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According to Dave Stevens of Brennan IT, probably not. In his opinion column in The Australian IT section he compares the NBN to the government providing each household with a Rolls Royce… and as much as I am enjoying my own fast broadband at home (only 100mbps – yowee!) I think I he has a point.

Not wanting to be political, but the full capacity of my 100mbps connection is practically untouched and my real broadband needs are much more mobile oriented than fixed line.

My brother cannot even get broadband at his place in Cranbourne, Victoria and he operated entirely from Telstra NextG. For a few years my own Telstra NextG connection on my Tablet PC was equivalent if not faster than the slow ADSL 2 speeds that I could get at home.

I hate to say it, but implementing better wireless technology like 4G makes a lot more sense than Fibre To The Home… After all, why should we be confined to fixed lines to do what we need to do. Notebooks, Netbooks, Smart Phones, iPads, iPhones and Tablet PCs are not the future, they are very much here and now. They would all benefit much more from better wireless coverage than fixed line broadband.

Update: Judging by the plethora of idiots people commenting on stories on the major news websites, it appears that the NBN represents the politics of distraction.

Punters and politicians are getting wound up about technical things that way out of their depth. They are throwing around billions when none of them have a clue what they are talking about (i.e. they wouldn’t know an ST fibre connector from an SC) , and I guess that was the gambit… What did I expect?

Motion Computing announced the J3500 this week. I’ve known about the Motion J3500 for quite a few months now and I have been looking forward to getting my hands on a touch slate tablet with some serious grunt. There are plenty of touch slate tablets on the market of course, but most of them are far to underpowered to replace a laptop of a desktop PC. Not so with the J3500.

I’m currently using the Fujitsu T900 around the home and office for general duties like video editing, music recording and note taking. It has been one of my favourite Tablet PCs to date. It has an Intel Core i7 processor (serious grunt) and features a Wacom active digitizer and multi-touch panel.

It’s amazing to think about how far Tablets have come since I had my first HP TC1000. To use a Tablet, you used to have to take a massive hit on performance. But this Fujitsu T900 and the new Motion J3500 proves that those days are long gone.

I was using the Apple iPad at home, but I found it way too simple for even my simple tasks… so I switched over to the T900. What I have found though is that I have not swivelled the screen of the T900 out of slate mode in a couple of weeks now. I have also practically not used the iPad since.

I’ve found that I’m using touch much more than I thought I would. Touch is no substitute for the Wacom active digitizer pen. The digitizer is perfect as a substitute for a keyboard. It’s perfect for drawing, and more importantly note taking – which I do a heck of a lot of. But touch is great for navigating, web browsing and really short text entry – for example entering URLs.

So effectively I’m currently using the T900 as a slate… But it’s an unnecessarily bulky and heavy slate. And that’s why I’m looking forward to the Motion J3500.

A lot of people that I speak to are a bit apprehensive about going to slate Tablets – I know I was when I first saw the Motion LE1600 at a shop in Sydney several years ago. I thought it was a bit crazy and I took refuge in my hybrid TC1100 at the time. What I’ve found is that particularly since Windows 7, I need the keyboard less and less… at least when I’m mobile.

When I’m in the office, I have the tablet docked with a 23” Full HD screen and an ergonomic keyboard and mouse. A lot of people don’t realise that slate tablets like the Motion J3500 can be docked, so you really don’t miss out on the keyboard at all. Like the TC1100, the J3500 also has a mobile keyboard that you can take with you, but personally I’ve found that I no longer need it.

So for me, the J3500 is the ultimate mobile work tool. It will also do some serious duty at play.

I’ll be perfectly upfront about this: I hate Apple Computer inc! I’ve been a PC since I was 10 years old – 25 years ago! As much as I try though, I just can’t resist Apples products.

My wife and I both have iPhones, so far we have resisted the iPod. We now have an iPad too and whenever I pick it up it just feels… well, magical!

The friggin’ iPad took me four hours to set up (thanks to ridiculous and bizarre app store country restrictions). I have no music, video or pictures on it because it is just impossible to work with that iTunes rubbish on PC. Ditto for the iPhone. But they are both still amazing!

The web browser on the iPad is built to be worked around. It doesn’t do flash or multi-tasking, so when I went to watch the video on how to use the Dragon Dictation app I just got this big white square where the video should be. And yet it still feels…awesome!

What the hell is going on here? Why do these devices have so many limitations and yet I am helpless to resist? Am I that suggestible?

I did some research and found that Apple are using NLP and hypnosis techniques to sell their products to you. Allow me to explain:

Music, emotional anchoring, colours, hypnotic phrases, keywords… it’s all there and it makes for one amazing show.

