The best of the "competition" can't compete on hardware (battery life, size, weight, screen, build quality) nor can they compete on OS quality. They cannot compete on quantity of apps or quality of apps. Finally, they cannot even begin to touch the iPad on the whole ecosystem concept.
All they have left is random scattered features: USB ports, promise of useable Flash, rootability...
After two rounds of iPad killers, they appear to be so far behind as to look like a Sandisk MP3 player next to an iPod 5 years ago...
I've been saying this for a long time. The cycle just keeps repeating itself. They are all running around trying to design the next "iPad killer" to compete with Apple. But their goal is wrong to begin with. Apple focuses on developing the best product, the coolest product, the sleekest product (etc). When coupled with great marketing, the product literally sells itself.
This is completely different from their competitors, whose main goal is compete with Apple. to do that, they figure they need not a "greaT" product, but one that's good enough to compete with Apple. Coupled with usually lackluster marketing, this results in poor sales.
I've been saying this for a long time. The cycle just keeps repeating itself. They are all running around trying to design the next "iPad killer" to compete with Apple. But their goal is wrong to begin with. Apple focuses on developing the best product, the coolest product, the sleekest product (etc). When coupled with great marketing, the product literally sells itself.
This is completely different from their competitors, whose main goal is compete with Apple. to do that, they figure they need not a "greaT" product, but one that's good enough to compete with Apple. Coupled with usually lackluster marketing, this results in poor sales.
Surprise, surprise.
In addition to that, each time a "competitor" announces an "iPad killer", they inadvertently give more legitimacy to the iPad and the Apple brand. They reinforce the notion that the iPad is the de facto standard.
Your comment above is ridiculous. Bet you could get a job at Gartners.
Look at what iPad2 performance especially in graphics did to XOOM and Galaxy ... back to the drawing boards.
And the demand line in Japan for iPad2 is 3 blocks long ... and the cry for product is immense.
He was giving a sarcastic response to another earlier comment which implied that the rest of the world was going to move forward technologically, while Apple was going to just sit around and do nothing to improve or innovate.
Not exactly. Java is able to match native C/C++ on a variety of performance fronts and exceed it in others. Native back-end code can be hard pressed to match dynamically optimized Java code.
What everyone is talking about is client-side java which, I fully admit is awful. AWT is slow and ugly. Swing is slow and almost as ugly. SWT was faster, better looking, but sacrificed portability.
Server-side java is excellent.
That being said, I agree that cross-platform client side products are usually awful. Go back to the nineties with C++ tools like Galaxy and scripting languages like TCL/TK. All bad.
Flash is a good example of this and one where I agree with SJ wholeheartedly. Cross-platform solutions tend to be either 1)lowest common denominator or 2)full of customized nonstandard widgets. Client cross-platform development tends to lag behind the native environments until the companies can get out support for new features. It wasn't until Java 6 that client Java got support for system tray notifications. That would put us in the 2007 timeframe. Yikes.
Almost four years after iPhone, and all Flash mobile has really done is to add Android to the list of zero day vulnerable platforms.
Native client side code will always, I think, provide a superior optimized experience, certainly for the foreseeable future. Even 5 years out will look like 5 years ago where people were still predicting the rise of the web app and subsequent fall of native. Web apps have many advantages, not the least of which is deployment,but UI is not one of them.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but isn't this particular discussion entirely about client-side code on resource-limited portable machines? That's what apps are. Observations of Java's excellent server-side performance do not address that.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but isn't this particular discussion entirely about client-side code on resource-limited portable machines? That's what apps are. Observations of Java's excellent server-side performance do not address that.
Maybe. I saw a few comments about web v. native as well as java is "write once, debug everywhere" but did not see anything specifically limiting the context to mobile side only.
If that is the case and we are talking about client side java on mobile devices, then please forgive my off topic reply.
Maybe. I saw a few comments about web v. native as well as java is "write once, debug everywhere" but did not see anything specifically limiting the context to mobile side only.
If that is the case and we are talking about client side java on mobile devices, then please forgive my off topic reply.
