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Hands-on With the iPad Alternatives On Display At IFA
Barence writes "This week's IFA show has seen a flurry of Android-based alternatives to the iPad emerge from leading manufacturers. The Samsung Galaxy Tab made a strong first impression on PC Pro's reviewer. The 7-inch tablet's TFT screen 'beams forth with rich, saturated colors and wide, wide viewing angles,' the device is capable of Full HD playback and the TouchWiz UI is 'clearly intended to draw customers away from the iFamily.' Elsewhere, ViewSonic has launched a pair of 7-inch and 10-inch tablets, the larger of which dual boots into either Android or Windows 7. 'Our first moments with Windows 7 were surprisingly painless, too: we expected the Atom processor and 1GB of memory to be horrendously sluggish, but it wasn't the case,' PC Pro reports. Finally, Toshiba's 10.1-in. Folio 100 marries Android 2.2 with Nvidia's Tegra 2 platform to deliver 'mighty graphics crunching power.' The build quality left a little to desire, though. 'The 14mm thick chassis feels lightweight, and even relatively gentle twisting motions left the Folio's plastic body creaking under the stress.'"
Software, software, software, software, software, software, software.
HOW IS THE SOFTWARE?
Am I the only one who doesn't like OLED and AMOLED displays? Sure they have vibrant colors but they are too saturated and not "real". Kinda like TVs at the hardware stores are setup to compete over color, without any regard for looking real.
I care about being able to install, without having to ask permission, in the future any or other possible OSs. Windows 7 starter is a non starter.
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
Is it just because I'm a nerd that I think a thin netbook with a proper keyboard would be more useful and just as portable?
That pretty much kills the device right there(at least for a lot of uses). If you are going to have a tablet with a software keyboard you are going to have to make it easy to type on, 7" just won't do it. Phones aren't that much smaller but are infinitely more portable. Looks like Samsung just figured they could split the difference between a phone and iPad and the product would be great, without actually realizing why each device has the form factor it does.
Monstar L
I'd be more interested in that 10" Viewsonic...the only really annoying thing I got while reading about it was the fact that you can't run Android 2.2 on it yet. That's kind of disappointing. This is definitely something I could pick up and play with though.
On the other hand, I think I'm interested more in color e-ink over this flurry of tablet PCs. Every time I see one, all I really think of is reading stuff. Like say...a comic book or even a normal book. I'm sure they're fine little PCs but I already have a netbook with an actual keyboard. The allure of a tablet is so-so.
"Those who would sacrifice essential liberties for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - BenF
Especially if I can buy one for a reasonable price. As I understand it, the Samsung will cost about $1000. In any case, I'm tired of the constant announcements, and no actual products.
I find it interesting that these after-the-fact products use Apple's offerings (iPhone and now the iPad) as the benchmark product. This tells me that other manufacturers see that Apple got it right, whether it's due to marketing or technology,
By comparing themselves to Apple's products, other manufacturers have made them the gold standard.
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
I would guess that the performance not being sluggish under Windows 7 with that processor they've used is related to it not running any anti-virus as well. I think we know how that ends for most people. It may not be sluggish now, but it soon will be.
Although this ignores the fact the Tab comes preloaded with Swype as its keyboard. Most who have tried it view Swype's mechanic as the future of touchscreen text input (and it will no doubt migrate in some for to the iPhone at some point). However it would actually be worse suited to a larger screen because the swiping motions would need to be significantly longer/larger to reach across a larger keyboard.
Given the chosen input method, the 7" form factor appears to be a better decision, not a worse one.
"Yes, Virginia, there is a Great Cthulhu..."
I have no problem typing on my cell phone's 3 inch screen, I doubt people will have much problems with a 7" screen either. It's nowhere near as good as an actual keyboard, but this isn't a PC or laptop replacement we're talking about. The iPad isn't much better.
This sentence no verb.
Wait for the Rockchip 2818 Clones running Android 2.2 at a lot less.
They also have 8 inch models with sharp and japan display.
they will be sub $100 after an initial release price of say $140, although obsolete VIA ones are less than that now.
ARM+DSP at low power beats anything MS on battery - so I wonder what MS is thinking.
I'm looking at these as eventual replacements for corporate blackberry devices. A small clean easy to use device with WiFi only - for corporate email and calendaring (read Exchange) with a good web browser and a note taking app. Viewing MS docs and PDFs is a bonus. Price it under $200 and my company would buy 500+
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Maybe they're planning to put Swype on it - that helps a lot with typing on touch screen mobiles and I think Samsung have some kind of a deal to have it on their mobiles already even though it's still in beta elsewhere. If they're expecting people to use this as a lightweight web browser then that's probably a good compromise, but I agree I'd hate to do any serious typing on it (even with a bluetooth keyboard, you have the issue of how you comfortably prop up a tablet device and keep your lap free for the keyboard - if you go the route of a stand then you may as well have a netbook).
Have absolutely no idea why Google are forcing tablets to have 3G. The Tab will come in at around $100-$200 with a 2 year contract. I actually think this type of price discounting FUD should be illegal. Tell me the total cost of the device and what part of the monthly fee goes towards the cost.
Anyway, so I already have a mobile phone that allows tethering, so I would like a wi-fi only Android 2.2 tablet please. I do not need another SIM. Google, get your act together.
