Slashdot Mirror
The Coming Onslaught of iPad Competitors
harrymcc writes "The iPad is selling as well as it is in part because no large manufacturer has had a direct rival out yet. But boy, is that going to change in the next few months. Over at Technologizer, I rounded up known information on 32 current and future tablet computing devices, from potentially worthy iPad competitors to wannabees to interesting specialty devices. By early 2011 these things are going to be everywhere, and it'll be fascinating to see how they fare." Related: the tablet-type device I've been watching most eagerly, Notion Ink's Adam, seems to finally have a realistic manufacturing prediction and price range (by November; up to $498 for the version with 3G and Pixel Qi screen).
What will I do with 32 tablets in the house?
ok but what if I took one of these, added a hard protective plastic coating, and then some ports for keyboards and such. i'd call it a 'laptop'.
When are all those ARM-based netbooks with Linux that we were promised going to show up? I'll take one with a Tegra 2 processor, Ubuntu Netbook Remix, and a Pixel Qi display please!
I'll pay extra for one in a form factor more like a Macbook Air, with a little extra screen, decent sized trackpad, etc.
Hello? Anybody out there?
tablets are great for 'consuming' content (now I feel dirty even using marketspeak like that).
but its true, its not oriented to create things. you basically tap your paw and get some goody back. for that, they work great. to expect more means a true revolution in UI design. not gonna happen with apple (they are too happy with the 'consuming pre-made content' notion) and will take a true visionary to accomplish.
we're still waiting. but hopeful.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
...when checking the one-liner review verdicts for the devices in this list:
"Engadget didn’t find it terribly satisfying."
"The Android Blog tried one and wasn’t exactly knocked out."
"UMPC Portal’s review says it’s not anywhere near as good as it looks."
"Engadget really didn’t care for it."
"Ubergizmo gave it a semi-positive review."
Does this sound anything like the reviews the iPad got? Hopefully the situation will change quickly to bring competition to benefit us customers.
Have you seen some of the art (and, for that matter, heard some of the music) that people have created on the ipad? It sucks for "creating content" in the "i have to type on a keyboard" sense, but it's actually pretty effective when you don't need a full keyboard to create something.
For some things, a keyboard will probably always be better. For others, the keyboard is really kind of pointless, and a tablet with no keyboard works surprisingly well.
Go back about five years in the archives of most tech publications and you can find similar stories about "The coming onslaught of iPod competitors." Look how that worked out.
For some reason, the tech community believes that the commoditize-and-cannabalize cycle that typified the 1980s and 1990s is a perpetual law. It isn't, and Apple's success this decade is a resounding rejoinder to that view. Apple's products aren't, in all respects, better than the competitors; what they are is more polished, more refined, and an order of magnitude easier to pick up on and figure out on your own.
The typical screeds about how Apple's success is due to marketing prowess, reality distortion fields, media sycophancy, etc. are all a bunch of red herrings. Apple makes great products, and it's a real shame that more companies haven't picked up on how they do it and why. It's not rocket science to diligently refine your products while at the same time planning their long-term placement growth; it's just more involved than most companies want to be.
So sure, I'm sure there will be an onslaught of cheaper, different tablets that mindless consumers (Who, I might add, the tech community still believes to be largely ignorant about technology. You know, in 2010.) will buy up and the iPad will be dead. It's impossible that, say, every single one of the competitor tablets will be inferior in one or more significant ways that fails to make an appreciable dent in the iPad's adoption rate. Equally impossible that Apple would refine the iPad beyond its current iteration to entice new customers. I mean, really.
I'm not giving Apple the keys to the kingdom carte blanche, as heaven knows they've made their share of mistakes, but on the whole, I think they've been too successful, too visionary, and too aggressive to continue this endless narrative about how, just when they're about to succeed, the commodity tech market comes up aces and wins the hand.
Yes, exactly. I don't think many of the people who use the term "marketing" really understand what it means. It's not just making things pretty and paying for a good advertising campaign which I think most people use it to mean. Marketing begins with determining what the market actually wants. Then determining how to sell it in that market. It's all based on customer satisfaction. People use "marketing" like some sort of pejorative, but in reality, there is no secret to marketing but making the customer happy by giving them a product they are happy with and continue to enjoy. Apple has done this. They do this to the point that people wonder why they would ever want their product at first glance ("No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."), but once they get ahold of it they like it, tell their friends, their friends buy them, and then when they need another product they trust the company to provide a similarly satisfactory product (at which point we are no longer talking about marketing but branding, which is a different rant).
After all as a tool the iPad is rather expensive since there are few tasks a tablet is truly well suited for. Most tasks, there are other devices that do a better job, other devices people usually own.
Typical checkbox thinking. For reading through the 1,000+ technical papers I have in Papers, plus the dozen books I have in PDF, browsing the web, handling most email, getting most of my news, looking at photos, anything to do with maps and directions, etc, etc, etc, the iPad wins hands-down. A tablet is a radically different form factor, IF it is properly designed and not just a port of a desktop OS and apps to a keyboardless netbook. And it is WAY nicer to interface with for those and more tasks, and is WAY easier to share and collaborate with than the welded-together-hence-restricted-in-aspect laptop or netbook alternative.
Call it "fashion" if you want. Makes me wonder if you wear garbage bags instead of clothes -- cheaper, stain-proof, water-proof -- and drive the butt-ugliest and most inconveniently-designed car -- cheaper, works just fine, more room for customization -- you can find, and live in a shipping container in back of the Piggly Wiggly, etc. No "fashion premium" for you, no sir.
The iPod was not the first MP3 player or anything. What it was is a fashion accessory.
I see people writing that now and then, and it's become clear that this sort of sentiment is disguised bitterness. It's nowhere near sufficient to explain what happened.
No, the iPod was not the first MP3, but it was the first one that that most people could stand to use. Seriously. I'm a tech person. I use Linux. I'm not trendy, and I don't have any interest in being trendy. But if I'm going to own an MP3 player, I want one that doesn't have a terrible design, and for some reason Apple seems to be the only tech company interested in solving their customer's problems.
Just for example, I had an iPhone for a couple years and liked it alright, but had some frustrations. I was talking to some pro-Android/anti-Apple people in various places (including on Slashdot), and I had become convinced that Android had gotten to be a good, stable, worthwhile phone OS. So I happily made the switch. I bought an HTC Incredible.
At first I was really happy and impressed. If it were a matter of fashion and image, I liked what it said about me that I no longer had an iPhone. But then so many damned thing just didn't work right. The audio player was crap. The picture viewer was ok, but sub-par. It would randomly crash and reboot itself. Battery life was not what it should be-- I could never go two days straight without charging. The available apps were pretty crappy. The notifications were excessive, and the included tones were grating. Over the course of a couple months, I began remembering why it was that I always hated cell phones. I found myself swearing at it under my breath. I started imagine that the phone was an object with free will, hellbent on frustrating me.
I managed to wriggle out of my contract and went back to AT&T (which I hate) and got an iPhone again. I'm not like "Oh wow, the iPhone is super-cool and I'm awesome for having one." It's more like I forget that I own an iPhone, and I forget why I hate cell phones, and I just use it.
And my story and perspective are not remotely unique. This is exactly why Apple has developed a following.
The best thing about this post is that it utterly fails to explain how Apple products become fashionable. Was it all a coincidence? Is it fashionable because Apple's products are high quality? High quality products by all rights certainly should be fashionable!
Just because something is fashionable doesn't also mean that it is bad. Somehow on Slashdot, "fashionable" is an effective way to disparage a person or product without justification. You could almost say it's a fashionable way to disparage something on Slashdot.
It's time for computer companies to admit they have no idea who their customer is, or what their customer wants. Most computer products try to be everything to everyone and end up disappointing all.
The secret to Apple's success is simplicity - identifying the smallest list of features that their customer base will find useful. Sure this makes some people unhappy, but the vast majority of their customers are happy with the feature set, and delighted by the ease of use that results from a device that doesn't try to do everything.
I used to want my computing devices to do everything. This usually resulted in building computers that could heat an entire house or carrying a laptop bag that weighed 50 lbs. Since converting my life to Apple's products (AppleTV, Mac Mini server, iMac, iPhones, iPods and iPads) I've been happier.
