I can totally see Amazon working their way to a real tablet starting as an Ebook reader. They already have an ecosystem?a totally different ecosystem from Apple's, but why can't there be room for more than one? Hell, if they offer a real file system and a way to read Ebooks in different formats, I might buy one myself?once they ditch this pathetic e-ink technology, that is.
As for the other contenders...when the $200 "Android" Crap-Tablets? arrive, they'll probably sell a ton of them. People will play with them for a while, and then they'll sit in a drawer gathering dust, but they will have grabbed a huge percentage of the "market", and that'll make the Fandroids delirious.
Palm might very well have come out with something that would gain traction if their brain-dead management hadn't run them into the ground, but my confidence in HP's ability to screw anything up beyond all human recognition is absolute.
The thought of RIM being able to design anything more modern than their pocket Ouija Board phones is so ridiculous there's no point in talking about it.
The wild card might be Windows Phone 7. From what little I've seen of it, it looks like absolutely the first Microsoft product that had any thought put into it at all. If they put out a tablet running a variant of it, it might be a contender?unless it's another typical case of Microsoft software that no available hardware is capable of running in real time. We'll see.
Remember, Google makes their money from advertising on the web more than anything else. They don't make money from people putting Android on devices. As long as there are multiple players in the field, Google wins. The danger of their only being one player (like Apple) is that they could create their own ad platform and lock out Google, like Apple's trying to do with iAds on mobile apps.
OMG the danger of NBC being the only player on their TV network is that they can lock out everyone else from ad revenues on their network! OMG danger danger!!!
I can totally see Amazon working their way to a real tablet starting as an Ebook reader. They already have an ecosystem—a totally different ecosystem from Apple's, but why can't there be room for more than one? Hell, if they offer a real file system and a way to read Ebooks in different formats, I might buy one myself—once they ditch this pathetic e-ink technology, that is.
As for the other contenders...when the $200 "Android" Crap-Tablets™ arrive, they'll probably sell a ton of them. People will play with them for a while, and then they'll sit in a drawer gathering dust, but they will have grabbed a huge percentage of the "market", and that'll make the Fandroids delirious.
Palm might very well have come out with something that would gain traction if their brain-dead management hadn't run them into the ground, but my confidence in HP's ability to screw anything up beyond all human recognition is absolute.
The thought of RIM being able to design anything more modern than their pocket Ouija Board phones is so ridiculous there's no point in talking about it.
The wild card might be Windows Phone 7. From what little I've seen of it, it looks like absolutely the first Microsoft product that had any thought put into it at all. If they put out a tablet running a variant of it, it might be a contender—unless it's another typical case of Microsoft software that no available hardware is capable of running in real time. We'll see.
I'm not so sure about WP7 as being a fully competitive tablet OS. What Ms is trying to make people forget it that WP7 is based upon CE, just as Win Mobile was. It's based on the latest revision, which is 3. But it's still a mobile OS. Whereas the other major OS's which will survive, that is, Android, iOS, and possibly surviving WebOS, are based on Unix, for iOS, and the Linux kernel for the others, CE isn't a full OS to that extent.
MS does have a true Windows Embedded version that is modular, but it isn't using that for its phones. I think they're missing a big bet there, and I don't know why.
But so far they are very definite about not using WP7 for tablets. They do seem to be definite about putting some variation of the UI from WP7 on top of Windows 8, at least as an alternative UI for tablets. The question about all of this is whether this will help Window's response time on an ARM chip or not, as well as its battery draw.
I'm not so sure about WP7 as being a fully competitive tablet OS. What Ms is trying to make people forget it that WP7 is based upon CE, just as Win Mobile was. It's based on the latest revision, which is 3. But it's still a mobile OS. Whereas the other major OS's which will survive, that is, Android, iOS, and possibly surviving WebOS, are based on Unix, for iOS, and the Linux kernel for the others, CE isn't a full OS to that extent.
MS does have a true Windows Embedded version that is modular, but it isn't using that for its phones. I think they're missing a big bet there, and I don't know why.
But so far they are very definite about not using WP7 for tablets. They do seem to be definite about putting some variation of the UI from WP7 on top of Windows 8, at least as an alternative UI for tablets. The question about all of this is whether this will help Window's response time on an ARM chip or not, as well as its battery draw.
I yield to your knowledge of WP7?mine was just from watching commercials. I thought the homescreen "tiles" might be something that would appeal to people, but my worry is that that would really punish the hardware?like Cover Flow x 12, or whatever it is.
I am so poor, that in the past 5 years I have purchased and Used various smart phone running Windows Mobile, Palm and Blackberry. I now am using an Android. My first real computer was a Macintosh and I spend 13 years from 1984 to 197 working with and for apple computer vendors. I understand the loyalty to the brand and I understand the problems inherent with evolving technologies.
After having my hands on an Android for the past 4 months and seeing the previews of the oncoming Android 3.0 Honeycomb, I can tell you that whatever "issues" they are having will eventually be worked out, but in the meanwhile it is by far the slickest most user friendly, OS I have ever had the delight to experience (yes including IOS as well).
I doubt that one technology can "own" the consumer market place for any length of time the way Microsoft has dominated the desktop market, but it seems obvious that Android will be the dominant smart phone platform for the foreseeable future.
