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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."
Mandatory hardware buttons, and dictate their placement. Having the back button, menu button, and home button change places on different Android devices is retarded. And make it hard to accidentally hit them. Apple's "fuck whatever you're doing and quit" key is stupidest UI decision ever made. Putting it where you hold the device makes it even worse.
Want to be real awesome? Have touch-sensitive dedicated scroll areas off the display surface.
Support pen input, from low-end pressure screens to that fancy induction Wacom stuff. That is the real future of tablets, always has been, always will be. There is a reason only children fingerpaint.
aggressively using the inactive (locked) screen state to display useful information
I don't know exactly what that means but I like the sound of it. Mobile operating systems, especially ones from Apple, should be a lot better than they are at at displaying device and communications status. It's one of the... maybe two things Windows Mobile is good at: at a glance I can see how many emails I have in each individual account, how many appointments I have today and the two or three coming up, how many active tasks I have and the first few highest priority/earliest due, how much data I've used this month, what the weather will be like tomorrow, and of course the time, date, battery and signal et cetera. All from one button press. And of course there are lots of other Today plugins available and they are easy to develop.
If you cringe at that, that's fine. You don't like it and most people I know don't want "clutter" on their home screen either. That's fine for them but iPhone OS doesn't give the choice to those of us who would like to use an otherwise purposeless blank screen for displaying useful information. The key word there is choice... you can have it your way and I can have it my way. At least, we could, if iPhone supported a single bit of customisation...
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 don't know, man. All the features I could ever want work great outta the box. As long as I'm locked into Android, there is no way I'll ever lose my contacts. When I format or switch to a new phone, my apps are all downloaded again automagically. If I don't like something about the OS, I can generally replace it with some third party application. When android tablets start coming out, if I get one, my custom "Android" will likely follow me onto it. I don't know, as someone who had to deal with people when they had synchronization problems with ActiveSync and their Windows Mobile phones (problems sync'ing generally mean loss of everything without some roundabout backup/restore of PIM), I can't get enough of Android's robust synchronization with "the cloud"
"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds"
What the hell are you trolling about? Have you ever even used Android? I have and Android phone right here and it is awesome. Everything on it works great. Thanks to the 1 GHz Snapdragon proc, multi-touch is butter smooth, the browser is blazing fast, maps and the free navigation is the best this side of a 500 dollar garmin, the camera takes decent phone pictures, it's easy to use, the ui is intuitive, voice input into any text entry box, I could go on. About the only thing that was indeed half-assed is the market app. It downright sucks. Of course, that's what sites like this are for. As someone that's been through over a dozen Windows Mobile phones through the years, Android is like when Dorothy stepped out of black and white and into color. It's nothing short of phenomenal as a smartphone OS. Even developing for it is brain dead easy with the free emulator and eclipse plugin integration.
I have to think you are trolling or just laying down the 'turf, one.
It's amusing that one of the linked articles mentions an "iPad killer" from Foxconn. Foxconn makes the iPad.
Foxconn's 2008 revenue was $62 billion. They're the "largest exporter in Greater China" and the world's largest maker of phone handsets. They have 486,000 employees. (Apple: 35,000. General Motors: 245,000.)
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.
Wouldn't it be great if all those who expect 100% perfection were rounded up and locked in a Klein bottle where they could resolve their issues by the Kilkenny cats method?:
There once were two cats of Kilkenny
Each thought there was one cat too many
So they fought and they fit
And they scratched and they bit
'Til (excepting their nails
And the tips of their tails)
Instead of two cats there weren't any!
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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?
...according to ArsTechnica:
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010/05/android-tablet-prototypes-not-yet-ready-for-prime-time.ars
"The performance stank. It was a stutter-fest (...) Resizing pages with the Web browser was jerky and uneven. The Gallery app stuttered a bit and generally wasn't nearly as responsive as it is on my Nexus One phone. And the Wired tablet app was just awful, running as it did on Adobe's AIR platform (...) In all, it's a genuine mystery as to why these tablets were in such rough shape. It could be some combination of beta software and beta GPU drivers--but really, I have no idea. It seems to defy the laws of physics that a Tegra 2-based Android tablet would have a less responsive UI than the Snapdragon-based Nexus One, but that was my experience yesterday. "
This is even with a nVidia Tegra2 processor, which should be more pwerful than Apple A4 processor.
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.
..for the first time (it was just released in europe), and after seeing the linked android tablet in the description, two things come to my mind:
1) 7'' might be a WIN. I found the ipad extremely gorgeus and fast, etc... but it was too uncomfortable to use because it was just heavy enough to use with both hands, but as soon as you need to interact with it a lot (i.e. almost anything other than scrolling) you need to switch to holding it with one hand and typing/interacting with the other hand. And it was way too heavy for me to do that comfortably.
That's why I think 7'' or 8'' might have been way better.
2) that android tablet will probably have a much poorer battery life (yes, pure speculation) and I doubt they will have access to android market, so.. (oh, and I hope they dont redo the entire homescreen/UI because that will probably mean they somehow f*cked it up)
I am eager to see 8'' android tablets made with great hardware, great battery life and stock android so it is easier for them to update the damn thing.
Also, I think 128MB or 256MB RAM is not enough. (see this one, for instance http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.39448)
What is the NDK? It's been available for some time now. To the best of my knowledge writing a Dalvik shell to expose the app to the O/S and then using a native NDK core *is* the way to do what you are saying.
These guys ported Quake 3. It uses a lightweight Dalvik launcher to control a native build of Quake 3.
While there might be some utility to a way to write a pure native code user-facing app in C, I don't think it currently exists. Android's browser, for example, is a Dalvik wrapper around the native code. You can of course build a pure native code executable that will run on the terminal (for example, see here) but that's not going to be useful for you.
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.
At least Apple is upfront and takes its users privacy seriously. But then I suppose some do not value their individuality as much as others.
"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?
This linked story is copied in its entirety from my site, Tested.com. While they have posted a link to the author's profile on the story, the content is copyright Tested. The link to the original story is http://www.tested.com/news/5-ways-google-can-make-android-truly-tablet-worthy/355/.
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