunky piece of junk. Do I want to look like the guy who couldn't afford a real computer or the guy who went to the future and brought back a device that's as cool as I imagine I am?
If the tablet is as appealing and useful as a laptop, with the power of a game console and an always-open library of apps, games, music, and entertainment, it will kill the laptop as a home games machine and kick the netbook out the window before its had a chance to disappoint us with its inadequacy.
Steven Johnson
Science writer
The End of an Era
Ten years from now, we will look back at the tablet and see it as an end point, not a beginning. The tablet may turn out to be the final stage of an extraordinary era of textual innovation, powered by 30 years of exponential increases in computation, connection, and portability.
When the Homebrew Computer Club started holding meetings in the mid-70s, the reigning assumption among critics and futurists was that we were headed, inexorably, toward an image-based culture dominated by the visual language of television. The word for so long the dominant medium for the transmission of information was headed for the margins, subtitles underneath the hypnotic flicker of the Image Society.
But then something extraordinary happened. The personal computer proved to be more than just a fancy calculator. It turned out to be a device for doing things with words. Each milestone in computation and connectivity unleashed a new wave of textual breakthroughs: Early networks gave rise to email and Usenet; the Mac UI made reading text on the screen tolerable; the Internet platform (and the NeXT development environment) made it possible for one man to invent a universal hypertext system; Google harnessed distributed computing to make the entire Web searchable in microseconds; and thanks to Wi-Fi and cellular networks, along with hardware miniaturization, we can now download a novel to an ebook in 10 seconds.
It has been an exhilarating ride, but it is coming to an end, and that magical experience of instantly pulling Middlemarch out of the ether and onto your Kindle suggests why: Compared to other kinds of information that computers process today, text has an exceptionally small footprint. With the arrival of the tablet, we have crossed a critical threshold: Where text is concerned, we effectively have infinite computational resources, connectivity, and portability. For decades, futurists have dreamed of the universal book: a handheld reading device that would give you instant access to every book in the Library of Congress. In the tablet era, its no longer technology holding us back from realizing that vision; its the copyright holders.
Advances in technology will give us plenty of headroom with other kinds of data: streaming real-time video, conjuring virtual spaces, exploring real-world environments with geocoded data, modeling complex systems like weather. But in the tablet world, textual innovation will not come from faster chips or wireless networks. Incremental improvements will continue, to be sure, but there will be a steady decrease in radical new ways we interact with text.
If you time-traveled back to the Homebrew Computer Club in 1975, it would take you days to explain all the new possibilities for creating and sharing text. (Imagine explaining Wikipedia to someone who hasn't heard of the word processor.) But I suspect that the text-based interactions that coalesce around the tablet will still seem familiar to my grandchildren in 2030. Unless, of course, we've hit the singularity and the novels were downloading have been written by the machines. But in that case, the rise of AI novelists will be the least of our worries.
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