>On the bright side, Moore's law will give us tablets that will run stock Linux pretty soon, and then all we need is a BSD-licensed, community built touch layer.
Could you explain how Moore's Law is relevant here? How you get from "Number of transistors per IC will double in 18 months" to "Linux on a tablet pretty soon"? Tablet development isn't being limited by processing power as far as I know.
Most people I know who have an iPad 1 complain that speed is an issue. The iPad 2 certainly fixes that, but Apple's have focussed a lot on optimization and their stack is all built around compiled code.
To me that suggests that tablet performance is only just adequate today.
If we want to realize the dream of a truly open, programmable-on-the-device tablet, we're going to need it to burn some cycles on languages that aren't as efficient as C, and frameworks that haven't been as tuned as iOS.
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>On the bright side, Moore's law will give us tablets that will run stock Linux pretty soon, and then all we need is a BSD-licensed, community built touch layer.
Could you explain how Moore's Law is relevant here? How you get from "Number of transistors per IC will double in 18 months" to "Linux on a tablet pretty soon"? Tablet development isn't being limited by processing power as far as I know.
I think power is very much an issue.
Most people I know who have an iPad 1 complain that speed is an issue. The iPad 2 certainly fixes that, but Apple's have focussed a lot on optimization and their stack is all built around compiled code.
To me that suggests that tablet performance is only just adequate today.
If we want to realize the dream of a truly open, programmable-on-the-device tablet, we're going to need it to burn some cycles on languages that aren't as efficient as C, and frameworks that haven't been as tuned as iOS.