The App Store: A Phone-Like Software Model for Tablet PCs?

Apple's decision to introduce an iPad version of their iPhone OS is a move that has been met with skepticism by many in the tech industry. The app store, which was introduced with the iPhone, is designed specifically for mobile devices, and its limitations have become apparent when it comes to tablet PCs. With the iPad, Apple is essentially taking a device that competes on the level with notebooks and netbooks, and yet, the app store remains a phone-like software model.

This raises questions about the compatibility of certain apps and the potential limitations of using a tablet PC. One major drawback of the app store is that users are required to go through Apple's approval process in order to install new software on their device. This can be frustrating for users who want more control over what they can and cannot install on their tablet. Moreover, the fact that the iPad is not designed with a removable storage option means that users are at the mercy of Apple when it comes to expanding their storage capacity.

In contrast, many netbooks and notebooks come with removable storage options, allowing users to expand their storage capacity as needed. This flexibility is something that is missing from the iPad experience. Furthermore, the app store's focus on mobile apps can be limiting for users who want to install more traditional software applications. For example, a user may want to install Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop on their tablet, but these apps are not available through the app store.

Despite these limitations, Apple has made significant strides in terms of hardware and performance. The A4 processor, which is used in the iPad, is an ARM Core derivative that was developed by Apple itself. This marks a departure from previous generations of iPhone processors, which were sourced from Samsung or Intel. While the A4 processor may not be revolutionary in terms of its design, it has delivered impressive results in terms of battery life and performance.

In other news, NVIDIA has revealed details about their upcoming Fermi GPU architecture, codenamed GF100. The company's CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, took to the stage at CES to reveal more information about the GPU, which is expected to be released later this year. According to Huang, the GF100 GPU will be capable of delivering performance that rivals two GTX 285s linked together in SLI. This makes it a significant upgrade over current-generation GPUs, and one that should provide gamers with a substantial boost in terms of performance.

The exact specifications of the GF100 GPU were not revealed during the CES presentation, but Huang did confirm that it will be based on NVIDIA's CUDA architecture, which is designed to enable parallel processing and accelerate certain types of calculations. The company has also confirmed that the GF100 GPU will be manufactured using a 40nm process, which should help reduce power consumption and increase performance.

While the GF100 GPU promises to deliver significant improvements in terms of gaming performance, it's worth noting that the first games optimized for the new architecture may not be available until later this year. In the meantime, NVIDIA is working with game developers to optimize their titles for the new GPU, which should provide a more seamless and enjoyable experience for gamers.

In related news, HotHardware has partnered with Origin PC to give away a brand-new gaming rig through our End-of-Year Sweepstakes. The system, which features a custom-built Origin PC that includes an Intel Core i7 processor, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 graphics card, and a 1TB hard drive, is valued at over $2,000. Readers can enter the sweepstakes by submitting their contact information on our website, with the final deadline being January 31st.

