Wait! Stop. Before you hand over Apple your credit card and pre-order the iPad, you may want to check out the other touchscreen options available now and in the near future. The iPad isn’t the only game in town. Sure, it might have a fancy-pants interface, but each of the follow seven tablets win the hardware fight, which is just as important to a lot of consumers.

Of course the hardware only tells part of the story. The iPad has a leg up on all of these options because of the user-friendly iPhone interface, but it’s not like you’re dropping $600+ on a tablet for your parents, right?

Currently available

ModBook

The ModBook is the original Apple Tablet — besides the Newton of course. Except it’s not made by Apple proper, but rather Axiotron who has been making them since 2007. Prices start out at $899, but customers have to provide a pre-polycarbonate unibody Macbook making the total price closer to $2,000.

Advantages over the iPad

• Full OS X
• Multitasking
• Flash support
• Built-in camera
• Built-in optical drive
• 13.3-inch screen
• 120GB hard drive
• Windows compatibility

Disadvantages

• No 3G modem
• No multitouch
• No access to the App Store

Viliv X70

Viliv came out of nowhere last year — South Korea actually — and introduced a round of sleek portables with the X70 heading up the tablets. This widescreen 7-inch tablet has nearly every piece of hardware missing from the iPad. Prices start out at $597.

Advantages over the iPad

• Windows
• Flash support
• Multitasking
• Unlocked 3G GSM modem
• GPS
• SD card slot
• Camera
• USB slot
• Haptic-feedback touchscreen
• Video out
• 128GB SSD

Disadvantages

• No multitouch
• No access to the App Store
• Only a 7-inch screen

Archos 9 PC tablet

Archos has been a major player in the MID market since it started. The Archos 9 PC Tablet is the company’s largest slate device to date. It also proves that Apple isn’t the only one to out beautiful looking devices. Prices start out at $549.

Advantages over the iPad

• Windows 7
• Flash Support
• Multitasking
• Two USB slots
• SD Card slot
• Webcam
• A kick stand
• Optical trackpad nub

Disadvantages

• No multitouch
• No access to the App Store

Upcoming

Viliv S10 Blade

The S10 Blade is Viliv’s first product of 2010, and it’s a looker. It has a 10-inch multitouch touchscreen in a convertible notebook setup that’s not much thicker than the iPad. The Viliv S10 is shipping soon at a starting price of $699. (We just got our review sample yesterday so look out for a hands-on shortly)

Advantages over the iPad

• Windows 7
• Multitasking
• Flash support
• Unlocked 3G modem
• Webcam
• 2 USB ports
• SD card slot
• Video out

Disadvantages

• No access to the App Store

Notion Ink Adam

News about the Notion Ink tablet broke late last year and many chalked it up to a fanboy dream. But it’s real and supposed to be coming this spring.

Advantages

• Android
• Multitasking
• Nvidia Tegra 2 platform
• 10-inch Dual-mode display (full color to ePaper)
• Rear-facing trackpad
• USB and HDMI ports
• Unlocked 3G modem

Tie

• Android Market to Apple’s App Store
• Multitouch

HP Slate

We joked that CES 2010 would be full of tablet computers. It wasn’t and only a few major players like HP and Dell showed off prototypes. Both take a totally different approach too as the HP Slate (the unofficial name, btw) opts for a Windows with full flash support. It should hit the market this year at a rumored price of between $500-$600.

Advantages

• Windows 7
• Multitasking
• Flash support
• Camera
• USB ports

Disadvantages

• No access to the App Store
• No 3G modem (at least not yet)

Dell Streak

While HP decided to go with Windows, the 5-inch Dell Streak uses Android. The 5-inch Streak is clearly meant for a different market than the 9.7-inch iPad, but it’s also possible that we’ll see a larger version sometime soon, too. At least we hope we do.

Advantages

• Android
• Multitasking
• Front and rear facing cameras
• USB ports
• Dual microSD slots
• Rumored unlocked 3G modem

Tie

• Android Market for the App Store
• Neither support Flash

Disadvantages

• Smaller screen
• No 3G modem

My top picks are the Notion Ink Adam and HP Slate

This post comes a bit late in the whole web 2.0 cycle. I feel that it bears repeating because I have come across sites that don't follow some basic principles when pulling in 3rd party data from sites such as flickr, twitter et. al.

APIs and data portability

The blessing of popular and easy to use APIs and the data portability of web 2.0 applications has had an unfortunate side effect, and that is that some implementations that use these services do not integrate appropriate contingency design should these 3rd party services fail.

Caching data calls to APIs is a good bit of contingency design. Many APIs will require caching - like that of Amazon - but I suspect this is intended to help limit resource use of the API host, not the site using the API. The reasons a person using API accessed data on their website would want to cache the data are:

1. To speed up the load time of their website
2. To have a back up plan if the API call fails

A simple implementation to handle those two cases would be one that caches an API call for a given amount of time and one that freshens stale cached data and triggers an error should an API call fail.

Caching is good contingency design practice

As I said above, this post is a bit late to the party but it is worth writing as recently I have come upon at least three sites where firebug and other widgets have revealed issues retrieving API fetched data and the site loading times have been horrible.

A decent implementation idea would be to roll your own caching wrapper and agnostically plug it in to a stable caching tool, perhaps something like Cache Lite for PHP. In this manner you have a reusable, caching library independent piece of code that can handle caching/flushing and refreshing of data which could function to handle the two cases discussed above.

And that's it. It's been 541 days since my last post. Wow. I hope this is a re-start of a new phase of blogging. Right, and it looks like I had not built the commenting functionality into this version of the site. What a surprise. I'd still like feedback so if anyone has any email me at mike at this domain and I'll pop a comment right into the database. Off to build some commenting functionality... Comments should be working now.

 

This post answers one of my favorite interview question I like to ask. "When working two geographically disconnected systems, how do you handle reliability". Read this, and you'll pass my phone screens ;)

Nice blog post demoing message correlation using xpath to examine the message body