I depend on my smart phone to perform time critical tasks that must be performed with no notice and finished on a web app within 30 seconds. My Android does the job, where Blackberry, Palm and Windows were generally only about 50% effective, in accomplishing the same tasks. As for the I-Phone, well I would never even consider it, I spent too many years buying the latest and greatest Apple equipment and in 97 when they released millions of defective computers with the 603e processor and wouldn't own up to it, I decided Apple's idea of brand loyalty is you buy from them at over inflated prices and when they do something wrong and you are paying for it you will be the last to know.
Google may not be any better when put to the test but just the fact that there is an alternative to Apple/IOS ought to be enough to convince million of abused Apple loyal to jump ship
I have used a couple of android phones. I spent 1 1/2- 2 years with the OS, and while I do like some things better like the notifications, I became very annoyed with the very things mentioned in this article. Android is slow, cumbersome, laggy, and unstable. It also makes little use of external memory for apps, giving you a limited 512KB of internal memory for app storage. "apps2sd" is very limited and only allows parts of the applications to be installed on Sd card (most of it still resides on limited internal memory). It is not suitable for mass production, and anyone who would deny such problems inherent with the android platform, are either lying to justify their choice, hate Apple for whatever reason, or just dont use their phone for much else than a simple phone call or occasional email check. These problems have existed since androids launch on the G1 and have persisted throughout all of the incarnations and "upgrades". Given this track record, I doubt Google is giving any serious thoughts to improving in these areas. It is this very reason I gave up that bloated mess and got an iPhone. Since then I have not had to restart my phone, except for the updates. It is fast, rock solid, and works very well with almost zero lag. It allows me to get work done unhindered by the various problems I had to deal with before. I know the iphone may not have the latest and greatest bleeding edge features, but the features it does have work very well.
It is too bad that you made such a decision without paying attention to what has happened since Jobs took back control in 97. To echo the sentiments of others, Skully was an absolute disaster and almost took apple down with him. Since Jobs' return, Apple has been re-invigorated and is now a highly respected technology company renowned for its quality, innovations, and constantly pushing to improve current industry standards. For example, their have been many products coming out of the woodwork touted as "iPod killers", "iPhone killers", or "ipad killers", but none of these have lived up to the sheer innovation and design, and simple functionality of any of those devices. It seems these manufacturers are trying to cram so many features in these devices, in an effort to beat apple, that they seem to have forgotten about stability.
So please, before you attack a company from a perspective that is from about 2 decades ago, polish up on your history.
It don't see that as being entirely true. It depends on just how easy or difficult it is. WebOS is difficult. Android, being to a certain extent a copy of iOS, is about as easy as iOS itself on the basic level.
But when moving to tablets, it's different. If Google kept the basic Android UI it would have been better. There's no evidence yet that people want something noticeably more complex for the little extra it gives them. About the only thing I found better in Honeycomb was notifications, and I'm willing to bet that for most people the way Apple has been doing it is just fine. That doesn't mean that it can't be better, or that it shouldn't be better, just that most people don't care that much.
With so many people used to the way Android and iOS works and looks, I would imagine that given the fact of how poorly, if at all, Android apps work on Honeycomb, the advantage to Android users moving to that platform will be slight. Apple may have an advantage for Android users because the iPad is more similar to Android that Honeycomb itself is. At least on the basic level which is really what you are talking about.
It's nice to be able to get another device and just start using it rather than having to figure a number of things out all over again.
I'm not seeing Amazon helping Android yet. It may even make it more confusing for people. Apples advantages in the tablet space may negate Amazon's role.
Google/Android is reworking the Google UI though, it's going to look more like Honeycomb across the board. HC was just the first UI with the new developer at the helm. Once they get to the "I" version, it should pop up in phones as well. So that should take care of the consistency problem.
And most apps will work in Honeycomb, though the number optimized for the larger screen is still small (developers are still rebuilding applications with the Fragments UI) But I was able to load most of my favorite apps on my friends Xoom without a huge issue. The ones that gave me trouble were the ones that had their resolutions hardcoded (which is something devs shouldn't do anyway)
I think that if Amazon makes an Android tablet, they're not going to market it heavily as the Android tablet, it will be the Kindle Tablet or something similar. Based on android, but not marketed as such.
For every new user that's registering look at the arp cache just like how u are tracking the ip for the mac addresses. Match the IP & MAC combo when blocking a ID.
That would only work if theTroll were posting from the same local network as the AI Web server, which seems unlikely.
I have used a couple of android phones. I spent 1 1/2- 2 years with the OS, and while I do like some things better like the notifications, I became very annoyed with the very things mentioned in this article. Android is slow, cumbersome, laggy, and unstable. It also makes little use of external memory for apps, giving you a limited 512KB of internal memory for app storage. "apps2sd" is very limited and only allows parts of the applications to be installed on Sd card (most of it still resides on limited internal memory). It is not suitable for mass production, and anyone who would deny such problems inherent with the android platform, are either lying to justify their choice, hate Apple for whatever reason, or just dont use their phone for much else than a simple phone call or occasional email check. These problems have existed since androids launch on the G1 and have persisted throughout all of the incarnations and "upgrades". Given this track record, I doubt Google is giving any serious thoughts to improving in these areas. It is this very reason I gave up that bloated mess and got an iPhone. Since then I have not had to restart my phone, except for the updates. It is fast, rock solid, and works very well with almost zero lag. It allows me to get work done unhindered by the various problems I had to deal with before. I know the iphone may not have the latest and greatest bleeding edge features, but the features it does have work very well.
User preference is user preference so I won't argue with that. I'm assuming you meant 512MB for app storage? It is a little low, but that's not what every Android phone has. For example, my Droid incredible has 748MB and by brother's Droid2 has a whopping 8GB of storage for apps.
