Bill Gates Responds To Apple iPad 503
superapecommando writes "Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates has called Apple's iPad a 'nice reader' but claims netbooks are the way forward. Speaking briefly to BNET's Brent Schlender, the Microsoft Chairman, who had admitted to being in awe of the iPhone on first release, saw nothing in the iPad to really excite him."
For those who didn't RTFA (Score:3, Informative)
You don't need to. There is zero meaningful information in it that is not included in the summary.
It would have been interesting to here some of Gates' reasons behind his statement.
Re:Uh, what? (Score:3, Informative)
A quick Google search turns up this. DRM here [teleread.org], Multi-task here [cnet.com] and underpowered for me is an extension of the fact that it cannot multitask. Having a large iTouch able to do one thing at a time does not really mean that it's blazing fast. Either it can't multitask because it doesn't have the specs for it or something is wrong with the iPhone OS (yeah, it's not running OS X).
Re:Uh, what? (Score:3, Informative)
It can multitask theoretically. Apple confirmed years ago that they limited multitasking on the iPhone to avoid battery drain. Apparently part of the problem was that they weren't happy with any of the UI conventions that they could think of for showing you which applications were currently running, which opened the door for users to unknowingly have a ton of different applications running in the background all the time.
It was also justified with the idea that most people running most applications had no real use for multitasking on a phone. If you freeze an application's current state when you exit, you don't actually need your little puzzle game to be actively running in the background. You want certain things to constantly run, e.g. anything to do with receiving incoming phonecalls or email. You also want your music to be able to keep playing even when you're not in your music-running application, so Apple made sure that worked.
With the iPad, I don't know. I guess it depends on the 3rd party software that comes out for it. I think you probably don't need your calendar app or ebook-reading app to continue running in the background when you aren't using them.
Re:I initially poo-pooed the iPad too (Score:3, Informative)
Given that the USB spec only allows for a maximum draw of 2.5W, I doubt we'll see one soon. At best you could charge it slowly if the netbook was not actually running. Though the OLPC could pull it off.
Perhaps in the future when they have USB3.0 ports (maximum draw of 9W) it may be possible.