No problem - your comments were interesting. I was just trying to clarify.
He was giving a sarcastic response to another earlier comment which implied that the rest of the world was going to move forward technologically, while Apple was going to just sit around and do nothing to improve or innovate.
Well, it actually was being implied. The implication was that these others would advance their products much faster than Apple would, and so they would catch up, and surpass them. That would imply that Apple was standing still for all intents and purposes.
I still don't trust Android phone sales numbers that are being thrown around. I'd love to see hard, bottom-up numbers built up from data provided by people actually selling the handsets (and corroborated with numbers from service providers on activations), and not just estimates put out by consulting/tech advice firms analysts.
What makes you not trusting Google's numbers but trust Apple's ? I think both publish the daily numbers of activations and it is at least a wash, if Android is not ahead. The number of the applications in the respective app stores is also about to equal (both are in 300 thousand range) and major publishers tends to release their titles for both platforms at the same time...doesn't sound like a monopoly at the smartphone arena at all.
iPad 2 is pretty nice piece of hardware, but it won't be nowhere as dominant through the 2011 and with more and more apps for Honeycomb showing up, there will be more reasons for people to use the same OS as they have on their phone.
Take few examples. Kindle : recent Honeycomb version is having the bookstore built in, which is sweet. If reading kindle books is important tablet use-case to you, Xoom with a big screen is not that bad choice at all. Mail : iOS mail client is no way superior to Honeycomb, quite contrary. Maps : This is clear edge for Android. Vector maps and offline caching rules. Video conferencing : so many people have GMail account and can use video in GTalk.
iOS and iPad is great, but trying to convince yourself it will maintain a dominant position through entire 2011 sounds like pissing into pants for warmth to me.
What I am trying to say (quite unsucessfully it appears) is that with the computing power we can now hold in our hands, most apps don't need to be written in XCode. They will run just fine on an abstraction layer. Yes, we failed to acheive this with Java. But we are getting better. I don't think we are too many iterations away from being able to accomplish this successfully. Just look at WP7. All the non XNA apps run on Silverlight and they perform as well as their native iOS counterparts.
Now that I write this, this may be one of the reasons Steve and Co. have been so quiet on the HTML5 front. That bloody thing could be a serious disruptor to the app store. Thinking it through, if the WSJ is not writting an HTML5 version of the WSJ app - they deserve a serious slap across the head!
It is not clear to me why you would not want every app you run to be specifically written to use every pixel and every feature on the phone to the fullest extent. Apps written so far in Java, flash and HTML have shown that this is unlikely to be achieved without native code. New and special features (gyroscope?) of a phone are usually supported first by the native API. Many apps on the iPhone have been spectacular and are very much likely to get even better. There is no shortage of programmers in the world and I hope we see many many apps specifically written for the iPhone.
Web apps, yeah, that's the ticket. People have been predicting that the future is web apps for at least the last 15 years, and it seems even less likely now
Quote:
Originally Posted by Eternal Emperor
No offense, but with respect to java, this simply isn't true. I defy anyone to find any coding environment that brings coding productivity, library support, performance, maintainability, scalablity(both in terms of code and operations) and portability together better than Java. Many can do some, but none can currently do all, IMO.
Of course, users don't give a damn about any of those things.
This is incredibly embarrassing and sad. I am surprised that their Boards aren't getting in front of this slow and inevitable train wreck more aggressively (the senior management obviously is not capable of doing this).
A lot of shareholder value and jobs are going to get destroyed.
Given how difficult this is turning out to be for just about everyone else, one has to simply marvel at what Apple has accomplished here. What an amazing machine Jobs has put in place!
I was going over some information I had on the executive team at Apple recently and was amazed at what a solid set of expertise and savvy Jobs has brought together. I am amazed at times that pundits who arguably have even better access to such information cannot analyze it for what it is. Far beyond Apple's ability to innovate is its ability to deliver on its vision. I realise this is a fine hair to split - but of such splits are acute observations made. It is one thing to have a vision, it is another to have a team that not only owns the vision but has the talent and expertise to drive it successfully. Good call.