Android handles app data a little differently than (I believe) an iOS device does. Big apps usually have two parts, the "core" of the app and then "everything else." The core is the only thing that needs to be stored on that internal memory and practically every app (but games) has a core of 10MB or less, most in the 1-4MB range. The rest of the app (even without apps2SD) can be stored on the SD card without an issue.
So let's say that my apps use the maximum typical amount for the core. That would still leave me room for 51 apps on a 512MB system, which is a pretty crazy number. The Maximum size that core can be is 50MB (at least in order to be hosted in the Google Market) and those types of apps are games which can be safely stored, completely, on the SD card.
I'm not saying the memory management doesn't need some work. it does, and phones should have more app space. But at the same time, it's not really as limited as the 512 number makes you think.
At any given time, I have 50-70 apps on my phone. Some are simple, like a news reader, but some of them are games or more advanced programs (google Earth is a huge file). I don't think I've had a point where my app storage is more than 50% full, and I'm pretty ADD and can't see myself having more than 50 apps that I use consistently on my phone.
Again, user experience is user experience, and if iOS works great for you, that's great. Android works great for me.
ARGH!!! Concern-trolling, BAD!!! This comment is only valid if Apple has been shown to rest on their laurels and their mountain of cash and say "Eh, we're good enough, we can just chill for a couple of years." Show me evidence that Apple has ever had that attitude!
For the last decade, Apple has done nothing but evolve! And by their own internal motivation, not by reacting to what "the competition" has done.
i find it hilarious when i hear comments like this, "apple has to keep evolving...".
since steve jobs took over the helm, apple has done nothing but innovate and evolve?without pressure from competitors.
the big difference (imo) between apple's philosophy and its competitors is that apple sees itself as it's only competitor. the others are too busy seeing what everyone else is doing and they're completely missing the boat.
we're already starting to see 'cracks' in the android bubble with developers having to deal with fragmentation of the ios.
well, truthfully, one of the reasons given as to why iPhone sales in India aren't doing as well as hoped is because the phone is too expensive. Compared to the Chinese, the average Indian is much poorer, and the infrastructure in the country is much worse, and that includes cell tower placement, though it's better than it was several years ago.
It s why the BB, which sells for half the price of the iPhone, Nokia Symbian phones, and many Android phones do better.
You're partly right. About the infrastructure anyway. But looking at "the average Indian" is a terrible way to rate the viability of a market. Depending on whose reports you look at, India's "middle class" population is anywhere from 50 million to 200 million. That's the number to look, not the "average income" for all of India.
Looking at it that way, even going with the conservative number of 50 million, that's still more than the populations of Canada (19 Apple Stores) and Switzerland (3 Apple Stores) combined. And if you go towards the optimistic end of the scale, India's middle-class population is larger than the entire population of any non-US country in which Apple has opened retail stores (excepting China, of course).
But, as I said in another discussion here, Apple probably doesn't want to wrestle with India's crappy infrastructure and culture of corruption. Sigh.
As the satisfied owner of a Pre 2, I have to say that WebOS is NOT difficult. It's just different. One of the first things the phone does after initial setup is try to run a gestures demo to bring the user up to speed. Spend 5 minutes running through that demo and it should be easy for anyone to use WebOS.
ARGH!!! Concern-trolling, BAD!!! This comment is only valid if Apple has been shown to rest on their laurels and their mountain of cash and say "Eh, we're good enough, we can just chill for a couple of years." Show me evidence that Apple has ever had that attitude!
For the last decade, Apple has done nothing but evolve! And by their own internal motivation, not by reacting to what "the competition" has done.
There is not a great deal of difference between the price of a top end Android phone and an iPhone, if you look at flat our cost.
What is different, at least in the four countries I spend a lot of time in (UK, Australia, Portugal and Netheralands), is that the mobile providers seem to be battling for Android customers. They often heavily discounts on high end android phones.
I do not see this happening with iPhone. Almost every company you look at is offering it for a similar priced deal. There seems to be no real attempt on provider?s part to offer cheaper iPhones to build their client base. I don?t know if this is an apple condition to be a iPhone provider or what. Or maybe other phone makers offer bulk discounts to providers so they can offer them cheaply.
Anyone have any real info on this (not fanboy or fandroid speculations)
Google/Android is reworking the Google UI though, it's going to look more like Honeycomb across the board. HC was just the first UI with the new developer at the helm. Once they get to the "I" version, it should pop up in phones as well. So that should take care of the consistency problem.
And most apps will work in Honeycomb, though the number optimized for the larger screen is still small (developers are still rebuilding applications with the Fragments UI) But I was able to load most of my favorite apps on my friends Xoom without a huge issue. The ones that gave me trouble were the ones that had their resolutions hardcoded (which is something devs shouldn't do anyway)
I think that if Amazon makes an Android tablet, they're not going to market it heavily as the Android tablet, it will be the Kindle Tablet or something similar. Based on android, but not marketed as such.
I've used the Xoom for a while, and I didn't come away impressed. While better tablets will come out, the software needs a lot of work. Google doesn't seem to know where it is going with any of this. They change their stance every couple of months. They don't care about how well the platform works, just as long they get it into as many hands as possible. Now they're talking about "Ice Cream", where they'll integrate it for both phones and tablets, something they were denying would happen just a month ago. We'll see how that goes sometime in the future, if they come out with it.
