I have an Asus Transformer Prime and it's great, but it has its limits, and I frequently pull out my Macbook Pro. The Transformer looks like a laptop, but since it's running Android, it's kind of half a laptop:
* Switching between apps is not as smooth as on a laptop running a normal operating system
* It looks and feels like a laptop, but I still get mobile web pages
* YouTube often tells me that the content isn't available on mobile
Other than that, I like it. In particular I find myself touching the screen even though the keyboard with the trackpad is connected. Once or twice I've even tried to touch the screen while using my Macbook.
The idea of having a laptop with a detachable screen is good, but for now it's probably still not possible to stick the capabilities of a normal laptop into something that would pass as a handy tablet.
One idea I've been toying with is to set up a server, and just use Splashtop on my Transformer whenever I need a proper desktop, but for now it's really just easier to pull out my Macbook.
"The idea of having a laptop with a detachable screen is good, but for now it's probably still not possible to stick the capabilities of a normal laptop into something that would pass as a handy tablet."
This use case is clearly part of the reason behind Microsoft's Windows 8 ARM strategy.
Within a year I will almost certainly own an x86-64 laptop with a detachable screen that happens to be an ARM based tablet that can run independently of the main system, so long as you're just using the Metro apps.
Apple could do the same with OS X/iOS, of course, though if they don't have an announcement for this on March 7th I wouldn't hold my breath for a while after that.
Android has a very nice, native YouTube app with a smooth interface. It can view about 50% of videos, though, since many users lock mobile users out (why?!). So opening the browser, using a development debug setting, running Flash and having awkward touch controls is quite the pain point for just wanting to see a video.
I usually use Opera Mobile, and have set the UA string to desktop, but I didn't know you could do this with the stock browser as well. Thanks, I'll try that out.
In Opera Mobile with the UA set to desktop, the experience on YouTube is suboptimal compared to a normal laptop, unfortunately.
Apple's key insight was that a touch screen demands a completely different UI than a mouse & keyboard. I predict that all these hybrid approaches are doomed to niche status. The impedance mismatch going back and forth between devices is a software problem that will be solved by deeper cloud integration.
In many scenarios, there's no need for a completely different UI. Clicking links, buttons and input fields, for instance, doesn't require the UI to be that different. I don't disagree completely with you, of course. Things such as menus need to be very different.
Perhaps the problem isn't that they need to be different - obviously a touch based UI needs to be different from normal operating system UI as it is now, but perhaps UI on normal operating systems could be closer to what's needed by touch interfaces?
* Switching between apps is not as smooth as on a laptop running a normal operating system
* It looks and feels like a laptop, but I still get mobile web pages
* YouTube often tells me that the content isn't available on mobile
Other than that, I like it. In particular I find myself touching the screen even though the keyboard with the trackpad is connected. Once or twice I've even tried to touch the screen while using my Macbook.
The idea of having a laptop with a detachable screen is good, but for now it's probably still not possible to stick the capabilities of a normal laptop into something that would pass as a handy tablet.
One idea I've been toying with is to set up a server, and just use Splashtop on my Transformer whenever I need a proper desktop, but for now it's really just easier to pull out my Macbook.