As always, readers can find more information about the system we're giving away, as well as HotHardware's latest news and reviews, on our website at hothardware.com.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhot hardware is back on tech v dave alte villa and marco chapetta return to talk about intel micron's latest innovation an affordable gaming laptop from alienware the apple ipad and the nvidia gf100 try go to meeting free for 30 days visit gotomeeting.com tech podcasts so dave intel and micron are working together on some new nand flash what's the news on this yeah it's actually you know it's a little bit on the geeky side to talk about process technology and semiconductors but uh it makes a big difference uh on the consumer side of things uh and a product that uh the end product that's produced and so yeah intel and micron or imft intel micron flash technology group has a collaboration between the two companies that is targeted at developing next generation nand flash technologies for things like flash cards and ssds and what they've come up with is a new 25 nanometer bleeding edge 25 nanometer semiconductor process technology that allows you know basically addresses two critical issues relative to solid-state storage and that is uh density and cost so a real real good breakthrough there and um you know going after the kind of what i guess what really are the limiting factors for uh consumer-based uh solid-state storage so this new partnership are they coming out with anything soon what's the timetable on the release of this thing yeah they're talking uh 2010 so uh first half 2010 uh release i'm sorry excuse me towards the end of 2010 so second half 2010 and um what we're talking about here is 25 nanometer process technology uh which you know previously the the smallest die geometries we could see on nand flash was 34 nanometer so it's you know roughly about a 35 reduction in die geometries but when you talk about how that affects on a wafer level the number of die and the density of chip you can get out of a single chip it's it's pretty amazing they're able to produce now an eight gig mlc nand flash device and a single chip eight gigs of storage so pretty amazing stuff that's some pretty amazing stuff that does sound pretty interesting marco i'm hearing that alienware also has something interesting going on an affordable laptop that's a gaming machine now when people say affordable on a gaming machine they usually start cringing because that means it's going to be underpowered what makes this laptop special so there's a couple things that make it special first is the form factor um it's an 11 inch 11 inch notebook but it's got nice full size keys it's got you know a lighted keyboard a discrete gpu so it's perfectly capable for gaming and it's based you know built around intel's processors it's basically just a shrink of alienware's m17 just in an 11 inch form factor it's a really beautiful machine uh what kind of resolution is it running i mean if it's only 11 inches i don't know if you can do a full 1920 by 1080 or what exactly is the resolution on this device right it's a 1366 by 768 so it is a you know widescreen format not ultra high res but you know with an 11 inch screen you can't have too many pixels on there what's the price actually it's affordable so what's the uh what's the big hook on this one right this is what's really cool considering the power and you know the design it's really affordable at 800 on up it's not on alienware site yet to purchase it's going to be released in a few weeks but you know at that price it's basically a steal for an alienware machine only 800 bucks from an alienware well 800 on up so a decent start exactly so that means you guys can probably rack that thing up to 3 000 if you choose i'm sure there's going to be options to do that dave the mobile computing market is about to get shaken up with the apple ipad what's your take on this not a netbook not a mobile phone in the middle device i mean it's kind of a crossover thing without a home what do you think about this thing yeah you know poor apple i hate even to go there again they've taken such a beating in the press with this thing but you know guess what they had the world's ear when they uh you know announced this press conference that they were uh you know going to be unveiling a new technology and everybody knew it was the ipad this new tablet from apple but boy they missed the mark we really feel you know you identified you weren't quite sure what it is it's a sort of an in-between device you know sean uh oliver on our site he he put up an article uh entitled uh the ipad's identity crisis and really that's what it is it's it's it's not quite enough of one thing or the other um some serious limitations with the device it's it's a traditional apple you know sort of closed system approach there's no universal connector on there that everybody can relate to like usb there's not even a flash card reader the battery is not replaceable um you know storage on it isn't upgradable you've got 64 gig max of flash storage which is a pretty good density you know it's pretty good capacity but from a hardware standpoint it's it's very limited in terms of its expandability and io connectivity from a software standpoint and we've got an article up on the site as well uh that talks about apple's you know app approach to uh software uh which really was a carrier from the iphone uh with the iphone os essentially a you know an expanded uh iphone os that's run on this uh ipad device um that again limits you and closes off your options in terms of what you can install in this thing you have to go to apple's app store and who would think in in their right mind if you had a netbook or a notebook or perhaps even a standard tablet pc that's running some you know stripped-down version of windows or maybe droid os who would think that you'd have to go back to the manufacturer to get any of your software and they'd have to approve it it's just now apple is taking a device that really competes on the level with notebooks and netbooks and you know other tablet pc like devices it's not a phone so the long and short of it is uh the app store is a phone like software model and it's just not gonna fly on a tablet pc well what do you think about the a4 in there i mean apple went ahead and is using their own uh tech this time they're not relying on samsung to make the processor i think they make the iphone processor they're not using intel either uh what do you think about this move