As far as Android apps working on Honeycomb, well, it's a mess. Admittedly, many iPhone apps don't look great on the iPad. But unless they require a voice phoning feature, they all work, and work well. Many work better on the iPad than on the iPhone because of the extra power of the hardware.
Not so with Honeycomb. Many apps don't work at all, and many that do, look really bad. I mean bad in a way that's worse than the softness on an iPad. They are streached or compressed in one direction, which often makes them hard to use or read. Sometimes elements on the screen are simply lost. It's really quite bad. So while it's easy to say that things are working well on Honeycomb, it's not really true.
And then we can look at cheap "tablets". They use 2.2, and often are 7" models with 800x480 resolution, the same as many phones, and not as much as a few. Even the better inexpensive ones are still not able to use Honeycomb, which means, in Google's eyes, that they're not tablets at all, and it seems unlikely that most of them, if any, will be upgradable to 2.3, much less 2.4 or Honeycomb itself.
While we'll see improvements over the year, the very slow pace of Honeycomb app development won't help. That's going hand in hand with very slow sales so far of Android tablets, and the lack of more than one Honeycomb model, though we may seem another within a month. But if the Acer sells as slowly as the Xoom, developers, who have been stating their unhappiness recently, won't be rushing to support it.
It's always possible that Honeycomb is starting out the way Android phones did, with one model being hailed as a killer to Apple's product, but proving to be a loser, but with more models coming out later that are better and more widespread, and increasing the sales a good deal. But, as has been pointed out by a number of writers, these aren't phones, and we can't automatically expect for things to play out in the same way.
You're partly right. About the infrastructure anyway. But looking at "the average Indian" is a terrible way to rate the viability of a market. Depending on whose reports you look at, India's "middle class" population is anywhere from 50 million to 200 million. That's the number to look, not the "average income" for all of India.
Looking at it that way, even going with the conservative number of 50 million, that's still more than the populations of Canada (19 Apple Stores) and Switzerland (3 Apple Stores) combined. And if you go towards the optimistic end of the scale, India's middle-class population is larger than the entire population of any non-US country in which Apple has opened retail stores (excepting China, of course).
But, as I said in another discussion here, Apple probably doesn't want to wrestle with India's crappy infrastructure and culture of corruption. Sigh.
When the numbers of middle class is spoken about in reference to different countries, it's not being compared to the middle class buying power of those in other countries. It's a relative term that has little to do with the middle class of other countries. What that means is that the middle class of Canada and the US are about equal to each other, but the middle class of those countries have much more buying power than the middle class of China. In turn, the middle class of China has more buying power than the middle class of India.
So the term "middle class" is relative to other economic classes in that same country, not others. After all, that's what "middle class" means. It doesn't mean that the middle class in every country is equal in buying power. So if we were to compare those middle class people in India with the Canadian population, we would find that most Canadians have much more buying power than their equivalents in India, and that many considered to be not quite in the middle class in Canada would still have more buying power than the majority of those in the Indian middle class.
As the satisfied owner of a Pre 2, I have to say that WebOS is NOT difficult. It's just different. One of the first things the phone does after initial setup is try to run a gestures demo to bring the user up to speed. Spend 5 minutes running through that demo and it should be easy for anyone to use WebOS.
It's not difficult, as I pointed out, to those of us who are more technically inclined. But these days, people expect to be able to use something without actually learning it first, and there are a number of things about WebOS that must be learned first. It's not obvious that swiping below the screen is required in a number of areas. That one example. I don't know how they do that today, as I haven't been interested in some while.
except when you have a problem, and apple tells you to go jump - until months later whe nthey decide it was actually their fault.
That really not true. If there's a problem that seems isolated at first, Apple investigated it. If a company doesn't know what a problem is, or whether it's a minor problem affecting just a few, or a more serious problem affecting many, it's difficult to give a response. But when they do figure it out, and it could take days, weeks, or even some months, as you say, they then respond very well. They're still giving new Mac Pros away to people who have leaky G5 machines. That's much more than they have to do.
We can compare them to Dell, which knew it was selling machines with a major flaw which ended up in almost all of the millions of machines it sold over a period of over five years failing, and lying about it directly to their customers. This isn't something I made up, as they lost a big case over this just recently.
There's a reason why for both consumers and business, Apple gets much higher ratings for reliability and service than any other company in the fields it serves.
So anything you have to say here is is just BS, and you know it.
When the numbers of middle class is spoken about in reference to different countries, it's not being compared to the middle class buying power of those in other countries. It's a relative term that has little to do with the middle class of other countries. What that means is that the middle class of Canada and the US are about equal to each other, but the middle class of those countries have much more buying power than the middle class of China. In turn, the middle class of China has more buying power than the middle class of India.
So the term "middle class" is relative to other economic classes in that same country, not others. After all, that's what "middle class" means. It doesn't mean that the middle class in every country is equal in buying power. So if we were to compare those middle class people in India with the Canadian population, we would find that most Canadians have much more buying power than their equivalents in India, and that many considered to be not quite in the middle class in Canada would still have more buying power than the majority of those in the Indian middle class.
Regardless of how the term "middle class" is defined, and what the parameters are, or how relative this definition is between countries, I can practically guarantee that there are more than 30 million Indians who can afford Apple products, especially iPads. That alone makes India a larger potential market than Canada, Australia or Switzerland*.
Which makes crap infrastructure, overbearing bureaucracy and pervasive corruption the most compelling theories (in my mind) for Apple's reluctance to make any serious entry into India.