What makes you not trusting Google's numbers but trust Apple's ? I think both publish the daily numbers of activations and it is at least a wash, if Android is not ahead. The number of the applications in the respective app stores is also about to equal (both are in 300 thousand range) and major publishers tends to release their titles for both platforms at the same time...doesn't sound like a monopoly at the smartphone arena at all.
iPad 2 is pretty nice piece of hardware, but it won't be nowhere as dominant through the 2011 and with more and more apps for Honeycomb showing up, there will be more reasons for people to use the same OS as they have on their phone.
Take few examples. Kindle : recent Honeycomb version is having the bookstore built in, which is sweet. If reading kindle books is important tablet use-case to you, Xoom with a big screen is not that bad choice at all. Mail : iOS mail client is no way superior to Honeycomb, quite contrary. Maps : This is clear edge for Android. Vector maps and offline caching rules. Video conferencing : so many people have GMail account and can use video in GTalk.
iOS and iPad is great, but trying to convince yourself it will maintain a dominant position through entire 2011 sounds like pissing into pants for warmth to me.
..the entire Android app platform will be ported to Honeycomb (now locked to any modification unless you get Google's explicit permission) and available within the 2011 timeframe AND all the tab makers will have successfully ported Honeycomb to their tab offerings. Or a popular, easy to use and consumer -friendly method of rooting all these lovely 7" tabbies will have been released and will make the UI and app situation the essential equivalent of the iOS ecosystem?
In short you are asserting that the smartphone is the exact equivalent to the tablet and that they are used for the exact same reasons. Yet report after report cites users buying iPads to augment and/or replace (for common daily uses) their computer. Not smartphones. iPads. Can you elaborate on your statements in a way that makes sense, given this evidence that seems to contradict you?
What makes you not trusting Google's numbers but trust Apple's ? I think both publish the daily numbers of activations and it is at least a wash, if Android is not ahead.
Valid point. Though, I think the reason people don't trust Google's numbers is because of the variants of Android that aren't quite 'Android'. The numbers released by IDC/Gartner/Canalysis include these variants. The numbers Google released (activations-per-day) are pretty close to these numbers (even though they say they don't include these variants). So, do these phones based on Android variants sell in very low quantities, or is Google adding the sales of these Android variants into their numbers, while claiming that they don't? By the way, iOS has more activations-per-day.
Quote:
The number of the applications in the respective app stores is also about to equal (both are in 300 thousand range) and major publishers tends to release their titles for both platforms at the same time...doesn't sound like a monopoly at the smartphone arena at all.
False. Android has just below half the number of apps iOS has. And is it the majority of the major publishers that release their titles simultaneously for both platforms?
Quote:
iPad 2 is pretty nice piece of hardware, but it won't be nowhere as dominant through the 2011 and with more and more apps for Honeycomb showing up, there will be more reasons for people to use the same OS as they have on their phone.
I'm sorry, but that's just naive. You think that the iPad won't be dominant simply because Honeycomb apps will magically appear? Especially when 2011 is close to half done?
Quote:
Take few examples. Kindle : recent Honeycomb version is having the bookstore built in, which is sweet. If reading kindle books is important tablet use-case to you, Xoom with a big screen is not that bad choice at all.
Well, the Xoom's more expensive than the best-selling iPad. You could have at least used a better Android tablet.
Quote:
Mail : iOS mail client is no way superior to Honeycomb, quite contrary. Maps : This is clear edge for Android. Vector maps and offline caching rules. Video conferencing : so many people have GMail account and can use video in GTalk.
And there are apps on iOS that are better than its Android version. Also, Skype is used more than GTalk for video chat, and it seems its iOS version is better.
Quote:
iOS and iPad is great, but trying to convince yourself it will maintain a dominant position through entire 2011 sounds like pissing into pants for warmth to me.
Do you actually know what that saying means? Using it the way you did is quite... brainless.
