Tablet for Oldies

[Guest]

Hi there

My mum is in her 60s and has never used a computer. She is missing out.........I got thinking about it all today big time. I could sit down and teach her but I know it will be an uphill struggle. There is something awkward about sitting in front of a screen reading off the screen. That's where a tablet might be better for people like my mum. Something that will boot up into Google and has an easy to use touchscreen keyboard. Nothing too scarey.............and something bullet proof.

The ipad wins over people as it's easy to use but it's still £500 - very pricey........you have a product you've invented that could be put to use for this purpose that wouldn't cost the earth.

Don't flame me here..........perhaps the way forward is to bring out a solution with an easy to use webbrowser and your touchbook that just does webbrowsing. It doesn't matter if flash works on it or not either! The Joojoo looked good but that looked too big form factor wise!

The form factor of the touchbook looks just right not to mention the cool running arm chip with it's battery life.
Do you think there is a market to be tapped for this sort of thing or has Apple stolen the whole lot with the Ipad? I see the touchbook sitting there and keep thinking it could suit this purpose really well.

What are your thoughts? I haven't used a touchbook yet so don't know how well the touch works on it and the webbrowsing.

Thanks for listening.

[glenhawk]

I was trying to think of how to reply and the first thing that came into my mind was...

"you get what you pay for"

If the Touch Book was as easy to use as an iPad more people would buy the cheaper Touch Book

If more money was spent making the Touch Book easier to use (either by AI or a professional 3rd party wanting to on-sell the Touch Book) it would cost more to the end user.

If community time is the only thing spent making the Touch Book easier to use it will take a long time. ARM netbooks, as we know them today, are still very young.

You could buy an Atom based tablet (essentially the same technology we have been developing operating systems on for decades) and run ubuntu netbook remix and have something relatively bullet-proof (and not windows/apple)... something I am seriously considering
However this would cost more than a Touch Book (maybe not as much as an iPad).

[Meizirkki]

No, with 400$ you can get a real computer. Giving a netbook or even worse, Touch Book, as a first computer would ruin her first experiences of computers.

[TomMD]

An EeePC + UNR is ideal for computer new comers, imnsho,

[Guest]

Thanks for your replies everyone. You do get what you pay for I realise. Sigh!
Netbooks are great - I personally don't dig the 1024x600 screens to much ( it seems to make such a difference at 1024x768).

Sorry if this is a bit off topic but what's the touch like on a touchbook? Is it responsive and can you use a finger or a pen? I wondered what web browsing is like with touch on a touchbook.

[Meizirkki]

Sorry if this is a bit off topic but what's the touch like on a touchbook? Is it responsive and can you use a finger or a pen? I wondered what web browsing is like with touch on a touchbook.

Finger and pen both work, Touchscreen is very unresponsive, you have to push it hard before it notices the touch, and finger scrolling on web browsers is a bit laggy.

[glenhawk]

...also the performance of the touch screen seems to vary with "charge". If you can get a really good charge into the batteries it seems to perform better.