right well the a4 is an interesting device and it's actually an arm core uh derivative that apple chose but you need to obviously you take this this core ip from arm technologies and you need to build around it things like you know graphics blocks and other uh peripherals to enable the full system on a chip like design that's the model of arm interesting processor very competitive in terms of low power tablet cpus not you know revolutionary in terms of how it was built but you got to hand it to apple they've got some pretty smart architects out there and that thing delivers you know 10 hours of uh hd video battery life it's it's pretty impressive so you know we applaud them for that marco let's talk graphics here hot hardware has all the details on the nvidia gf100 why don't you tell the people about this what what's exciting about this why is this a big deal so what's exciting is that nvidia finally revealed some of the gaming specs related to their upcoming fermi gpu architecture for the last few months we've been hearing a lot about the compute performance of the gpu and not a lot about what it's going to do for gamers so we still don't have hardware but out at ces we got a nice deep dive briefing that explained a lot of the gamer oriented features of gf100 it's basically going to be more powerful than two gtx 285s linked together in sli it's going to be a super powerful gpu so this thing is going to be able to run some serious games we're talking about is there a game out there that can break this yet well you know we can't really say so here's the thing on paper the architecture looks very powerful but it's up to nvidia to see what kind of clock speeds they can hit and how they deliver final retail product so if they're able to hit decent clock speeds and yields are okay on a gpu this size it's a three billion transistor gpu then yeah it's going to be super powerful it's probably going to outpace a radeon 5870 um not quite catch the the 5970 but yeah there's there's no games out there today that are going to tax it you know should it ship sometime soon so this is a challenge out there to the game developers right now you got to beat this thing up because this thing's got to be old tech i would imagine in about three months there'll be something more amazing it is the way of the graphics cards there is uh dave there's a contest going on hot hardware right now and i think there's one coming up could you fill the people in on this sure yeah actually uh we're just closing off the the final day of our hot hardware and origin new year's sweepstakes uh ended actually yesterday january 31st so the folks folks you've missed out on this one but uh every month we give away a new pc a new gaming rig uh and today it was origin pc origin systems that has collaborated with us their former alienware executives that started up this new gaming pc company boutique pc and it's pretty impressive system stop by the site take a look and stay tuned for next month's contest you can find out all about the stuff we talked about at hothardware.com marco chapetta mark managing editor at hot hardware thanks for being here and dave altavella editor-in-chief thanks for showing up and remember people you can find techv everywhere including blip youtube you can probably play it on the ipad even though dave hates it so that's all for now we'll see you guys laterhot hardware is back on tech v dave alte villa and marco chapetta return to talk about intel micron's latest innovation an affordable gaming laptop from alienware the apple ipad and the nvidia gf100 try go to meeting free for 30 days visit gotomeeting.com tech podcasts so dave intel and micron are working together on some new nand flash what's the news on this yeah it's actually you know it's a little bit on the geeky side to talk about process technology and semiconductors but uh it makes a big difference uh on the consumer side of things uh and a product that uh the end product that's produced and so yeah intel and micron or imft intel micron flash technology group has a collaboration between the two companies that is targeted at developing next generation nand flash technologies for things like flash cards and ssds and what they've come up with is a new 25 nanometer bleeding edge 25 nanometer semiconductor process technology that allows you know basically addresses two critical issues relative to solid-state storage and that is uh density and cost so a real real good breakthrough there and um you know going after the kind of what i guess what really are the limiting factors for uh consumer-based uh solid-state storage so this new partnership are they coming out with anything soon what's the timetable on the release of this thing yeah they're talking uh 2010 so uh first half 2010 uh release i'm sorry excuse me towards the end of 2010 so second half 2010 and um what we're talking about here is 25 nanometer process technology uh which you know previously the the smallest die geometries we could see on nand flash was 34 nanometer so it's you know roughly about a 35 reduction in die geometries but when you talk about how that affects on a wafer level the number of die and the density of chip you can get out of a single chip it's it's pretty amazing they're able to produce now an eight gig mlc nand flash device and a single chip eight gigs of storage so pretty amazing stuff that's some pretty amazing stuff that does sound pretty interesting marco i'm hearing that alienware also has something interesting going on an affordable laptop that's a gaming machine now when people say affordable on a gaming machine they usually start cringing because that means it's going to be underpowered what makes this laptop special so there's a couple things that make it special first is the form factor um it's an 11 inch 11 inch notebook but it's got nice full size keys it's got you know a lighted keyboard a discrete gpu so it's perfectly capable for gaming and it's based you know built around intel's processors it's basically just a shrink of alienware's m17 just in an 11 inch form factor it's a really beautiful machine uh what kind of resolution is it running i mean if it's only 11 inches i don't know if you can do a full 1920 by 1080 or what exactly is the resolution on this device right it's a 1366 by 768 so it is a you know widescreen format not ultra high res but you know with an 11 inch screen you can't have too many pixels on there what's the price actually it's affordable so what's the uh what's the big hook on this one right this is