What makes you not trusting Google's numbers but trust Apple's ? I think both publish the daily numbers of activations and it is at least a wash, if Android is not ahead. The number of the applications in the respective app stores is also about to equal (both are in 300 thousand range) and major publishers tends to release their titles for both platforms at the same time...doesn't sound like a monopoly at the smartphone arena at all.
iPad 2 is pretty nice piece of hardware, but it won't be nowhere as dominant through the 2011 and with more and more apps for Honeycomb showing up, there will be more reasons for people to use the same OS as they have on their phone.
Take few examples. Kindle : recent Honeycomb version is having the bookstore built in, which is sweet. If reading kindle books is important tablet use-case to you, Xoom with a big screen is not that bad choice at all. Mail : iOS mail client is no way superior to Honeycomb, quite contrary. Maps : This is clear edge for Android. Vector maps and offline caching rules. Video conferencing : so many people have GMail account and can use video in GTalk.
iOS and iPad is great, but trying to convince yourself it will maintain a dominant position through entire 2011 sounds like pissing into pants for warmth to me.
You have a number of things wrong here. First of all, the number of apps on the platforms isn't close to even. I just checked, and there are now over 383,000 apps in Apple's App Store. The last reliable number I saw for the Google Marketplace, a couple of weeks ago was about 170,000.
But it's much more than the raw numbers. Apple vets their apps, as we all know, and Google doesn't, as we all know. I've looked at Apple's numbers on a regular basis, and occasionally, those numbers actually went down by a thousand, or even four thousand. That's because Apple removes apps from developers that are copyright violations of other legit apps. They also remove, sometimes by the thousands, apps that are empty apps, by the same developers, that just point to a website, or do other things that are not what real apps do. This is important.
But Google does none of this. Estimates are that anywhere from one third to as much as two thirds of all apps in the Google Marketplace are copyright violations, or empty apps. Google doesn't care. Estimates are that hundreds of apps have malware, perhaps more, but unless Google is called out for it, they don't care. The only reason they removed those 28 or so apps that were malware recently was because someone outside of Google found them, and went
public.
Also, every reviewer that has discussed apps, has stated that Android apps are not as good as iOS apps?even when it's the same app by the same developer offering it on both platforms.
We know why this is.
Comparing numbers is a futile task, unless everything is equal, which it certainly is not here.
You obviously haven't tried the Google video conferencing. You should.
What were also seeing, when marketshare of the iPad, and Android tablets are compared, numbers that aren't comparable.
It's interesting to note that Apple has made it very clear, through Jobs and Cook, that Apple counts sell thru, i.e., sales to users, as the numbers they consider to be "sales", when they talk about "sales". Cook has stated this in their last conference call with analysts, which, by the way, is considered to be a legal financial document.
Meanwhile, others just talk about product "shipped". When asked about what the sell thru, or whatever other term for it others use, they are politely told that they aren't giving out those numbers. RIM's co-CEO got huffy about it, and whined that they shouldn't be questioned or doubted about their figures. Gee, I wonder why?
So now we're reading that Apple had 76% tablet marketshare last quarter based on these numbers. What numbers? The only numbers released on tablets sold were the ones for the iPad. I'm willing to bet the real percentage was upwards of 90%. and that goes for the quarter before, when Samsung released bogus numbers for the Tab, and were called on it, and had to backtrack, saying that they didn't sell nearly as many as they had shipped. And this isn't using the discredited "small" vs "smooth" controversy.
Also interesting is that Android marketshare in the USA has slipped, going from 53% to 50%, while iPhone numbers went from 19% to 28%. of course, RIM dropped as well. It's evidence that if the iPhone is sold on as many carriers as Android phones, it will do pretty well overall. So what happens if it's also sold on Sprint and T-Mobile? What about Metro Express, and other small carriers? What about if it's carried on all the carriers around the world that it's not carried on now? I think you know.
Comments
It sure is beginning to look that way, isn't it?
The best of the "competition" can't compete on hardware (battery life, size, weight, screen, build quality) nor can they compete on OS quality. They cannot compete on quantity of apps or quality of apps. Finally, they cannot even begin to touch the iPad on the whole ecosystem concept.
