Family Tech: What of Steve Jobs' latest innovation?

Choosing a computer is like choosing a house. Do you buy a cheaper house that needs a lot of ongoing maintenance, or a newer home that looks nice and will not require as much upkeep?

In the computer world, it's known as buying a PC or going with a Macintosh.

For economic reasons, mine is a PC family. I have to worry about keeping our anti-virus software up to date, and scan for other malware frequently. Also getting things to all work together can require a lot of tweaking, and sometime acceptance of the way things are, imperfect.

If you want to minimize that kind of effort, Apple Macintosh computers require less ongoing maintenance because they are more secure and less the target of virus authors.

And if you like your computer to be a work of art, Mac's the way to go.

Steve Jobs, the co-founder and CEO of Apple, is many things: an inventor, a marketer extraordinare and an artist. Apple products not only have to function, but function intuitively and look good. While PC products often give you many ways to do the same thing, Apple products tend to give you one way to do something. That one way is carefully thought through.

Last Wednesday, Steve Jobs may have given his fourth epoch moment to technology. Steve and his partner Steve Wozniak first major contribution was the Apple IIe, the first real home computer. Then in 1984, they changed the tech world again with the Macintosh, bringing windowing to computers. In 2007 Jobs wowed the world with the iPhone, bringing out the first phone, music player and Internet appliance in one.

Speaking in San Francisco, with his words streamed via cell phones to geeks online, he introduced the iPad, a tablet PC that is like an oversize iPhone at first take.

The iPad is basically a piece of touch-sensitive glass 9.7 inches in diagonal, half an inch thick and weighing just 1.5 pounds. It is designed to fit an Apple perceived niche between an iPhone and a full computer. It has been heavily criticized on-line for running the iPhone operating system, and thus not being a "real" computer. I think those people are missing the point.

A tablet is not a computer so much as it is an appliance for consuming electronic media. It can read elec-tronic books like Amazon's Kindle ebook reader. Unlike the Kindle it can play back videos of mov-ies or TV programs, play games, display photos, and run any of the over 100,000 applications in the iTunes App Store. Apps specifically for the Tablet are coming.

Apple's tablet has a virtual keyboard almost the size of a regular keyboard good for e-mails or documents. I could see myself writing this column on one using Apple's iLife office suite of soft-ware designed for the tablet.

The tablet is designed to be held as you would a book. I can see VRE riders reading the paper on one.

I suspect in the next year or two, many families will obtain a tablet computer. Not necessarily an Apple one though. The recently held Consumer Electronic Show displayed many tablets coming out this year. Some ran Google Android operating system that runs on both phones and small appliances or their upcoming Chrome operating system.

At first, I see families sharing a tablet as they once shared a computer. As prices come down, and the usefulness is proven, I can see people getting one for each family member. One long time computer user told me he wants to see the day they are cheap enough to have one in every room of the house.

There is much more manufacturers can do with tablets, so expect this to be a competitive and innovative segment of technology for a while. Families can only gain as we get easier to use, portable, tools for doing the things we commonly do now on our computers.

History will need judge if Jobs championing of tablet computers will be as pivotal as his first three inventions. I'd never listened to one of these announcements before. He had his audience of Tech Journalists cheering, gasping, and clapping like the paid studio audience of a late night infomercial. The next year should be interesting.

Links for items mentioned in this column can be found at: http://bit.ly/FamilyTech. Mark's blog is at http://markstout.blogspot.com and his e-mail address is markstout@gmail.com.