Dave Puttersnipe’s Keeping Up With Tech-know-lodgey Corner Presents Your Guide To The Tablet!
Every so often the Laffzone calls upon its resident tech guru Dave Puttersnipe to explain to all us lugheads what’s going on in the world of technology. His columns always leave our heads spinning with the possibilities of electrical machines and the awesome power of 1’s and 0’s (and 9’s!)! This time, he’s talking Tablet. No, he’s not on drugs! And even if he was, the Tablet is big news. Take it away, David!
Hello Laffzone readers!
Okay, pop quiz, hotshot: what are you reading this post on? A book? a magazine? some sort of kiosk? a cellular or car phone? Believe it or not, after today all of those things could become history and get thrown in a landfill, because today is the dawn of “the Tablet.”
We all remember the humble writing tablet from our school days, right? Or also from movies where people aren’t able to speak for some reason, usually from being too stupid or foreign or a bird, and so they use chalk.
Either way, this is a whole new kind of tablet! And it’s on its way! To you and me! And what is it called? Why, the “Tablet” of course!
The buzz has been audible and buzzy on this new device, though few know what, if anything, it will do. What we do know is that its manufacturer is an up-and-coming but previously little-known and possibly devil-may-care computing company calling itself Appel. This Johnny-come-lately hopes to sell Tablets to every Tom-Dick-and-Harry that comes down the merry-go-pike, and they might do just that!
Here’s why: people love writing and reading, and the Tablet will provide for at least one of those all-important outlets of human humanism: reading. While a digital computized device that can record human writing is the kind of radical amazing invention that gets yours truly, a real tech-no-fan all jazzed up, and could radically alter all of our lives in ways that could only be good, we’ll have to wait on that one.
That being said, the world has been in dire need of a new way of reading for a long time. Nobody wants to pick up heavy, smelly, boring old books anymore, and when i hear the word “magazine” that’s when I reach for my revolver. Just kidding. Actually I reach for a computer, because that’s where I read magazines and everything else nowadays. But since I’ve been reading on a computer, the whole reading experience has become much nicer, especially since I just skim everything (that way you get more done!) but also less nice, because my computer is hot, heavy, and covered in crumbs.
Enter The Tablet. This slender, lightweight device will be roughly the same size as a magazine but with no ink to smudge fingers or subscription cards to annoy the fuck out of you. Sorry. Those things are the worst.
I know what a lot of you are thinking: what about pictures? Magazines are famous for their pictures, and one of the more incredible advancements of the 1990’s was the introduction of pictures into proper books as well. So will the Tablet bring us pictures, the very thing that has come to mean so very much to the act of reading itself?
Sadly, no. The tablet can only show words. If you had a picture of words (say a picture of a stop sign, for instance) the Tablet might be able to manage that, but a picture of a horse? Or a lady in a bathrobe? No chance. How about a picture of an Appel Tablet? Sorry. What about a description of a picture of an Appel Tablet (let’s just call it an Appblet, ok?) using words? Well, maybe. But it would have to be concise, and even then you’d be better off looking at the Appblet itself.
But worry not, gadget-geeks! (Don’t worry, it’s a term of endearment!) Because word just came down the merry-go-pike (internet) that Appel has just announced the 2011 release of… THE PICLET!
The company is desperate for a big win (their AmEx bill is like 60 days past due so, you know…)
