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‘I am a professed atheist, until I find myself in serious circumstances. Then I quickly fall on my knees, in my mind if not literally, and I say : “Please God, save me from this.”‘
– Don McCullin
We’ve just got back in from the last day of the Don McCullin exhibition at the Imperial War Museum. If it wasn’t the last day, I would say go and take it in. It’s been very well put together and reminds me why I used to enjoy gallery hopping. This is the first exhibition I’ve been to in around a year.
The quality of the work on the walls is astounding. To take pictures of that quality with nothing more than a Nikon F, Tri-X and a lightmeter is pretty damn amazing and the situations they’re taken in are equally provocative.
Oh, and a Nikon F saved his life by taking a bullet. They don’t build ‘em like that any more. Admittedly he carried three, which is quite a bit of surface area (and weight).
And a packet of Ready Brek.
But there’s something at the bottom of almost every single exhibition note which caught my eye:
“Hand printed by Don McCullin”
Now take a look at the quality and thought which has gone into many of these prints. We praise McCullin based on the quality of his photographs and his subject matter without taking into account that he’s a master printer. After failing to pass his photographers theory exam in the RAF, he worked in the darkrooms and this really comes through in his work. There’s a single annotated working image in the collection, the iconic “Shell Shocked Soldier” from 1968. Something I’ve noticed from other PJs from the same period is they came back from assignment and dropped off the films with the in-house printer from the newspaper. They then visit the printer later and discuss modifications. Don worked the prints himself, and this comes across in the detail in the images. There’s also a lot of work in a still-life consisting of a vase of flowers and “souvenirs” brought back from Cambodia and Vietnam (sorry, can’t find a link). I stood there staring at it for a good five minutes, just taking in the detail work.
Genius.
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This is in response to a twitter post from Dom Hogdeson, in which the Hodge asks:
Well, that’s a very good question Mr Hodge. There’s not much on the market just yet, but let’s see if we can answer that.
This first tablet from a big name to become available on a network in the UK, the Dell Streak is really a large Android phone. Running 1.6 (slated[1] to move to 2.2 soon-ish), this is still a phone, but capable of being used as a tablet. Dell are certainly marketing it as such, and is now available from O2.
Dell also have plans of releasing bigger versions of the device in the near future to complement the product line.
Motorola have been busy, with a good run of Android handsets over the past year. They’ve hardly been able to keep the Milestone/Droid in stock, partly thanks to an aggressive and quite clever marketing campaign in the US.
At CES 2010, Motorola waved around a 7 inch tablet running Android, with an expected launch date of July. We don’t know a lot, but we do know it’s running a NVidia chipset, probably Tegra 2.
Described as a “Galaxy S on Steroids”, it’s not far off… The big brother to the Galaxy S, the Galaxy Tab is scheduled for a release in November and (should be) shipping in three sizes (initially 7 inches), so suit all suitcases.
There’s also a promise of a tweak to the UI, on top of TouchWiz to better support the larger format. Not sure where that’s going yet, but I’m quite curious to see.
The geek in me gets a little wet over this one. The device was waved around at CES last year and promises some goodies that make is stand out from the competitors:
- 1GHz nVidia Tegra 2 Dual-Core A9.
- Dual mode screen – LCD for full functionality and a reflective e-paper mode for reading in sunlight.
- 3 USB ports (USB, not some random dock interface)
- Android by default, support for Chrome OS and Ubuntu.
There’s been quite a lot of hype around this device and expectations are high, it’s very much a toy for the geeks. Plenty of juice, plenty of expansion, and the ability to run multiple OSs on it make it a good choice for the true mobile geek. And the screen is a god-send.
This is the tablet I am waiting for. I will be one of the first in-line when it is finally released.
After I made this blog post, Orinoco popped his head up to say:
A quick google shows this to be a WIFI only tablet device running Android 1.6 with a 7″ resistive screen and a 600Mhz processor, but the nice part is the price – $100. Orinoco bought his for £65 from eBay, 1/6th the price of an iPad. It looks great if you use it as nothing more than a mobile web browser.
[Update] – Roll Your Own
One of the niceties about the Android OS is it’s (mostly) Open Source and there’s been a great hacking community built up around it with people porting it to all sorts of unexpected devices, including legacy HTC Windows Mobile devices and even the iPhone.