what's really cool considering the power and you know the design it's really affordable at 800 on up it's not on alienware site yet to purchase it's going to be released in a few weeks but you know at that price it's basically a steal for an alienware machine only 800 bucks from an alienware well 800 on up so a decent start exactly so that means you guys can probably rack that thing up to 3 000 if you choose i'm sure there's going to be options to do that dave the mobile computing market is about to get shaken up with the apple ipad what's your take on this not a netbook not a mobile phone in the middle device i mean it's kind of a crossover thing without a home what do you think about this thing yeah you know poor apple i hate even to go there again they've taken such a beating in the press with this thing but you know guess what they had the world's ear when they uh you know announced this press conference that they were uh you know going to be unveiling a new technology and everybody knew it was the ipad this new tablet from apple but boy they missed the mark we really feel you know you identified you weren't quite sure what it is it's a sort of an in-between device you know sean uh oliver on our site he he put up an article uh entitled uh the ipad's identity crisis and really that's what it is it's it's it's not quite enough of one thing or the other um some serious limitations with the device it's it's a traditional apple you know sort of closed system approach there's no universal connector on there that everybody can relate to like usb there's not even a flash card reader the battery is not replaceable um you know storage on it isn't upgradable you've got 64 gig max of flash storage which is a pretty good density you know it's pretty good capacity but from a hardware standpoint it's it's very limited in terms of its expandability and io connectivity from a software standpoint and we've got an article up on the site as well uh that talks about apple's you know app approach to uh software uh which really was a carrier from the iphone uh with the iphone os essentially a you know an expanded uh iphone os that's run on this uh ipad device um that again limits you and closes off your options in terms of what you can install in this thing you have to go to apple's app store and who would think in in their right mind if you had a netbook or a notebook or perhaps even a standard tablet pc that's running some you know stripped-down version of windows or maybe droid os who would think that you'd have to go back to the manufacturer to get any of your software and they'd have to approve it it's just now apple is taking a device that really competes on the level with notebooks and netbooks and you know other tablet pc like devices it's not a phone so the long and short of it is uh the app store is a phone like software model and it's just not gonna fly on a tablet pc well what do you think about the a4 in there i mean apple went ahead and is using their own uh tech this time they're not relying on samsung to make the processor i think they make the iphone processor they're not using intel either uh what do you think about this move right well the a4 is an interesting device and it's actually an arm core uh derivative that apple chose but you need to obviously you take this this core ip from arm technologies and you need to build around it things like you know graphics blocks and other uh peripherals to enable the full system on a chip like design that's the model of arm interesting processor very competitive in terms of low power tablet cpus not you know revolutionary in terms of how it was built but you got to hand it to apple they've got some pretty smart architects out there and that thing delivers you know 10 hours of uh hd video battery life it's it's pretty impressive so you know we applaud them for that marco let's talk graphics here hot hardware has all the details on the nvidia gf100 why don't you tell the people about this what what's exciting about this why is this a big deal so what's exciting is that nvidia finally revealed some of the gaming specs related to their upcoming fermi gpu architecture for the last few months we've been hearing a lot about the compute performance of the gpu and not a lot about what it's going to do for gamers so we still don't have hardware but out at ces we got a nice deep dive briefing that explained a lot of the gamer oriented features of gf100 it's basically going to be more powerful than two gtx 285s linked together in sli it's going to be a super powerful gpu so this thing is going to be able to run some serious games we're talking about is there a game out there that can break this yet well you know we can't really say so here's the thing on paper the architecture looks very powerful but it's up to nvidia to see what kind of clock speeds they can hit and how they deliver final retail product so if they're able to hit decent clock speeds and yields are okay on a gpu this size it's a three billion transistor gpu then yeah it's going to be super powerful it's probably going to outpace a radeon 5870 um not quite catch the the 5970 but yeah there's there's no games out there today that are going to tax it you know should it ship sometime soon so this is a challenge out there to the game developers right now you got to beat this thing up because this thing's got to be old tech i would imagine in about three months there'll be something more amazing it is the way of the graphics cards there is uh dave there's a contest going on hot hardware right now and i think there's one coming up could you fill the people in on this sure yeah actually uh we're just closing off the the final day of our hot hardware and origin new year's sweepstakes uh ended actually yesterday january 31st so the folks folks you've missed out on this one but uh every month we give away a new pc a new gaming rig uh and today it was origin pc origin systems that has collaborated with us their former alienware executives that started up this new gaming pc company boutique pc and it's pretty impressive system stop by the site take a look and stay tuned for next month's contest you can find out all about the stuff we talked about at hothardware.com marco chapetta mark managing editor at hot hardware thanks for being here and dave altavella editor-in-chief thanks for showing up and remember people you can find techv everywhere including blip youtube you can probably play it on the ipad even though dave hates it so that's all for now we'll see you guys later\n"