*I name these countries because Apple has deemed them worthy of the investment of building several Apple Retail Stores.
Comments
As for the other contenders...when the $200 "Android" Crap-Tablets? arrive, they'll probably sell a ton of them. People will play with them for a while, and then they'll sit in a drawer gathering dust, but they will have grabbed a huge percentage of the "market", and that'll make the Fandroids delirious.
Palm might very well have come out with something that would gain traction if their brain-dead management hadn't run them into the ground, but my confidence in HP's ability to screw anything up beyond all human recognition is absolute.
The thought of RIM being able to design anything more modern than their pocket Ouija Board phones is so ridiculous there's no point in talking about it.
The wild card might be Windows Phone 7. From what little I've seen of it, it looks like absolutely the first Microsoft product that had any thought put into it at all. If they put out a tablet running a variant of it, it might be a contender?unless it's another typical case of Microsoft software that no available hardware is capable of running in real time. We'll see.
Remember, Google makes their money from advertising on the web more than anything else. They don't make money from people putting Android on devices. As long as there are multiple players in the field, Google wins. The danger of their only being one player (like Apple) is that they could create their own ad platform and lock out Google, like Apple's trying to do with iAds on mobile apps.
OMG the danger of NBC being the only player on their TV network is that they can lock out everyone else from ad revenues on their network! OMG danger danger!!!
I can totally see Amazon working their way to a real tablet starting as an Ebook reader. They already have an ecosystem—a totally different ecosystem from Apple's, but why can't there be room for more than one? Hell, if they offer a real file system and a way to read Ebooks in different formats, I might buy one myself—once they ditch this pathetic e-ink technology, that is.
As for the other contenders...when the $200 "Android" Crap-Tablets™ arrive, they'll probably sell a ton of them. People will play with them for a while, and then they'll sit in a drawer gathering dust, but they will have grabbed a huge percentage of the "market", and that'll make the Fandroids delirious.
Palm might very well have come out with something that would gain traction if their brain-dead management hadn't run them into the ground, but my confidence in HP's ability to screw anything up beyond all human recognition is absolute.
The thought of RIM being able to design anything more modern than their pocket Ouija Board phones is so ridiculous there's no point in talking about it.
The wild card might be Windows Phone 7. From what little I've seen of it, it looks like absolutely the first Microsoft product that had any thought put into it at all. If they put out a tablet running a variant of it, it might be a contender—unless it's another typical case of Microsoft software that no available hardware is capable of running in real time. We'll see.
I'm not so sure about WP7 as being a fully competitive tablet OS. What Ms is trying to make people forget it that WP7 is based upon CE, just as Win Mobile was. It's based on the latest revision, which is 3. But it's still a mobile OS. Whereas the other major OS's which will survive, that is, Android, iOS, and possibly surviving WebOS, are based on Unix, for iOS, and the Linux kernel for the others, CE isn't a full OS to that extent.
MS does have a true Windows Embedded version that is modular, but it isn't using that for its phones. I think they're missing a big bet there, and I don't know why.
But so far they are very definite about not using WP7 for tablets. They do seem to be definite about putting some variation of the UI from WP7 on top of Windows 8, at least as an alternative UI for tablets. The question about all of this is whether this will help Window's response time on an ARM chip or not, as well as its battery draw.
I'm not so sure about WP7 as being a fully competitive tablet OS. What Ms is trying to make people forget it that WP7 is based upon CE, just as Win Mobile was. It's based on the latest revision, which is 3. But it's still a mobile OS. Whereas the other major OS's which will survive, that is, Android, iOS, and possibly surviving WebOS, are based on Unix, for iOS, and the Linux kernel for the others, CE isn't a full OS to that extent.
MS does have a true Windows Embedded version that is modular, but it isn't using that for its phones. I think they're missing a big bet there, and I don't know why.
But so far they are very definite about not using WP7 for tablets. They do seem to be definite about putting some variation of the UI from WP7 on top of Windows 8, at least as an alternative UI for tablets. The question about all of this is whether this will help Window's response time on an ARM chip or not, as well as its battery draw.
I yield to your knowledge of WP7?mine was just from watching commercials. I thought the homescreen "tiles" might be something that would appeal to people, but my worry is that that would really punish the hardware?like Cover Flow x 12, or whatever it is.
I am so poor, that in the past 5 years I have purchased and Used various smart phone running Windows Mobile, Palm and Blackberry. I now am using an Android. My first real computer was a Macintosh and I spend 13 years from 1984 to 197 working with and for apple computer vendors. I understand the loyalty to the brand and I understand the problems inherent with evolving technologies.
After having my hands on an Android for the past 4 months and seeing the previews of the oncoming Android 3.0 Honeycomb, I can tell you that whatever "issues" they are having will eventually be worked out, but in the meanwhile it is by far the slickest most user friendly, OS I have ever had the delight to experience (yes including IOS as well).
I doubt that one technology can "own" the consumer market place for any length of time the way Microsoft has dominated the desktop market, but it seems obvious that Android will be the dominant smart phone platform for the foreseeable future.
I depend on my smart phone to perform time critical tasks that must be performed with no notice and finished on a web app within 30 seconds. My Android does the job, where Blackberry, Palm and Windows were generally only about 50% effective, in accomplishing the same tasks. As for the I-Phone, well I would never even consider it, I spent too many years buying the latest and greatest Apple equipment and in 97 when they released millions of defective computers with the 603e processor and wouldn't own up to it, I decided Apple's idea of brand loyalty is you buy from them at over inflated prices and when they do something wrong and you are paying for it you will be the last to know.