The Android-x86 project has been working on a version specifically tailored to working on x86 devices making it perfect for existing notebooks and tablet devices. You lose Google Market (only available to official devices and builds) but you can still happily run third party apps through other sources, since you can happily install any .apk that meets the system requirements. It looks like they’re working on 2.1 at the moment, cool times.
The one piece of kit screaming for this attention is The Asus Eee T91, which is supported (alas at the moment with VESA modes). This is a netbook-tablet with a rotating top which allows you to switch between the two modes. Who needs a separate keyboard when you can do that? Yummy.
Everything Else
There’s plenty in the pipeline. Unlike the iOS platform, which needs a dictator to steer the direction – creating the market for new devices as they go, Android devices turn up as the market demands. If people want them, they will be made. A quick search for the word tablet on Phandroid shows plenty of interest from manufacturers. Like Android phones, expect them to start popping up in quite serious numbers shortly towards the end of the year, and some understanding and development of the market (read second generation models) next year.
Of course a device is only as good as the software which runs on top of it. There’s been very little serious interest from Android developers in writing applications for the tablet format yet (well why would you when there are so few out there), but hopefully with a serious crop of tablets turning up in the next 12 to 18 months, that position will change. Unlike the iOS eco-system, there’s not so much fan-fare around device releases, it’s up to individual developers to decide when there’s enough demand in the market for them to port their app to better support the bigger platforms. I personally reckon it’ll take 18 months to 2 years for Android tablets to really take off in a useful way and start upsetting Steve Jobs again.
[1] pun intended.
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Since I’ve seen a few posts about the damn thing, I’m going to weigh in with my two pence.
One of my clients has recently been developing an iPad application for one of their major clients, and I’ve helped with the planning stages and keeping an eye on the delivery of the project. As such, we’ve had a few of these things knocking around the office and I’ve had my hands on them and played with them a bit.
My first impressions are underwhelming. If I put on my uber-geek hat, it’s a giant iPhone. It comes with the iPhone limitations and strengths. You can’t really tinker with the thing, it’s locked down tighter than a nun on retreat, and you can only really do what Apple says you can do with it. It’s less portable than an iPhone, and (I) found it quite heavy to hold for an extended period of time. The technical geek in my says “for the love of God – WHY?”.
But when I take off by technical-geek hat and put on my consumer hat, it’s a different game. Yes, it’s a giant iPhone[1]. And the iPhone has two major things going for it – App Store apps and Mobile Safari. Now the apps are pretty cool, and I’ve seen some that I’ve been suitably impressed by for mobile productivity (Things for starters, Mail is a definite improvement). The drawing apps are also suitable impressive and I was definitely tempted when I saw the venerable Omnigraffle on the iPad (for those unaware, I toiled with Visio for years. Then was shown Omnigraffle and cried tears of joy).
But for me, the biggest, the biggest and bestest (I know that’s not a word, but I don’t care) thing about the iPad is having a nine-inch, decent web browser. Because that provides a portal to stuff that Apple don’t have control over (not yet). Steve Jobs said in the WWDC keynote yesterday that HTML5 was their first platform, and the App Store second. With Android looking to go the same way, all bets are on HTML5.
And a nine-inch iPad is just about the right size to throw down in a meeting and have a small table of people peer over. It makes a great collaboration tool. I’ve used it a couple of times now in planning meetings for sprints and despite a couple of glitches JIRA and Greenhopper works great on the format. The format allows you to throw ideas together and plan sprints collaboratively without needing to lug a laptop, projector and designated minion to manage it all. You can put the screen flat on the table, making people feel part of the process rather than just talking to the man with the laptop.
So whilst it’s a great personal productivity tool, for me the great benefit is collaboration. I can see Balsamiq or Omingraffle (not tried it yet) being the next move for collaboration, getting people around for throwing UML use cases or interface designs together and getting all that lovely input together.
It probably goes without saying that I won’t be getting an iPad for myself. I’ll be waiting for a device like the Notion Ink Adam, running Android of course. 
[1] I’ve just been corrected by Caius the pedant that since the iPad does not make calls, it is infact a giant iPod touch, not a giant iPhone. I stand corrected.
