Slashdot Mirror
How Google Can Make Android Truly Tablet-Worthy
With an Android armada on the horizon (or at least expected), reader androidtablet plugs this piece on ways Android could be truly tablet-friendly. Armchair engineering may be easy to knock, but I like the ideas presented here, such as aggressively using the inactive (locked) screen state to display useful information.
I was thinking I would offer some features an Android tablet might need. I made a list:
Share screen - for educational purposes
Ebook reader.
Internet browser
Citrix client
IRDA capture/replay (media remote control apps)
Skype
Apparently I'm not very creative. Those things and many thousands more are available in the standard package. Truly inventive stuff is offerred in the app store.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Wouldn't it be better for Google make Android 100% perfect as a phone OS before branching out into other areas?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Apple's "fuck whatever you're doing and quit" key is stupidest UI decision ever made.
If you ask most people, they wish they had that button on absolutely every device they have to use.
The "lockscreen" is the screen you see when you start up the phone from inactivity, or a powered-off screen. When the screen powers on, the lock screen is the first thing you see. You unlock it, whether via button, via some "intuitive" slide-to-unlock gesture, or some pattern or lock pin, to go to whatever application you left at. So by "aggressive use of the locked screen", they are just saying, "Dammit! Allow us to customize it," or they're saying put more useful information there. They mention widgets, so it's logical to say they want customization. Honestly, I think they just want a prettier clock and an animated battery "charging" widget. Oh, and maybe Tetris as a widget. Wouldn't that be awesome?
"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds"
I am sympathetic to the idea of mandated hardware buttons and placement, buuuuuut ... I'd rather have tiered recommendations / human interface guidelines, because there might be a lot of cool applications for Android where a mandated layout wouldn't work, but a secondary recommended layout / alternative would. I'm spur-of-the-moment imagining an embedded display in a convertable's dashboard that's intended to have little chance for dust to get in. I don't have a convertable, and maybe that's a silly example, but Hey. I know that on many of my electronic gizmos, the actual electronic bits and display have outlived the life of the buttons.*
Want to be real awesome? Have touch-sensitive dedicated scroll areas off the display surface.
As long as we're thinking of the same sort of thing, that's one thing I look forward to in the (of-course-it's-delayed) Notion Ink Adam tablet. (Though I also worry that it will be distractingly bad, as when a touchpad on a notebook is oversensitive and leads to all kinds of curse-inducing pointer misplacement.)
timothy
* Another reason I hate trackpads :) When their "mouse buttons" fail or start to go wonky, the simple, elemental-to-human-life matter of click, Yea, whether left or right, can bring great wailing and gnashing of teeth and bashing of buttons.
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Amusing, but not crazy, as far as I can see. There are only so many large-scale makers of this kind of electronics -- and it's no weirder than different parts of Apple, or HP, or Microsoft (or GM, for that matter) trying to put the other parts out of business. Foxconn seems like one of the very most likely sources for an "iPod Killer" device, because they have in-house expertise. (Of course, maybe they have agreements with Apple that rule out certain routes to producing an iPod killer ;))
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
All these demo unit's/available in China, I just want one now!
2.2 minimum, tegra would be nice, standard usb socket to charge (as well as another one to drop in cradle for hdmi output I guess), bluetooth keyboard support as standard so I can use a keyboard with it if I want to, or just lug around without and use the onscreen one if I have to.
Done.
I've got a credit card warmed up and ready to use for something like that. Why all this 1.5/1.6 stuff?
Seems to be true that there's alot of Android Tablets inc, heck, they were showing dozens of them off before Apple even admitted they had a tablet
I do have some fears.
It appears if you've got a non-Google phone, updates are looking risky. As much as the new Dell tablets ones look neat, if Google(htc) brought their own out, I'd probably go for that with a better expectation that it'll be supported for later updates.
Whats the Chome Tablet for? Seems odd for them to fracture their own market when Android seems great and well suited for a tablet. Can the Chrome browser just be chucked on an existing Android platform to give people more choice?
But yeah, if the Dell tablets were going on sale tomorrow at Best Buy, I'd be typing this out on my G1 camped outside.
Waiting for an amusing sig.
The iPad seems to be a huge success. Tablets have never been hugely popular before. Now everyone wants to make one. Why all of a sudden?
And what are they actually for?
The tablets available previously were laptop computers running lightly modified desktop operating systems and applications. Consequently, that's what people tried to use them for. They were not very good at it.
The iPad doesn't pretend to be a laptop replacement, it's for web browsing, casual gaming and media playing with maybe a little light note taking. It's using an OS which is designed specifically for the job. Also, love it or hate it, the iPhone did revolutionise the design of touch interfaces - if you can't see how everything since has copied it then you need stronger glasses.
People describe the iPad as "just a big iPod Touch" as if that were a criticism - I bought an iPad because that was exactly what I wanted. Most of the haters are evaluating it as if it were a small PC.