I was hesitant to get an iPad fearing that it's limited feature set would relegate it to a dust-collector in my technology scrap pile. I couldn't have been more wrong. On a recent weekend in Las Vegas, I didn't even bring my laptop bag. I was able to get remote access to my entire work network, read books and magazines, watch movies, and listen to music. Battery life was fantastic and I never once wished that I brought my laptop bag the entire weekend.
It was damn cool to walk on the plane with only an iPad and a pair of headphones in tow.
I'm not saying Apple's way is the only right way. There may be another company out there that figures their customers out as well as Apple has, but for now, I haven't seen it.
-ted
>Nor would I exactly discount Microsoft. Ever hear of a little latecomer called the Xbox?
Yes, it's a money loser for the company which produces it.
>Do you really think that one of the giants of software won't manage to carve off a piece if they want one?
Well, let's see.... ... relatively little consumer interest
They wanted a part of the digital music player market, they released the Zune... HUGE failure.
They wanted a piece of the PDA and later, smart-phone OS market... Windows CE -> Windows Mobile
They wanted a piece of the SmartPhone hardware market... so they bought SideKick... and now it's mostly dead. No new models lately, no new OS based on the SideKick OS, and of course releasing all of the customer data by accident.
Then they released the Kin, which could rightfully be called the "Zune II".
Microsoft has tried again and again with Set-Top boxes, and... yeah.
Microsoft was pushing their "Origami" project for palmtops/netbooks, and... yeah.
Even more telling, MS has been pushing Tablet PCs for a very long time, and doing a shitty job of it.
The fact is, they don't "get it", and they probably never will. Windows is strong on the desktop because it has momentum, and applications. If you try to force a desktop OS into random devices. They think they have the Windows DNA, so they should leverage it wherever possible, which is a big problem. They have a hammer, so everything becomes a nail.
I'll give you an Example. I had this cute little "premium netbook" called a Sony Type P (look it up). The thing was faster than 1GHz and had 2GB of ram. That puts it at close to the spec of my MacBook air, and well above the iPad and similar. But the thing came with VISTA... which made it DIRT slow. Not only was it slow, but it there was no special version like "Windows for Netbooks" or something, no, it tried to run all sorts of services in the background like DFS, etc., which are likely never to be used on a netbook. Then there were other problems, which indicate the practical limitations of Windows. For example, the screen was small and very high res - which would be fine, except that Windows application are very resolution independent. When you get a higher res. screen, everything shrinks. When you have a high-res small screen, you have to squint to read anything. There are two ways around this. One is you lower the resolution. At that point, you are wasting your screen and making everything blocky. Another is that you increase the font size. When you do that, many applications (including parts of Windows) will break. They assume a certain size dialog will fit all their text, and when it doesn't (because you increased the font size)... it just gets cut off.
That's just one example of many, but the point is, Windows isn't designed for that kind of hardware, and shoe-horning it in doesn't help anyone. You buy something, and it's not usable. Worse yet, the applications aren't designed for that kind of hardware either. I'm not even singling out Windows here, Linux is the same - except that Android and a few other distributions are customized enough to be truly adapted to mobile platforms. Windows 7, I'm sorry, it isn't, and it probably never will be. For example, adding some half-assed touch-screen support in the form of a few gestures and mouse emulation does not a touch interface make. There should be a totally separate mode for tough input. The problem is that then applications would have to support it, and Microsoft doesn't want to actually have to fight iOS and Android for mindshare, which is why they won't do anything drastic, and they won't succeed.
You would really want to deal with all that BS and headaches? On the page you linked to it says that plugging in a keyboard will cause Xorg to crash, the micro touchpad AND the left buttons don't work, no 3D acceleration, it just seems like a really bad hack to me and a whole lot of bullshit to go through simply to have a half crippled device at the end.
While I've always respected the FOSS "run it on anything" philosophy, having so many devices not working and functioning incorrectly sounds less like a new OS and more like a broken one. I mean if all you cared about was speed you could probably jam Win98 on there and be just as fast and just as broken. Why would you want to spend the money on a new device just to cripple it with software that doesn't run correctly?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.