Thread: Mp3Car's Sean Clark on 'Why Tablets?'

^^^ That is very interesting.

What I'd like to see would be a wireless connection (Bluetooth or Wifi) to things like fusion brain and CarPC joy con ex. I mean, why reinvent the Fusion Brain/CarPC JoyCon if all you need is a wireless interface and a software? Interface with softare like tasker (crazy automation on Android there) and you half way through.

That's the second best thing for a black box would be a generic USB to Bluetooth interface...But it's maybe even harder than I think.

Why not something like the Car/Droid solution from Bybyte? This is an integrated tablet within a double din space.

Major drawback I see to tablets/etc are the lack of PCI card usage.

Until someone releases a REAL 8-10 channel USB sound card I will pass.

Why? Simple. The sheer fact that I built a $400 mini-itx based car pc that replaces $6000 in high end/pro-audio gear for my gear. Priceless.

A tablet would ONLY enhance the display for me, not the functionality or certainly the price.

What NEEDS to happen is the release of a real transflective/capacitive multi-touch display for the 12v market. My guess is these are or will show up soon via the OEMs as most cars are showing up with touchscreen everything now a days.

As for cooling/power/etc....If you can't figure that out how the hell could you figure out how to cram 10 lbs of crap into a 1 lbs bucket (i.e. customizing dash via fiberglass/etc for a "large" tablet integration)?? Answer: As the article states, by the time you paid (assuming of course YOU don't have the skills) to have it done for you, you are well past the price point of an "old" carputer with half the functionality imho.

Good times.

^ audio-wise, i am in the same boat(use the carpc for active audio processing), but for the overall forum, the new tablets cover 80-90% of what everyone needs a carpc to do.

at this point, i believe they are more viable options then the pc tablets of before-- the smaller overall profile allows for easier installations(yes gizmo, i think your tablet install is too large for most), and because everything is included, makes for less of a per-piece cost, and less assembly issues..

Gizmo I totally see where you coming from with the tabletPC but, for lack of a better term, is no longer a tablet. And I use that term because of what people generally think of now when you say 'tablet'. What you have, is a tabletPC which is not the same as the devices we are referring to. The reason these new tablets are so much more popular is not because of marketing though. Its because of the follow (pluses) IMO
- multitouch
- thin
- not windows
- app markets

Sure, touchscreen PCs have been around for a long time, bill gates said it himself when asked about the iPad before it launched. People weren't looking for a laptop they can touch. They wanted a new form factor, and they didn't want windows.

With all that said - the main thing to think about for the tablet to succeed is interface. And I say that coming from the perspective of a consumer, and a programmer. These new form factor devices force people to think differently about how they should interact. Now a days its not uncommon to see a 40 yr old mother of 2 using 3 fingers on a touch screen to complete a task. The very nature of this type of new interaction causes developers to come up with software that plays nice with how people will interact.

The same thing will happen when the next device form factor comes out. If connect had blow up as the new cool UI of the future we might have been waving our hands in front of things by now.

So for in car use - I dont think tabletPCs will ever get a grasp on the market. But tablets will, and are. And you'll start to see a community of people gathering and communicated about car + tablet integration, because its a better form factor than the standard car pc box.

Maybe you guys can school me on some audio.
Would optical audio out of a tablet not suffice?

Originally Posted by soundman98

^ audio-wise, i am in the same boat(use the carpc for active audio processing), but for the overall forum, the new tablets cover 80-90% of what everyone needs a carpc to do.

at this point, i believe they are more viable options then the pc tablets of before-- the smaller overall profile allows for easier installations(yes gizmo, i think your tablet install is too large for most), and because everything is included, makes for less of a per-piece cost, and less assembly issues..

depends on your needs.

many external sound processors do have a optical input-- though most of those sound processors require a pc with mac/windows OS to be programmed to work correctly. the rockford fosgate 360-series processors allow bluetooth connections to palm, windows mobile, and possibly windows OS devices(don't know if it accepts optical though).

but overall, there are only a couple of tablets that run full OS's, with the majority running various versions of android, or IOS--neither are currently supported by any car audio companies sound processor box that i know of..

so you would still need a available pc/win-mobile/palm device to setup and tweak any settings associated with the audio setup.

of course, you could setup the sound processor once using a compatible device and never touch it again, though my setup was in constant change for the first 1-1/2 years-- so that would mean that i would have needed to carry a laptop with me during that time to solidify my setup...

would i like to ditch the component-based carpc for something a little more mobile? yes, but discussions like this remind me that the pc is still required, so i might as well use the pc for everything...

Tablets are for lazy people. LOL, j/k. Yes a tablet is less work, its all in a nice little package, and costs less. I dont know though, I like the building aspect of the car pc. The ability to constantly add to it (and yall know I have certainly added) is what attracts me. Also the ability to almost do what you want to do hardware and software wise. Yes tablets have a nice screen, but car pc based screens seem to be catching up. Yes tablets have a huge app market, but how many of them are useful in the car, while driving? I guess another point is what does each user want to do. Me, I want my car to be able to take over the world military defense system and kill everyone and start the war of the machines, lol. A tablet cant do that. Now if its simple stuff, then a tablet is all good.

In the end it all depends on what each each user wants and expects.

Yea it totally depends on the user. I think for a lot of folks, its the idea of the car computer that is attractive, not the fact that you get to build and customize the computer. This area attracts 3 types of people. Car geeks, audio geeks and computer geeks. Computer people care about the box, car people care about the function / ease, audio people care about 8 channel audio. Everyone wants what they love about the car, and that will always be awesome.