All they have left is random scattered features: USB ports, promise of useable Flash, rootability...
After two rounds of iPad killers, they appear to be so far behind as to look like a Sandisk MP3 player next to an iPod 5 years ago...
I've been saying this for a long time. The cycle just keeps repeating itself. They are all running around trying to design the next "iPad killer" to compete with Apple. But their goal is wrong to begin with. Apple focuses on developing the best product, the coolest product, the sleekest product (etc). When coupled with great marketing, the product literally sells itself.
This is completely different from their competitors, whose main goal is compete with Apple. to do that, they figure they need not a "greaT" product, but one that's good enough to compete with Apple. Coupled with usually lackluster marketing, this results in poor sales.
Surprise, surprise.
I've been saying this for a long time. The cycle just keeps repeating itself. They are all running around trying to design the next "iPad killer" to compete with Apple. But their goal is wrong to begin with. Apple focuses on developing the best product, the coolest product, the sleekest product (etc). When coupled with great marketing, the product literally sells itself.
This is completely different from their competitors, whose main goal is compete with Apple. to do that, they figure they need not a "greaT" product, but one that's good enough to compete with Apple. Coupled with usually lackluster marketing, this results in poor sales.
Surprise, surprise.
In addition to that, each time a "competitor" announces an "iPad killer", they inadvertently give more legitimacy to the iPad and the Apple brand. They reinforce the notion that the iPad is the de facto standard.
Yeah, in the meantime, Apple will do nothing between now and five years from now.
Get real.
Your comment above is ridiculous. Bet you could get a job at Gartners.
Look at what iPad2 performance especially in graphics did to XOOM and Galaxy ... back to the drawing boards.
And the demand line in Japan for iPad2 is 3 blocks long ... and the cry for product is immense.
Your comment above is ridiculous. Bet you could get a job at Gartners.
Look at what iPad2 performance especially in graphics did to XOOM and Galaxy ... back to the drawing boards.
And the demand line in Japan for iPad2 is 3 blocks long ... and the cry for product is immense.
He was giving a sarcastic response to another earlier comment which implied that the rest of the world was going to move forward technologically, while Apple was going to just sit around and do nothing to improve or innovate.
Not exactly. Java is able to match native C/C++ on a variety of performance fronts and exceed it in others. Native back-end code can be hard pressed to match dynamically optimized Java code.
What everyone is talking about is client-side java which, I fully admit is awful. AWT is slow and ugly. Swing is slow and almost as ugly. SWT was faster, better looking, but sacrificed portability.
Server-side java is excellent.
That being said, I agree that cross-platform client side products are usually awful. Go back to the nineties with C++ tools like Galaxy and scripting languages like TCL/TK. All bad.
Flash is a good example of this and one where I agree with SJ wholeheartedly. Cross-platform solutions tend to be either 1)lowest common denominator or 2)full of customized nonstandard widgets. Client cross-platform development tends to lag behind the native environments until the companies can get out support for new features. It wasn't until Java 6 that client Java got support for system tray notifications. That would put us in the 2007 timeframe. Yikes.
Almost four years after iPhone, and all Flash mobile has really done is to add Android to the list of zero day vulnerable platforms.
Native client side code will always, I think, provide a superior optimized experience, certainly for the foreseeable future. Even 5 years out will look like 5 years ago where people were still predicting the rise of the web app and subsequent fall of native. Web apps have many advantages, not the least of which is deployment,but UI is not one of them.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but isn't this particular discussion entirely about client-side code on resource-limited portable machines? That's what apps are. Observations of Java's excellent server-side performance do not address that.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but isn't this particular discussion entirely about client-side code on resource-limited portable machines? That's what apps are. Observations of Java's excellent server-side performance do not address that.
Maybe. I saw a few comments about web v. native as well as java is "write once, debug everywhere" but did not see anything specifically limiting the context to mobile side only.
If that is the case and we are talking about client side java on mobile devices, then please forgive my off topic reply.
