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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"
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.
...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.
Actually, Apple timed this product just right. The appeal of tablets have been clear for years, it's just that the technological infrastructure wasn't good enough and the implementations were lousy. Windows tablets anyone? I have one, and I almost never use it as a tablet.
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. It's a natural role for a company driven by a perfectionist like Jobs who sees the mistakes the first generation products make and does not repeat them.
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, 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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
Apple has a very dedicated herd of followers who buy everything Apple throws at them.
Turn the hate down from 11 and think about why that is. My personal story is that after supporting a series of clunky laptops at home, Vista made me reluctantly buy the wifey a MacBook Air. Wow. Her experience with that made me replace my latest in a series of problematic Belkin routers with a Time Capsule (wireless N with automatic backups). She broke a MBA hinge and because we were no longer supported I got her a MacBook. After 11 months Apple decided to fix the MBA hinge at no charge. Wow. Then I got her a 2G iphone (which at the time the RAZR was the top selling phone for three years). Wow. Then came the 3G and I got one for myself (I got tired of rebooting the work HTC 8500 to make a phone call). Then the 3GS. Got one for myself and gave the 3G to the wifey because she dropped the 2G into a glass of tea. The iPhone makes me use my desktop only infrequently. My work laptop now stays at work. I bought and returned a Windows 7 netbook. Wow (in a bad way). Then the iPad came out (wow) and I got the wifey one and now she only uses her laptop to type meeting minutes and reports. Now that we have kids there is no screen to open, no laptop to lug around with both hands, and no keyboard for the monkeys to lunge at. I bought an old used eMac just like the one the girls use at school ($200US). I look around the house and see all the Apples and wonder what the hell happened, and then realize I wouldn't change a thing.
To do all this I gave up the features that are important to you but got features that turned out to be important to me. I paid more than I would have using the other technologies but they also sold at a higher rate. So I'm in the herd. With the options today, if I was buying my first phone I don't know if it would be an iPhone. But at each point in time what I purchased was the right one for me as compared to the other options.
Example: Brilliant industrial engineering and packaging.
No, just luxury components and packaging. You pay for it. Brilliant would be to deliver the iPad for $199.
Example: High Quality IPS screen: Apple is using a better screen here than practically every product shown so far.
Yes, they buy expensive and high end components. Your point?
Example: Battery life. Apple engineer it to use the lowest power envelop possible
Same thing: they use expensive components.
Example: Capacitive multi-touch. Many competitors are single touch resistive (Yuk).
The choice between resistive and capacitive is not so clearcut. Capacitive is good for fingers, resistive is good for pens. iPad and iPhone are lousy for drawing, and handwriting input is a no-go. I hope someone will start making Android tablets with resistive input (or Wacom or hybrid input) because the Apple iPad input sucks for anything other than poking at oversized on-screen buttons.
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.
There's nothing "special" about it; it's marketing fluff. iPhone batter life, screens, hardware integration, etc. is no better than on the Droid or the X10 or any of numerous other phones, and those cost much less.
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.
The reason you won't see anything like that is not because other companies don't know how to build these kinds of machines, but because their customers aren't willing to pay as much.
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?
Yes, I did. Nothing you say contradicts what I said: Apple is a luxury brand delivering a luxury product made from premium components. They do use new technology, but most of that they just buy elsewhere.
The reason their competitors don't compete with Apple is not because they don't know how to, but because it's not rational to compete with Apple for a small part of the market. Google, Microsoft, Nokia, HTC and others are going for the mass market.
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/.