Google may not be any better when put to the test but just the fact that there is an alternative to Apple/IOS ought to be enough to convince million of abused Apple loyal to jump ship
I have used a couple of android phones. I spent 1 1/2- 2 years with the OS, and while I do like some things better like the notifications, I became very annoyed with the very things mentioned in this article. Android is slow, cumbersome, laggy, and unstable. It also makes little use of external memory for apps, giving you a limited 512KB of internal memory for app storage. "apps2sd" is very limited and only allows parts of the applications to be installed on Sd card (most of it still resides on limited internal memory). It is not suitable for mass production, and anyone who would deny such problems inherent with the android platform, are either lying to justify their choice, hate Apple for whatever reason, or just dont use their phone for much else than a simple phone call or occasional email check. These problems have existed since androids launch on the G1 and have persisted throughout all of the incarnations and "upgrades". Given this track record, I doubt Google is giving any serious thoughts to improving in these areas. It is this very reason I gave up that bloated mess and got an iPhone. Since then I have not had to restart my phone, except for the updates. It is fast, rock solid, and works very well with almost zero lag. It allows me to get work done unhindered by the various problems I had to deal with before. I know the iphone may not have the latest and greatest bleeding edge features, but the features it does have work very well.
It is too bad that you made such a decision without paying attention to what has happened since Jobs took back control in 97. To echo the sentiments of others, Skully was an absolute disaster and almost took apple down with him. Since Jobs' return, Apple has been re-invigorated and is now a highly respected technology company renowned for its quality, innovations, and constantly pushing to improve current industry standards. For example, their have been many products coming out of the woodwork touted as "iPod killers", "iPhone killers", or "ipad killers", but none of these have lived up to the sheer innovation and design, and simple functionality of any of those devices. It seems these manufacturers are trying to cram so many features in these devices, in an effort to beat apple, that they seem to have forgotten about stability.
So please, before you attack a company from a perspective that is from about 2 decades ago, polish up on your history.
It don't see that as being entirely true. It depends on just how easy or difficult it is. WebOS is difficult. Android, being to a certain extent a copy of iOS, is about as easy as iOS itself on the basic level.
But when moving to tablets, it's different. If Google kept the basic Android UI it would have been better. There's no evidence yet that people want something noticeably more complex for the little extra it gives them. About the only thing I found better in Honeycomb was notifications, and I'm willing to bet that for most people the way Apple has been doing it is just fine. That doesn't mean that it can't be better, or that it shouldn't be better, just that most people don't care that much.
With so many people used to the way Android and iOS works and looks, I would imagine that given the fact of how poorly, if at all, Android apps work on Honeycomb, the advantage to Android users moving to that platform will be slight. Apple may have an advantage for Android users because the iPad is more similar to Android that Honeycomb itself is. At least on the basic level which is really what you are talking about.
It's nice to be able to get another device and just start using it rather than having to figure a number of things out all over again.
I'm not seeing Amazon helping Android yet. It may even make it more confusing for people. Apples advantages in the tablet space may negate Amazon's role.
Google/Android is reworking the Google UI though, it's going to look more like Honeycomb across the board. HC was just the first UI with the new developer at the helm. Once they get to the "I" version, it should pop up in phones as well. So that should take care of the consistency problem.
And most apps will work in Honeycomb, though the number optimized for the larger screen is still small (developers are still rebuilding applications with the Fragments UI) But I was able to load most of my favorite apps on my friends Xoom without a huge issue. The ones that gave me trouble were the ones that had their resolutions hardcoded (which is something devs shouldn't do anyway)
I think that if Amazon makes an Android tablet, they're not going to market it heavily as the Android tablet, it will be the Kindle Tablet or something similar. Based on android, but not marketed as such.
For every new user that's registering look at the arp cache just like how u are tracking the ip for the mac addresses. Match the IP & MAC combo when blocking a ID.
That would only work if theTroll were posting from the same local network as the AI Web server, which seems unlikely.
I have used a couple of android phones. I spent 1 1/2- 2 years with the OS, and while I do like some things better like the notifications, I became very annoyed with the very things mentioned in this article. Android is slow, cumbersome, laggy, and unstable. It also makes little use of external memory for apps, giving you a limited 512KB of internal memory for app storage. "apps2sd" is very limited and only allows parts of the applications to be installed on Sd card (most of it still resides on limited internal memory). It is not suitable for mass production, and anyone who would deny such problems inherent with the android platform, are either lying to justify their choice, hate Apple for whatever reason, or just dont use their phone for much else than a simple phone call or occasional email check. These problems have existed since androids launch on the G1 and have persisted throughout all of the incarnations and "upgrades". Given this track record, I doubt Google is giving any serious thoughts to improving in these areas. It is this very reason I gave up that bloated mess and got an iPhone. Since then I have not had to restart my phone, except for the updates. It is fast, rock solid, and works very well with almost zero lag. It allows me to get work done unhindered by the various problems I had to deal with before. I know the iphone may not have the latest and greatest bleeding edge features, but the features it does have work very well.
User preference is user preference so I won't argue with that. I'm assuming you meant 512MB for app storage? It is a little low, but that's not what every Android phone has. For example, my Droid incredible has 748MB and by brother's Droid2 has a whopping 8GB of storage for apps.
Android handles app data a little differently than (I believe) an iOS device does. Big apps usually have two parts, the "core" of the app and then "everything else." The core is the only thing that needs to be stored on that internal memory and practically every app (but games) has a core of 10MB or less, most in the 1-4MB range. The rest of the app (even without apps2SD) can be stored on the SD card without an issue.