Maybe. I saw a few comments about web v. native as well as java is "write once, debug everywhere" but did not see anything specifically limiting the context to mobile side only.
If that is the case and we are talking about client side java on mobile devices, then please forgive my off topic reply.
No problem - your comments were interesting. I was just trying to clarify.
He was giving a sarcastic response to another earlier comment which implied that the rest of the world was going to move forward technologically, while Apple was going to just sit around and do nothing to improve or innovate.
Besides for the fact that no one implied that.
So yes, his comment was ridiculous.
Besides for the fact that no one implied that.
So yes, his comment was ridiculous.
Well, it actually was being implied. The implication was that these others would advance their products much faster than Apple would, and so they would catch up, and surpass them. That would imply that Apple was standing still for all intents and purposes.
So your comments are off base.
I still don't trust Android phone sales numbers that are being thrown around. I'd love to see hard, bottom-up numbers built up from data provided by people actually selling the handsets (and corroborated with numbers from service providers on activations), and not just estimates put out by consulting/tech advice firms analysts.
What makes you not trusting Google's numbers but trust Apple's ? I think both publish the daily numbers of activations and it is at least a wash, if Android is not ahead. The number of the applications in the respective app stores is also about to equal (both are in 300 thousand range) and major publishers tends to release their titles for both platforms at the same time...doesn't sound like a monopoly at the smartphone arena at all.
iPad 2 is pretty nice piece of hardware, but it won't be nowhere as dominant through the 2011 and with more and more apps for Honeycomb showing up, there will be more reasons for people to use the same OS as they have on their phone.
Take few examples. Kindle : recent Honeycomb version is having the bookstore built in, which is sweet. If reading kindle books is important tablet use-case to you, Xoom with a big screen is not that bad choice at all. Mail : iOS mail client is no way superior to Honeycomb, quite contrary. Maps : This is clear edge for Android. Vector maps and offline caching rules. Video conferencing : so many people have GMail account and can use video in GTalk.
iOS and iPad is great, but trying to convince yourself it will maintain a dominant position through entire 2011 sounds like pissing into pants for warmth to me.
What I am trying to say (quite unsucessfully it appears) is that with the computing power we can now hold in our hands, most apps don't need to be written in XCode. They will run just fine on an abstraction layer. Yes, we failed to acheive this with Java. But we are getting better. I don't think we are too many iterations away from being able to accomplish this successfully. Just look at WP7. All the non XNA apps run on Silverlight and they perform as well as their native iOS counterparts.
Now that I write this, this may be one of the reasons Steve and Co. have been so quiet on the HTML5 front. That bloody thing could be a serious disruptor to the app store. Thinking it through, if the WSJ is not writting an HTML5 version of the WSJ app - they deserve a serious slap across the head!
It is not clear to me why you would not want every app you run to be specifically written to use every pixel and every feature on the phone to the fullest extent. Apps written so far in Java, flash and HTML have shown that this is unlikely to be achieved without native code. New and special features (gyroscope?) of a phone are usually supported first by the native API. Many apps on the iPhone have been spectacular and are very much likely to get even better. There is no shortage of programmers in the world and I hope we see many many apps specifically written for the iPhone.
No offense, but with respect to java, this simply isn't true. I defy anyone to find any coding environment that brings coding productivity, library support, performance, maintainability, scalablity(both in terms of code and operations) and portability together better than Java. Many can do some, but none can currently do all, IMO.
Of course, users don't give a damn about any of those things.
Of course, users don't give a damn about any of those things.
Neither do developers that care about making great apps for a platform.
But Canalyst's survey said that competing tablets had a 26% market share!
Would that include Nooks and Kindles?
This is incredibly embarrassing and sad. I am surprised that their Boards aren't getting in front of this slow and inevitable train wreck more aggressively (the senior management obviously is not capable of doing this).
A lot of shareholder value and jobs are going to get destroyed.
Given how difficult this is turning out to be for just about everyone else, one has to simply marvel at what Apple has accomplished here. What an amazing machine Jobs has put in place!