Its also closer to the original Netbook concept, while Netbooks themselves have morphed into entry-level laptops because they could run desktop software, and there wasn't a lot of alternative net book-friendly software. The iPad arrives with a good developer base, lots of available apps and no option to stick Windows or Ubuntu on it...
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
If you ask most people, they wish they had that button on absolutely every device they have to use.
That button is standard on most phones, including all Android phones.
What Apple is missing is the "go back", "search", and "show me my options" buttons. Those functions are inconsistent among many iPhone and iPad apps.
Foxconn seems like one of the very most likely sources for an "iPod Killer" device, because they have in-house expertise.
No they don't. The real value behind tablets is in the software, not the hardware (except that the HW shouldn't hinder the SW), and Apple produces that part themselves. The Foxconn employees just copy it to the device.
I'm already seeing it coming that most tablet developers will miss this crucial thought and fail miserably. Just stuff some UI (aka Android) meant for 3.5" onto a 10" tablet and sell your hardware with it. This is really easy to do and will work perfectly, right?
Just like that "iPad killer" tablet produced by some Chinese manufacturer I saw a few months ago on television. It worked so well that even the Skype application that ships with it doesn't scale correctly. Not to mention that the presenter had to do every tap on the screen twice because the touchscreen was so good that it didn't recognize the first one (that was an official presentation!).
this right here is the point. the software isn't optimized for the hardware. They can't get the best use out of any given chip. Apple does more "advanced" features on less powerful hardware and ram than anyone else. how is it possible that they got the OS working better than anyone else?
Oh and for the record every andriod phone I have used have had horrible interfaces, hard to navigate browsers(where the fsck is the back button in landscape mode, and why does the typing on the keyboard have to be so painful?)
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
If you look at the iPod, iPhone and iPad, they're all cases where Apple chose the right time to capture the second mover advantage.
Apple sells premium products a little ahead of the mass market. That's neither "right" nor "wrong". Nokia or HTC couldn't have sold the same devices in their markets.
Now if things go true to form, the third generation competitors will scramble for scraps from Apple's table by copying whatever they can, repeating the mistakes made in the first generation products,
If things go as they usually go for Apple, Apple will get stuck at a few percent market share, while the mainstream companies saturate the market with more powerful and much cheaper devices. The only time Apple ever managed to hold on to a significant lead was with iPod/iTunes. And the reason people copy prior products is not necessarily because they are better, but because users don't want to have to learn new systems all the time.
and trying to come up with bullets for a side by side comparison. It'll take several iterations before a credible competitor to the iPad emerges.
Apple's market niche isn't technology, it's branding. A competitor to iPad is like a competitor to Nike shoes: it doesn't really matter what the shoes are--they all get the job done--it matters how people perceive the brand. Can Apple maintain its brand perception as a supposedly innovative brand for create people? I don't know; they're getting a lot of bad press.
"Apple's market niche isn't technology, it's branding."
WTF??
Perhaps you mean Apples niche isn't check-box marketing and they aren't meeting your check-boxes?? While I don't own anything Apple (yet) but it is clear to me that it is a lot more than just branding.
Unless Apples Branding is shorthand for technical excellence(at least in this case). Just look at the technology aspects.
Example: Brilliant industrial engineering and packaging.
Example: High Quality IPS screen: Apple is using a better screen here than practically every product shown so far. All I see in competitors is crappy TN screen with horrendous viewing angles, that might be acceptable in a netbook, but not in a tablet meant to be used in multiple orientations.
Example: Battery life. Apple engineer it to use the lowest power envelop possible and deliver solid 10 hour battery life, also it doesn't need a fan, doesn't get hot.
Example: Capacitive multi-touch. Many competitors are single touch resistive (Yuk).
Example: HW/SW integration. This is the special sauce that make enables them to build something that is greater than the sum of its parts. That enables true engineering to take place where every component is engineered to just deliver what needs to be there, so you can a low powered device that is more response than people dropping in much more powerful off the shelf components but poor integration.
So I would like a more open tablet with and SD-Slot/USB port, but I serious don't think we will have anything with remotely as good technology (Screen/digitizer/battery life/industrial engineering/HW-SW integration) all in one package for a long time to come.
To say Apple is just branding and not technology is completely ridiculous. Did you take any time to consider the technology and execution before you made that claim?
That button is standard on most phones, including all Android phones.
Right, so it in fact was not a stupid idea to put it on the iPad as the original poster was claiming.
What Apple is missing is the "go back", "search", and "show me my options" buttons. Those functions are inconsistent among many iPhone and iPad apps.
Actually Back is pretty consistent being the upper left.
The other things you mention (and in fact even back) I believe do not need to be consistent, they are items better off presented in ways that make the most sense for the particular application they are running in.
Think about it this way, the "stop everything" button is really unrelated to the application, it's a system button. But the other three buttons are very much application specific buttons, even though they can also do other things in the system. That is the difference and why I think they are better done as virtual controls rather than physical ones.
Physically the buttons are very bad for other reasons on something the size of a tablet, for a phone size device I see how they are kind of nice but I still don't think they are a better idea than virtual controls can be.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley