My Surface Pro taskbar routinely fills up, usually in portrait. However, if I’m doing some particularly detailed work, I have filled in up in landscape. Point is that Windows 8 is more often found on small screens, so the concern is legitimate. I hope the new start button will be a user option.
Cook and Ive need to realize that Steve Jobs was wrong: somebody wants a stylus. In fact, lots of people do. Apple needs to add an active stylus to the iPad. Pens like this one or the Jot Touch come off as hacks to me. And with no system-level API for styli in iOS, 99% of apps won’t see it as anything different from a finger.
It actually makes quite a bit of sense for Google to do this. Glass is not going to “run apps” like phones and tablets do. Glass is really just one proprietary app running on a bare-bones version of Android. (I’m sure Google stripped out a lot of non-essential parts.) Jelly Bean does not make many fundamental changes to the OS, and I can’t think of one change that Glass would actually benefit from having. (It already has Google Now, so JB isn’t needed.) 4.0.4 is proven to be the most reliable version of the OS for this particular chipset. The Galaxy Nexus does run 4.2, but for a great number of users (self included) it simply is not as snappy or reliable as 4.0.4 was.
Interestingly, this is the exact same thing that Google did with the Nexus Q. A special layer of web-powered services on top of a stripped-down ICS, running on the OMAP 4430.
But it isn’t meant as a replacement for those things. It augments them, taking over the very small, quick interactions we do with smartphones. It isn’t going to be worth using for general browsing.