I was going over some information I had on the executive team at Apple recently and was amazed at what a solid set of expertise and savvy Jobs has brought together. I am amazed at times that pundits who arguably have even better access to such information cannot analyze it for what it is. Far beyond Apple's ability to innovate is its ability to deliver on its vision. I realise this is a fine hair to split - but of such splits are acute observations made. It is one thing to have a vision, it is another to have a team that not only owns the vision but has the talent and expertise to drive it successfully. Good call.
What makes you not trusting Google's numbers but trust Apple's ? I think both publish the daily numbers of activations and it is at least a wash, if Android is not ahead. The number of the applications in the respective app stores is also about to equal (both are in 300 thousand range) and major publishers tends to release their titles for both platforms at the same time...doesn't sound like a monopoly at the smartphone arena at all.
iPad 2 is pretty nice piece of hardware, but it won't be nowhere as dominant through the 2011 and with more and more apps for Honeycomb showing up, there will be more reasons for people to use the same OS as they have on their phone.
Take few examples. Kindle : recent Honeycomb version is having the bookstore built in, which is sweet. If reading kindle books is important tablet use-case to you, Xoom with a big screen is not that bad choice at all. Mail : iOS mail client is no way superior to Honeycomb, quite contrary. Maps : This is clear edge for Android. Vector maps and offline caching rules. Video conferencing : so many people have GMail account and can use video in GTalk.
iOS and iPad is great, but trying to convince yourself it will maintain a dominant position through entire 2011 sounds like pissing into pants for warmth to me.
..the entire Android app platform will be ported to Honeycomb (now locked to any modification unless you get Google's explicit permission) and available within the 2011 timeframe AND all the tab makers will have successfully ported Honeycomb to their tab offerings. Or a popular, easy to use and consumer -friendly method of rooting all these lovely 7" tabbies will have been released and will make the UI and app situation the essential equivalent of the iOS ecosystem?
In short you are asserting that the smartphone is the exact equivalent to the tablet and that they are used for the exact same reasons. Yet report after report cites users buying iPads to augment and/or replace (for common daily uses) their computer. Not smartphones. iPads. Can you elaborate on your statements in a way that makes sense, given this evidence that seems to contradict you?
What makes you not trusting Google's numbers but trust Apple's ? I think both publish the daily numbers of activations and it is at least a wash, if Android is not ahead.
Valid point. Though, I think the reason people don't trust Google's numbers is because of the variants of Android that aren't quite 'Android'. The numbers released by IDC/Gartner/Canalysis include these variants. The numbers Google released (activations-per-day) are pretty close to these numbers (even though they say they don't include these variants). So, do these phones based on Android variants sell in very low quantities, or is Google adding the sales of these Android variants into their numbers, while claiming that they don't? By the way, iOS has more activations-per-day.
The number of the applications in the respective app stores is also about to equal (both are in 300 thousand range) and major publishers tends to release their titles for both platforms at the same time...doesn't sound like a monopoly at the smartphone arena at all.
False. Android has just below half the number of apps iOS has. And is it the majority of the major publishers that release their titles simultaneously for both platforms?
iPad 2 is pretty nice piece of hardware, but it won't be nowhere as dominant through the 2011 and with more and more apps for Honeycomb showing up, there will be more reasons for people to use the same OS as they have on their phone.
I'm sorry, but that's just naive. You think that the iPad won't be dominant simply because Honeycomb apps will magically appear? Especially when 2011 is close to half done?
Take few examples. Kindle : recent Honeycomb version is having the bookstore built in, which is sweet. If reading kindle books is important tablet use-case to you, Xoom with a big screen is not that bad choice at all.
Well, the Xoom's more expensive than the best-selling iPad. You could have at least used a better Android tablet.
Mail : iOS mail client is no way superior to Honeycomb, quite contrary. Maps : This is clear edge for Android. Vector maps and offline caching rules. Video conferencing : so many people have GMail account and can use video in GTalk.
And there are apps on iOS that are better than its Android version. Also, Skype is used more than GTalk for video chat, and it seems its iOS version is better.
iOS and iPad is great, but trying to convince yourself it will maintain a dominant position through entire 2011 sounds like pissing into pants for warmth to me.
