Android Tablets Were Born Too Soon 480
adeelarshad82 writes "When you look at the Apple iPad's sales figures, it's not hard to see why every technology company on the planet is jumping on the tablet bandwagon, a lot of which are Android tablets. Unfortunately though, some of these Android tablets were born way too early. They are haunted with a series of problems including flimsy hardware, low-quality resistive touch screens, serious display resolution issues, and old Android versions with limited or non-existent access to apps. Even the Samsung Galaxy Tab came well before its time. Even though it's fast, well-designed, and comes with a decent Android implementation, its functionality is limited to that of an Android smartphone. So here's to hoping that Honeycomb's functionality make up for the lost ground."
Re:You have to learn to crawl, before you can walk (Score:5, Interesting)
If you can't match the quality of a competitor that launched eight months before you, then you probably rushed the thing. (Yes, it is an oversimplification, but it's also hard to excuse a latecomer that offers little to recommend it over the Other Guy's first-generation product.)
Re:What's interesting about Android (Score:5, Interesting)
Are you joking? Don't get me wrong, I love Android and custom ROMs, precisely because with the right hardware I can enjoy all the newest features of Android for a long time to come, but pretending the situation with official updates is anything other than abysmal is, well, insane.
Froyo: HTC has updated most of their devices. Samsung is halfheartedly lagging behind, and Motorola, well, they've updated like one device (the original Droid), while deliberately sabotaging any chance other handsets had at home-cooked updates by locking up their bootloaders.
Gingerbread: Nothing to see here, folks. Even the Nexus One hasn't been upgraded yet, and I'm guessing most Nexus One owners are pretty pissed about that, what with having expected to buy a device that would be a supported Android dev phone for a few years (let's say two).
Sure, I'm enjoying Gingerbread (CyanogenMod 7 nightly builds) on my Desire right now, and I'm sure Honeycomb will be along soon, but Joe Sixpack is up shit creek... and outdated smartphones don't make great paddles.
Re:You have to learn to crawl, before you can walk (Score:4, Interesting)
From my experience, tablets replaced netbooks. Netbooks were all the rage 2 years ago, and it started what, in 2007? Now they are hardly mentioned anymore. They first came in the 7" screen size and quickly moved up, and for all intents and purposes quickly became your average 12" notebook albeit thinner and with a low-end CPU. My walmart used to have 3 on display a year and a half ago, and since thing chiseled it down to one. They replaced that space with iPads.
I don't think these type of tablets are fads. It's just a realization you don't always need a keyboard, a physical one at least. When I really want to type, I'm on my desktop with an ergonomic keyboard. It also depends what you're doing with it - a person with a budget for only one computing device probably will take a notebook that can do a little bit of everything. After that, it's all up to your needs. Something will come along eventually that merges these functions in something even more convenient, but that form factor could be at least a decade or two away (I'm thinking disposable sheets with printed on screens that can be folded, etc).
Re:What's interesting about Android (Score:4, Interesting)
I've got 2.2 on my HTC Dream, the first Android phone to be released. In my nation it was released with Android 1.1. Everything past 1.6 is a community ROM but I've still got 2.2.
When Apple decided not to release new functionality for the older Iphones and Ipads, what other choice do you have but to buy a new one to get that functionality. Not like you can run unsigned code on an Ipad.
Re:What's interesting about Android (Score:3, Interesting)
But its OS so the community can support the hardware the manufacturers drop.
eg. Samsung dropped support for the original Samsung Galaxy i7500 while the phone was still under contract from some of the networks - the Samsung firmware is stuck on 1.6 with them saying that it won't support 2.2 (Froyo). Fortunately due to Android being OS there is a community GAOSP (Google Android Open Source Platform) build on it which means that despite Samsung's inaction the hardware does still have the latest release on it.
Thats definately a bonus.
Re:What's interesting about Android (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem with this kind of "support" is that you are relying on the hardware being picked up by the community and developed for. What happens when your hardware isn't picked up by the community and the maker decides to EOL it before the contract ends? Or it ends up like the Motorola or Sony handsets where trying to root it is all but impossible?
Android tabs are a bit of a joke at the moment, and I'm advising all of my friends keen to get one to wait until their favourite flavour of manufacturer has Honeycomb tabs. Otherwise you're gambling on a possible update by the community should the manufacturer EOL it.
I was keen to get an Android tab mid last year, but there was nothing about. I got an iPad and have been pleased with my purchase. Sure, it didn't come with os 4.X, but it has it now and I know apple aren't going to drop support for the iPad when the iPad 2 comes out. Just as my iPhone 3G didn't lose support when the 3GS or the 4 came out.
Fashion accessory (Score:4, Interesting)
Seriously, what is the point of a tablet device? At the high school I work at, we're going to be made to use iPad's starting in April. I've played around with one of the test devices and I can't imagine actually getting work done on these things. I'm dreading April. If it were an Android device it wouldn't be any better.
Re:What's interesting about Android (Score:4, Interesting)
It still hasn't materialized. The latest information is, that it would come sometime during Q1.
This was the same phone that was sold as Droid in the States, but with added bootloader protection. When users complained, the director of marketing replied that "you should have bought HTC or Nexus One".
Re:Then revise market share (Score:5, Interesting)
This is something I have to explain to customers when we do mobile development, especially explaining our pricing for Android. We only give QA on the Nexus One/(now S). Each additional handset costs extra and typically most will want QA against Droid(Verizon), HTC Evo(Sprint), and Samsung (AT&T/T-Mobile). That makes the Android platform usually between 3 to 5 times the cost to develop for iPhone/iPod. Usually we treat the iPad as a separate device just as we'll treat these new tablets running Android as each being a different "platform".
Last year we tried to treat "Android" as a platform, but we ended up losing money on that side of the business because every time we turned around there were a half dozen new handsets and a new OS version to deal with.
Archos: resistive, no official Market access (Score:4, Interesting)