So let's say that my apps use the maximum typical amount for the core. That would still leave me room for 51 apps on a 512MB system, which is a pretty crazy number. The Maximum size that core can be is 50MB (at least in order to be hosted in the Google Market) and those types of apps are games which can be safely stored, completely, on the SD card.
I'm not saying the memory management doesn't need some work. it does, and phones should have more app space. But at the same time, it's not really as limited as the 512 number makes you think.
At any given time, I have 50-70 apps on my phone. Some are simple, like a news reader, but some of them are games or more advanced programs (google Earth is a huge file). I don't think I've had a point where my app storage is more than 50% full, and I'm pretty ADD and can't see myself having more than 50 apps that I use consistently on my phone.
Again, user experience is user experience, and if iOS works great for you, that's great. Android works great for me.
...It's up to Apple to keep evolving.
ARGH!!! Concern-trolling, BAD!!! This comment is only valid if Apple has been shown to rest on their laurels and their mountain of cash and say "Eh, we're good enough, we can just chill for a couple of years." Show me evidence that Apple has ever had that attitude!
For the last decade, Apple has done nothing but evolve! And by their own internal motivation, not by reacting to what "the competition" has done.
i find it hilarious when i hear comments like this, "apple has to keep evolving...".
since steve jobs took over the helm, apple has done nothing but innovate and evolve?without pressure from competitors.
the big difference (imo) between apple's philosophy and its competitors is that apple sees itself as it's only competitor. the others are too busy seeing what everyone else is doing and they're completely missing the boat.
we're already starting to see 'cracks' in the android bubble with developers having to deal with fragmentation of the ios.
Yup. Totally agree.
well, truthfully, one of the reasons given as to why iPhone sales in India aren't doing as well as hoped is because the phone is too expensive. Compared to the Chinese, the average Indian is much poorer, and the infrastructure in the country is much worse, and that includes cell tower placement, though it's better than it was several years ago.
It s why the BB, which sells for half the price of the iPhone, Nokia Symbian phones, and many Android phones do better.
You're partly right. About the infrastructure anyway. But looking at "the average Indian" is a terrible way to rate the viability of a market. Depending on whose reports you look at, India's "middle class" population is anywhere from 50 million to 200 million. That's the number to look, not the "average income" for all of India.
Looking at it that way, even going with the conservative number of 50 million, that's still more than the populations of Canada (19 Apple Stores) and Switzerland (3 Apple Stores) combined. And if you go towards the optimistic end of the scale, India's middle-class population is larger than the entire population of any non-US country in which Apple has opened retail stores (excepting China, of course).
But, as I said in another discussion here, Apple probably doesn't want to wrestle with India's crappy infrastructure and culture of corruption. Sigh.
WebOS is difficult.
As the satisfied owner of a Pre 2, I have to say that WebOS is NOT difficult. It's just different. One of the first things the phone does after initial setup is try to run a gestures demo to bring the user up to speed. Spend 5 minutes running through that demo and it should be easy for anyone to use WebOS.
I wouldn't call us abused. If anything, Apple pampers its customers.
except when you have a problem, and apple tells you to go jump - until months later whe nthey decide it was actually their fault.
ARGH!!! Concern-trolling, BAD!!! This comment is only valid if Apple has been shown to rest on their laurels and their mountain of cash and say "Eh, we're good enough, we can just chill for a couple of years." Show me evidence that Apple has ever had that attitude!
For the last decade, Apple has done nothing but evolve! And by their own internal motivation, not by reacting to what "the competition" has done.
Calm down. I wasn't concern-trolling.
What is different, at least in the four countries I spend a lot of time in (UK, Australia, Portugal and Netheralands), is that the mobile providers seem to be battling for Android customers. They often heavily discounts on high end android phones.
I do not see this happening with iPhone. Almost every company you look at is offering it for a similar priced deal. There seems to be no real attempt on provider?s part to offer cheaper iPhones to build their client base. I don?t know if this is an apple condition to be a iPhone provider or what. Or maybe other phone makers offer bulk discounts to providers so they can offer them cheaply.
Anyone have any real info on this (not fanboy or fandroid speculations)
Google/Android is reworking the Google UI though, it's going to look more like Honeycomb across the board. HC was just the first UI with the new developer at the helm. Once they get to the "I" version, it should pop up in phones as well. So that should take care of the consistency problem.
And most apps will work in Honeycomb, though the number optimized for the larger screen is still small (developers are still rebuilding applications with the Fragments UI) But I was able to load most of my favorite apps on my friends Xoom without a huge issue. The ones that gave me trouble were the ones that had their resolutions hardcoded (which is something devs shouldn't do anyway)
I think that if Amazon makes an Android tablet, they're not going to market it heavily as the Android tablet, it will be the Kindle Tablet or something similar. Based on android, but not marketed as such.
I've used the Xoom for a while, and I didn't come away impressed. While better tablets will come out, the software needs a lot of work. Google doesn't seem to know where it is going with any of this. They change their stance every couple of months. They don't care about how well the platform works, just as long they get it into as many hands as possible. Now they're talking about "Ice Cream", where they'll integrate it for both phones and tablets, something they were denying would happen just a month ago. We'll see how that goes sometime in the future, if they come out with it.