Do you actually know what that saying means? Using it the way you did is quite... brainless.
What makes you not trusting Google's numbers but trust Apple's ? I think both publish the daily numbers of activations and it is at least a wash, if Android is not ahead. The number of the applications in the respective app stores is also about to equal (both are in 300 thousand range) and major publishers tends to release their titles for both platforms at the same time...doesn't sound like a monopoly at the smartphone arena at all.
iPad 2 is pretty nice piece of hardware, but it won't be nowhere as dominant through the 2011 and with more and more apps for Honeycomb showing up, there will be more reasons for people to use the same OS as they have on their phone.
Take few examples. Kindle : recent Honeycomb version is having the bookstore built in, which is sweet. If reading kindle books is important tablet use-case to you, Xoom with a big screen is not that bad choice at all. Mail : iOS mail client is no way superior to Honeycomb, quite contrary. Maps : This is clear edge for Android. Vector maps and offline caching rules. Video conferencing : so many people have GMail account and can use video in GTalk.
iOS and iPad is great, but trying to convince yourself it will maintain a dominant position through entire 2011 sounds like pissing into pants for warmth to me.
You have a number of things wrong here. First of all, the number of apps on the platforms isn't close to even. I just checked, and there are now over 383,000 apps in Apple's App Store. The last reliable number I saw for the Google Marketplace, a couple of weeks ago was about 170,000.
But it's much more than the raw numbers. Apple vets their apps, as we all know, and Google doesn't, as we all know. I've looked at Apple's numbers on a regular basis, and occasionally, those numbers actually went down by a thousand, or even four thousand. That's because Apple removes apps from developers that are copyright violations of other legit apps. They also remove, sometimes by the thousands, apps that are empty apps, by the same developers, that just point to a website, or do other things that are not what real apps do. This is important.
But Google does none of this. Estimates are that anywhere from one third to as much as two thirds of all apps in the Google Marketplace are copyright violations, or empty apps. Google doesn't care. Estimates are that hundreds of apps have malware, perhaps more, but unless Google is called out for it, they don't care. The only reason they removed those 28 or so apps that were malware recently was because someone outside of Google found them, and went
public.
Also, every reviewer that has discussed apps, has stated that Android apps are not as good as iOS apps?even when it's the same app by the same developer offering it on both platforms.
We know why this is.
Comparing numbers is a futile task, unless everything is equal, which it certainly is not here.
You obviously haven't tried the Google video conferencing. You should.
What were also seeing, when marketshare of the iPad, and Android tablets are compared, numbers that aren't comparable.
It's interesting to note that Apple has made it very clear, through Jobs and Cook, that Apple counts sell thru, i.e., sales to users, as the numbers they consider to be "sales", when they talk about "sales". Cook has stated this in their last conference call with analysts, which, by the way, is considered to be a legal financial document.
Meanwhile, others just talk about product "shipped". When asked about what the sell thru, or whatever other term for it others use, they are politely told that they aren't giving out those numbers. RIM's co-CEO got huffy about it, and whined that they shouldn't be questioned or doubted about their figures. Gee, I wonder why?
So now we're reading that Apple had 76% tablet marketshare last quarter based on these numbers. What numbers? The only numbers released on tablets sold were the ones for the iPad. I'm willing to bet the real percentage was upwards of 90%. and that goes for the quarter before, when Samsung released bogus numbers for the Tab, and were called on it, and had to backtrack, saying that they didn't sell nearly as many as they had shipped. And this isn't using the discredited "small" vs "smooth" controversy.
Also interesting is that Android marketshare in the USA has slipped, going from 53% to 50%, while iPhone numbers went from 19% to 28%. of course, RIM dropped as well. It's evidence that if the iPhone is sold on as many carriers as Android phones, it will do pretty well overall. So what happens if it's also sold on Sprint and T-Mobile? What about Metro Express, and other small carriers? What about if it's carried on all the carriers around the world that it's not carried on now? I think you know.