The following hypnotic NLP ad is so slick that I want to buy a 27” iMac now. I would run Windows 7 on it though.

…tremendous, unique, so much further, bigger, higher, standard, faster, more, truly our best iMac ever!!!

Is Johnny Ive Derren Browns lost brother? He could be!!!

Of course, I can’t say that I figured this out myself… Thanks to Fake Steve Jobs for this: http://www.fakesteve.net/2009/10/jonny-uses-nlp-hypnosis-to-make-you.html

It appears that the hailed religious leader of Apple fanbois, Steve Jobs is stupid.

According to the wired report on the now famous “Town Hall” meeting (seems a bit religious doesn’t it – for freak’ sake they make computers), Steve says about Adobe,

They are lazy, Jobs says. They have all this potential to do interesting things but they just refuse to do it. They don’t do anything with the approaches that Apple is taking, like Carbon. Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy, he says. Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it’s because of Flash. No one will be using Flash, he says. The world is moving to HTML5. – Wired Article

Apparently he’s never seen the smoking pile of garbage that is iTunes. In terms of designing to usability standards it is on a par with if not worse than Adobe’s lazy products like Acrobat Reader. It is slower than a snail, unbelievably irritating, and incredibly hard to use. Did they design this program to convey the complete disdain that they hold you in as a customer.

What about Quicktime? What a piece of rubbish! It does not conform to any Windows usability standards… and you have to wonder, was it designed with that in mind? – To make windows seem bad? I flat out refuse to install it, and thankfully more and more the format is irrelevant anyway. Kudos to flash!!! I can think of once or twice in the last 12 months that I’ve visited a site that needed their buggy piece of rubbish video player.

All I’m saying here is that while Steve’s flamboyant rant had the Apple underlings in rapture, it was a ruse.

Apple make money from iTunes and the App Store. If they gave it away for free by letting flash roam around on the iPhone and iPad unguarded there would be no profit and no business.

It has nothing to do with how rubbish Adobe products are, and Macs crash more frequently than windows because they are Macs… don’t go blaming flash (which is actually one of the more reliable Adobe products, probably thanks to its Macromedia roots).

So cut the bullshit Steve! Stop throwing stones because that Apple store you got is one freakin’ huge glass house!

One of the best known digital inkers of all time is Sumocat who writes for Gottabemobile.com. To see a great example of what digital inking is all about, visit Sumocat’s ink blog here: http://sumocat.blogspot.com/

But something that he said in a comment on one of his articles yesterday got me thinking…

Just about the only thing I don’t like about the iPad is the lack of real inking, but this isn’t something that appeals to the masses. – Sumocat, Gottabemobile.com comments

Last night I was out at a business lounge in the Melbourne Airport Hilton with a couple of Motion Computing VPs and Sumocat’s comment came to mind… As I looked across the room I noticed business people all over the place having informal meetings and taking notes on pen and paper.

Perhaps Sumocat’s comment was referring to the fact that people don’t use pen and paper so much while vegetating on the couch (or toilet) – which is of course the intended use case for an Apple ipad. And he’d be right about that… Touch will do just fine.

However, I thought how many people work in an office, attend meetings all day long and take notes? Tablet PCs in their current form are unbelievably ideal for this use case, and I’d have to say that there are masses.

At home, at work, in the car (as a passenger or stopped of course!), at church, at the shops, at the post office… there are so many places that you scribble notes on paper. Surely everyone does that?

Touch in any form will simply not cut it to replace the ballpoint pen, but a proper windows Tablet PC with an active digitizer can! If we could only get them into a consumer format and priced like an Apple iPad.

I think now that Apple will never adopt the pen. I doubt that Google will either when they release a couple Tablet PCs shortly. C’mon Microsoft, it’s time to act on Courier – put your cards on the table(t)!

Thanks to Apple iPad madness, my Tablet PC YouTube channel goes over 200,000 views tomorrow… At the start of the year (only one month ago), I was celebrating 100,000 views. Most of the traffic has been aimed at one video I did showing off the Motion Computing F5 with windows 7 on it.

I filmed this video before the release of Windows 7 showing it alongside another F5 with Windows Vista on it.

I wanted to show off the improvements for tablet PC users in windows 7 as well as the Motion F5 hardware… I think that I’ve certainly succeeded in both! This video itself will account for 100,000 views in a couple of days.

The thing that strikes me is that there are so many people who still don’t even know about Windows Tablet PCs, even though they have been around for 10 years in their current form (20 years really on Windows).

