Ever since the iPad came out back in April 2010, tablets have been popping up faster than weeds in an untended garden. Companies from Motorola to HP quickly jumped into the fray hoping that consumers would pick their inexpensive devices over the already popular Apple offering. Though these tablets had a lot of welcome features such as a much bigger screen, longer battery life, and faster processors there was still something about them that made a good majority of the tech market think twice before buying. Namely, that the tablets were close to the size, cost, and functionality of laptops (or netbooks) but didn’t have the memory and processing power, a real drawback for conducting processor-heavy business applications and complex gaming.

This is exactly what ASUS was intent on approaching with their Transformer tablet. The tablet, which will now be available on December 8th, is the first to have a quad core processor powered by NVIDIA’s Tegra chip technology. The tablet also sports a 10.1 inch 1280×720 display made of Gorilla Glass, 1 GB of RAM, an 8-megapixel camera with LED flash, a microSD slot, and a mini-HDMI port. The battery is supposed to last for a crowd pleasing 12 hours and will have WiFi capabilities. In addition, it can be easily mounted to an optional keyboard with a trackpad making it easier to write e-mails and play certain kinds of games.

With all of the interesting features that this tablet includes, the question that invariably surfaces is why not make a tablet that is as powerful as most laptops? Though the specs on this device are top notch for tablets, they’re actually quite slow compared to laptops. Considering laptops can be bought for as little as $300, it seems only a matter of time before tablet makers like ASUS not only make a device that has a processor as fast as the Intel i series with enough RAM to keep multiple programs open at a time, while having an operating system that not only works well for touch and gestures but for a mouse and keyboard as well. This way, it would be possible to use the laptop for touch-based or keyboard-based control of all sorts of complex applications such as simple editing in Final Cut Pro or Premiere. It would also place the tablet in a great buying position as many consumers could use the device as a laptop replacement with the added weight and size benefits that a tablet has.

Either way, it’s good to see companies like ASUS release better and faster hardware. With the pace the tablet upgrades seem to be happening it could be just a few short years before we see something that can truly be a laptop replacement.

Windows 8 will go where no Windows program has gone easily before – to the tablet market.

If you’re thinking of buying a tablet in the future, you might have to wait just a wee bit longer, because Windows 8 promises to be a better interface for the tablet user but won’t be out until probably next spring.

Windows 8 will work with a touchscreen operation and includes a Facebook-like sharing sidebar called “Share Charm”.  At last year’s Consumer Electronics Show [CES], Microsoft announced that Windows 8 was in the works, this week at the Build developers conference in Anaheim, Microsoft announced ’8′ be coming soon to a tablet near you. Developers say the cloud-based use will be better and easier and there will be 300 new features for cloud and business management.

According to the technical site, ars technica, Windows 8 will have a “genuine, uncompromised tablet operating system”, in other words – tablet use won’t be an afterthought, and users of non-Apple tablets should be able to enjoy the tablet experience that iPad users revel in.  Instead of a program made for keyboard and mouse use being fitted into a tablet user’s world, the new program will have an easier touchpad experience, with better icons and text, literally from startup –  with a touchscreen interface. You can “pick up” tiles, or icons, and move them around, swipe left, right or from the top, and pinch-zoom.

Once the iPad hit the market, the tablet genie was out of the bottle, and manufacturers and product developers  have been trying to take a nibble from that exclusive pie ever since.

IT World got the first exclusive look, and discusses its many new features.  According to reports, Windows 8 won’t be on tablets on store shelves until April or May of 2012. We have several different models of tablets here at Videomaker to experiment with their use and workablility, so we can’t wait to see Windows 8 in action. We’ll keep you updated on how these amazing little devices will work for you in your video-producing world.

Windows 7 -  Hero? or Foe?

When Windows 7 launched in October 2009, many people read about some of the problems and concerns that early adopters were dealing with and decided to wait. But, oh! Along came Adobe CS5 first, with it’s 64-bit processing mandates, and then many other editing programs that all demanded an upgrade to Windows if you were going to use their programs.

Windows 7 IS faster, feels more stable, and has more GPU feature support in the 64-bit world.  We’ve all recovered, and like the Y2K scare that never happened, the editing world as we knew it didn’t come crashing down.

I, for one, hesitated about upgrading to Windows 7 because, unlike previous Windows upgrades, moving to Windows 7 meant a complete rewrite on my system, one in which I had to reinstall every single program I used, including my email server; which, in reality meant having to organize all my shortcuts, bookmarks, desktop links and C-drive; and then I had to store them on a special file to reload later. But I was upgrading to CS5 and Avid Media Composer 5, and needed a beefier system, so now seemed the time to bite the bullet and organize. It was a hassle, but it was worth it. Windows 8 might do for tablets what Windows 7 did for desktops – we’ll let you know as soon as we know!

It’s Official – Apple released their tablet today! The iPad.

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