Slashdot Mirror
Google Preparing iPad Rival?
dazedNconfuzed noted an update in the ongoing rumor train about the Google iPad Competitor. It would be based on Android (not ChromeOS) and supposedly Eric Schmidt was telling people about it at a party in LA recently. If any Googlers want to leak me s3cr3t information, I promise anonymity, though without an actual product, price or date it's tough to get really excited. But the iPad clearly has significant limitations that someone else can capitalize on.
And they don't have to care. The N1 is perfectly usable out of the box. If you want to, you can tweak it and make it even better. If you don't, it will still work just fine. How is that a problem?
This will unavoidably become less true as iPhone hardware improves. Already there are apps that work well on the 3GS but not the slower versions, and most existing iPhone apps look lousy when pixel-doubled on the iPad.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
With the iPhone you have zero choice of hardware.
This is not true.
You can choose Apple or nothing
This is true.
Since Apple never intended their OS for use on non-Apple hardware, and since Google never intended Android to be exclusive, these are indeed inherent traits, by the definition of the word.
This is part of tinkerability. You can put Android on whatever you want, including a PC.
But choice, in hardware and software, is not something inherent to Android but not to iPhone. Choice in hardware manufacturers is. If you want to break that out from tinkerability, I have no problem with that, but it doesn't really change anything.
As far as the bulk of your post discussing CDMA, that's not inherent to the iPhone, it's simply an implementation decision. There's nothing about the iPhone design or philosophy that precludes building a CDMA handset. In fact, the iPhone was originally offered to Verizon, to run on their CDMA network. But they turned it down.
If I buy a PC preloaded with Ubuntu, am I now tinkering?
No. But the hardware manufacturer tinkered with Ubuntu to get it onto the PC (or maybe not, with Ubuntu and PCs, but with handsets, this is exactly what must happen, and exactly what Android specifically promotes).
With iPhone OS, however, other hardware makers are *not* allowed to tinker with the OS to get it to run on their handsets.
Buying a shrink-wrapped product and using it without modification is never tinkering, period. This isn't being broken out to placate me personally. It is simply the proper uses of the words.
I think you're abusing the tinkering label to make your point, and I think you've gone so far with it as to strain logic.
No, because I'm not saying what you think I'm saying. I've also already stated that if you want to break it out into a separate category, I don't mind.
I never said, "end-user tinkerability", I said "tinkerability". And the ability for HTC, Motorola, etc., to ship Android handsets stems *directly* from Android's tinkerability. If you want to break it out into a separate category, however, like I've said more than once, feel free.
The inherent philosophy behind the iPhone is, and has always been, 'the iPhone user experience'. Aka 'my way or the highway'. This specifically precludes using anything other than the stuff shipping out of Cupertino. If the new iPhone switches to TCP over Carrier Pigeon, you have no choice but to accept it, should you wish to stay on that platform. With Android, this cannot be - and this is intrinsic in the very concept.
Yes, exactly. You can tinker with Android and make your own phone, that uses TCP over Carrier Pigeon, if you are so inclined. But there's nothing inherent in iPhone OS that precludes Apple choosing Avian TCP.
This changes everything.
The only thing it changes is that it allows third parties to fracture the Android market. And this *ALL* stems from their ability to tinker with the system. Some can make hardware keyboards, some have flashes on their cameras, etc.