As far as Android apps working on Honeycomb, well, it's a mess. Admittedly, many iPhone apps don't look great on the iPad. But unless they require a voice phoning feature, they all work, and work well. Many work better on the iPad than on the iPhone because of the extra power of the hardware.
Not so with Honeycomb. Many apps don't work at all, and many that do, look really bad. I mean bad in a way that's worse than the softness on an iPad. They are streached or compressed in one direction, which often makes them hard to use or read. Sometimes elements on the screen are simply lost. It's really quite bad. So while it's easy to say that things are working well on Honeycomb, it's not really true.
And then we can look at cheap "tablets". They use 2.2, and often are 7" models with 800x480 resolution, the same as many phones, and not as much as a few. Even the better inexpensive ones are still not able to use Honeycomb, which means, in Google's eyes, that they're not tablets at all, and it seems unlikely that most of them, if any, will be upgradable to 2.3, much less 2.4 or Honeycomb itself.
While we'll see improvements over the year, the very slow pace of Honeycomb app development won't help. That's going hand in hand with very slow sales so far of Android tablets, and the lack of more than one Honeycomb model, though we may seem another within a month. But if the Acer sells as slowly as the Xoom, developers, who have been stating their unhappiness recently, won't be rushing to support it.
It's always possible that Honeycomb is starting out the way Android phones did, with one model being hailed as a killer to Apple's product, but proving to be a loser, but with more models coming out later that are better and more widespread, and increasing the sales a good deal. But, as has been pointed out by a number of writers, these aren't phones, and we can't automatically expect for things to play out in the same way.
You're partly right. About the infrastructure anyway. But looking at "the average Indian" is a terrible way to rate the viability of a market. Depending on whose reports you look at, India's "middle class" population is anywhere from 50 million to 200 million. That's the number to look, not the "average income" for all of India.
Looking at it that way, even going with the conservative number of 50 million, that's still more than the populations of Canada (19 Apple Stores) and Switzerland (3 Apple Stores) combined. And if you go towards the optimistic end of the scale, India's middle-class population is larger than the entire population of any non-US country in which Apple has opened retail stores (excepting China, of course).
But, as I said in another discussion here, Apple probably doesn't want to wrestle with India's crappy infrastructure and culture of corruption. Sigh.
When the numbers of middle class is spoken about in reference to different countries, it's not being compared to the middle class buying power of those in other countries. It's a relative term that has little to do with the middle class of other countries. What that means is that the middle class of Canada and the US are about equal to each other, but the middle class of those countries have much more buying power than the middle class of China. In turn, the middle class of China has more buying power than the middle class of India.
So the term "middle class" is relative to other economic classes in that same country, not others. After all, that's what "middle class" means. It doesn't mean that the middle class in every country is equal in buying power. So if we were to compare those middle class people in India with the Canadian population, we would find that most Canadians have much more buying power than their equivalents in India, and that many considered to be not quite in the middle class in Canada would still have more buying power than the majority of those in the Indian middle class.
As the satisfied owner of a Pre 2, I have to say that WebOS is NOT difficult. It's just different. One of the first things the phone does after initial setup is try to run a gestures demo to bring the user up to speed. Spend 5 minutes running through that demo and it should be easy for anyone to use WebOS.
It's not difficult, as I pointed out, to those of us who are more technically inclined. But these days, people expect to be able to use something without actually learning it first, and there are a number of things about WebOS that must be learned first. It's not obvious that swiping below the screen is required in a number of areas. That one example. I don't know how they do that today, as I haven't been interested in some while.
except when you have a problem, and apple tells you to go jump - until months later whe nthey decide it was actually their fault.
That really not true. If there's a problem that seems isolated at first, Apple investigated it. If a company doesn't know what a problem is, or whether it's a minor problem affecting just a few, or a more serious problem affecting many, it's difficult to give a response. But when they do figure it out, and it could take days, weeks, or even some months, as you say, they then respond very well. They're still giving new Mac Pros away to people who have leaky G5 machines. That's much more than they have to do.
We can compare them to Dell, which knew it was selling machines with a major flaw which ended up in almost all of the millions of machines it sold over a period of over five years failing, and lying about it directly to their customers. This isn't something I made up, as they lost a big case over this just recently.
There's a reason why for both consumers and business, Apple gets much higher ratings for reliability and service than any other company in the fields it serves.
So anything you have to say here is is just BS, and you know it.
When the numbers of middle class is spoken about in reference to different countries, it's not being compared to the middle class buying power of those in other countries. It's a relative term that has little to do with the middle class of other countries. What that means is that the middle class of Canada and the US are about equal to each other, but the middle class of those countries have much more buying power than the middle class of China. In turn, the middle class of China has more buying power than the middle class of India.
So the term "middle class" is relative to other economic classes in that same country, not others. After all, that's what "middle class" means. It doesn't mean that the middle class in every country is equal in buying power. So if we were to compare those middle class people in India with the Canadian population, we would find that most Canadians have much more buying power than their equivalents in India, and that many considered to be not quite in the middle class in Canada would still have more buying power than the majority of those in the Indian middle class.
Regardless of how the term "middle class" is defined, and what the parameters are, or how relative this definition is between countries, I can practically guarantee that there are more than 30 million Indians who can afford Apple products, especially iPads. That alone makes India a larger potential market than Canada, Australia or Switzerland*.
Which makes crap infrastructure, overbearing bureaucracy and pervasive corruption the most compelling theories (in my mind) for Apple's reluctance to make any serious entry into India.
*I name these countries because Apple has deemed them worthy of the investment of building several Apple Retail Stores.