Sure 200,000 views is nothing compared to the dizziness that surrounds an Apple product launch, but I’m still proud of what we have achieved so far here down under… All part of a days work for me to get the message out about real, useful tablet PCs that will make your job quicker and easier – not just Apple richer. Swipe!

I was seriously expecting the Apple iPad to be a game changer, but it appears to me that the folks at Cupertino haven’t spent any time using real Tablets. If they had, the iPad probably wouldn’t be lacking an active digitiser with digital ink capabilities.

When commentators said that the lack of Tablet PC sales means that people don’t like the pen, maybe Apple listened. But most of those folks that pass comment on Tablet PCs haven’t seriously used one either…

It’s not true that people don’t like the pen. They might not like the idea of it, but for the most part they’ve never tried it, so they don’t really know that they don’t like it. It’s an experience that they have never been able to have, so they really don’t know how useful it is. The disappointing thing is that thanks to Apple, they may never know.

Windows Tablets are still far from perfect, but due to the lack of a digitiser they are still far more useful than the iPad appears to be.

To give you an example, I spent the weekend in a conference. I took notes through the entire full day session on a Motion Computing C5 tablet on one battery. That included scribbled notes, mind maps, sketches, drawings and audio. Windows indexed all of my handwritten content in the background so that I can search through it… which I often do.

Another example, when a customer calls on the phone, I have my Tablet PC open with Microsoft OneNote and our enquiry form template. I fill in the details we discuss without distracting the person on the other end from the conversation with the noise of frantic key tapping. It’s much faster to note take this way than on the keyboard anyway.

When I go to a meeting with a customer, I always take notes and fill in the answers to my questions so that my sales process does not rely on tatty notebooks, sticky notes and lost paper.

I often take screen shots of things like web pages, pictures, documents and videos, then scribble on them and email them off using the Microsoft Snipping Tool.

I never print letters of faxes that I have to sign. I just sign on the screen and email them straight back using Bluebeam or Word.

Digital note taking, sketching and drawing is all impractical on a device like the iPhone or iPad. There are no tools to do it with… Sure, you could use the brushes application shown at the iPad launch to draw with your finger… But that’s a bit like drawing with a blunt stick. Practically useless when compared to using a Tablet PC with a Wacom active digitiser – Which is both proximity and pressure sensitive, while your touch screen is neither.

No, there are only 2 things that have held Windows based Tablet PCs back from going where Apple is about to go (and I’m not talking about UMPCs here).

1. Price – iPad is cheap in comparison
2. Availability – iPad will be available to get your hands on in most places.

Windows Tablets did not take a huge hit today, because Apple decided to play it safe. Did Apple fall into the old corporate trap of too many focus groups, too many committees, too many meetings, too many voices of fear in the back of their heads? They played it safe and just supersized an existing product… I don’t think that’s going to fly.

This is not the mobile phone scenario where windows mobile is being seriously spanked by the iPhone. Phones are pretty much a closed system, whereas Windows Tablets leverage the 92% of computers in the world that run Windows, not to mention the fact that they can connect to and access practically any server be that Windows, *nix or Mac.

That said, if Microsoft et al don’t act – and be seen to act – it may be only a matter of time until history is rewritten by Apple.

Remember the first iPhone? With no 3G, no video, no app store? Apple won’t stand still with a seriously deficient product like this until it becomes a seriously useful product like the iPhone 3Gs.

The release of the Apple iPad this morning threatened to impress. It looks great – as expected like a big iPhone. 1.3cm thick, 700grams, impressive screen. Super mobile computing!

But I had hoped for something game changing. I had hoped that Apple would bring something new to the slate form factor with some radical new input method like mind control or eye tracking… Something that was just out there!

Coming down off of the high of finally meeting the unicorn (Apple Tablet has been a myth for 5 years now), I am starting to feel a little disappointed.

One of the biggest benefits of having a tablet is input. Taking notes, drawing, handwriting recognition. Apple iPad has none of that. It even appears to have kept the same virtual keyboard as the iPhone – which is good enough for a 3 inch screen, but hardly ideal for a 10” one.

On the iPhone, input is frustrated by constant switching form letters to numbers to symbols and it appears that Apple haven’t really even addressed this with their legendary innovation… Nothing.

In the end, it appears that we’ll have to wait for MS and partners to come back with a decently priced super mobile digitizer tablet that handles handwriting recognition, sketching and note taking. At the end of the day they already have all that right now, but just not at the right price!

So it turns out that the Apple iPad is a consumption device for consumers. Disappointing.