jr conlin's ink stained banana

i must be a bad geek again.

Every year, i look forward to the electronic Christmas pageant that is the Consumer Electronics Show. Not actually attending mind you (i had to do that a few years ago when i was asked to pimp Yahoo! Mobile 3.0 which was thankfully dragged behind the barn and beaten with a shovel), but reading about all the nifty toys that are going to be coming out Real Soon Now.

Most of them are crap, of course, but there are usually a few gems in the mix, with one overriding theme as companies desperate for a big hit latch onto anything that seems remotely marketable. This time: The iTablet. Apple's long rumored slab based device that will bring peace to the Middle East and rainbow sprinkled unicorns to children of the world. It has yet to exist, mind you, but that didn't stop folks from releasing dozens of iTablet killers in shiny glory.

And i bet they still won't sell.

Tablets aren't new. They've been around in various incarnations for coming up on a decade. They're expensive, tend to not really work terribly well, and are great for a tiny fraction of folks that want to live the dream of being a character in Star Trek: The Next Generation. If you wanted one, you could drop $500 and pick one up on amazon today. Heck, you could even scrape out the installed OS and load up osx86 on it and wait for the unicorns to show up. Granted, even if you don't, what you've got is still going to be better than a pure tablet.

The problem with all of these is that you're basically walking around with half a laptop, and unless you're highly proficient with a mouse, you're going to discover in pretty short order how much text entry you really do in a given day. You're also going to discover that walking around with half a laptop isn't really as much fun as you'd think it'd be, unless you happen to have a good sized purse or rather large pockets. Even then, you're probably going to realize that a laptop is just a bit thicker than what you're currently wandering around with, and has a keyboard, which not only allows you to type at a slightly faster rate, but does things like protect that big-ass scratch magnet from your car keys and loose change.

The biggest problem with tablets is that they seem like a good idea, kind of like how people think flying cars and mechanized walking battle armor are good ideas. They're not. In fact, they're down right horrible ideas if you actually try to use them. (Thus the amazing lack of ambulatory champions on BattleBots.)

It just doesn't feel like this year's show had anything all that exciting. Just the same stuff as before only now with 3D capacities taped on like some bad 1950's World of Tomorrow short. (i wear my sunglasses at night, so i can see two people talking to each other for ten minutes IN 3D! It's like being at a play! Except the focal distance is still fixed and it's not like i can actually shift my focus to SEE something in the background! OOooooh.)

Sigh.

Guess this Christmas was mostly socks and underwear.