The actual price, contract free, is likely to be in the $750 range. In the UK, the price of the Tab has been stated as being slightly more expensive than a Galaxy S. I can get one of those for around £400, so I expect to get a Tab around £500.
My problem is still that most new phones can tether. So my tablet does not need to have 3G functionality.
I have an iPad and will get an android tablet whenever one comes out.
But Samsung has decided to fail before they even get out of the gate. $900 for their tablet? Are you flipping serious? 7'' instead of 10'', 4GB of memory instead of 64.
I can see it now, in the board of directors meeting
"Apple is printing money with these at $500, I bet if we double the price, we can make twice as much money!!!"
If they want to go after the iPad, which they do, they need to create a comparable product at the same price point.
...I saw a comment that pretty much exactly said this, before the iPad came out, about its screen.
You say, "iPad Alternatives", but you still got "iPad in the headline. Geeze! On Slashdot, a day without Apple is a slow "news" day indeed... Eh, just like the old days when every portable cassette player with the headset was a Walkman
Apple, the new Sony
I'll stick to my Nokia N900.
"But that's a phone and not a tablet", you might say. Nokia disagrees: "Such devices should be seen more as portable computers with phone functionality rather than traditional mobile phones mainly capable making a phone call. N900 belongs to this category of mobile computers." (http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=57214)
You might argue that tablets can do all sorts of whiz-bang things my phone can't. I don't know what they are, exactly. Play music? No, my N900 does that. Play videos? My N900 does that too. Okay, so you're not going to watch a movie on a 3.5 inch screen (a 3.5 _foot_ screen would be more like it), but you're not going to watch movies on a 7 inch screen either, are you? But watching a 20 minute TED talk (ted.com) is something the N900 handles well.
Play games, then---well, the N900 does that too. It runs all the emulators debian runs (i.e. nes, snes, game boy, amiga, c64). There are native ports of commercial games (you supply the data files): HoMM2, Quake; abandonware (Beneath a Steel Sky, descent), Linux games (Battle for Wesnoth, Frozen Bubble), you name it. Okay, so you can't play starcraft except using the stratagus engine which is weird, but hey---can other non-x86 linux tablets run x86 windows games? :-)
Or if you don't want a media circus but just want to communicate, take notes, put appointments in your calendar and be productive (instead of reading slashdot :D), you can do that too. Sure, it has a smaller screen and a smaller keyboard, and it ain't lightning fast, but it fits in your pocket so you can have computing wherever you go.
And... well, I guess I'm coming near a point besides just sharing my experience; or if not a point, then a question: if you're going to go somewhere and you're going to carry a bag with you (I suspect you don't have 7-to-10 inch pockets), why not carry a computer with a decent-sized keyboard? You know, on'-o'-dem laptops? I'm genuinely curious: which jobs are tablets the best for, and why?
It might fit into a pocket so you don't have to carry a bag. 7" is probably the absolute max you don't need a bag for.
You don't have to make the keyboard larger on the larger screen. So Swype is probably fairly size agnostic.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I agree with you and that's why I think the Always Innovating Touchbook is about the sweetest thing possible. It's an ARM-based touchscreen tablet with a detachable keyboard. Unfortunately it's being brought to market by a small company and just like the Open Pandora, they have been having trouble with filling orders and continuously lengthening deadlines. It was supposed to come out in 2007 and finally came out in 2009 and now they are sold out. Always Innovating is promising that the new version will be coming out in September but I didn't believe them so I bought one on eBay.
Was there any product other than the german Wetab (of which... we hear less and less...) that would feature an open architecture?
FWIW, and with all my wishes: http://wetab.mobi/en
Herve S.
All I want from a tablet is a good PDF reader with a big enough display to fit a single page of a typical scientific paper (mostly US Letter or DIN A4 format) so I can read comfortably. The tablet should be relatively light, i.e. lighter than the iPad which is too heavy for my taste and rugged so I don't have to worry too much about breaking it or scratching the display. Having two dedicated buttons for flipping pages forward and backward would be a plus. The most important feature software-wise would be running a decent BibTeX managing software which let's me build a library of papers, books, reports, etc. by using a built-in WLAN connection to the Internet and a Web browser to access the likes of citeseer, IEEE, ACM, and so forth. What I don't need is graphics power or any fancy features. A real USB port that lets me connect the tablet to a host computer or an external USB mass storage device (like an external harddisk, USB stick, or a digital camera for instance) would be a definite plus. A DVI connector that allows me to use the tablet to give a presentation using the built-in PDF reader would be absolutely great. Programming should be easy and not require learning a new set of libraries for one of those strange phone operating systems like iOS or Android. This is where a nice stripped-down GNU/Linux distribution would shine. That would be no iPad competitor, it would be in a league of its own aimed at people who want to use the tablet for basic productivity tasks in academia, schools, industry as opposed to watching videos, listening to music, or playing car racing games.
I want one with just Android installed. I don't want any permanent third party apps or extra UI layers. I'm kicking myself for not buying a Nexus One when I had the chance because it is the only phone to offer a pure Android experience. There are other nice phones out there, but they do stupid things like add Nascar apps that can't be removed or have a different UI.
brain@kumanopuusan ~ % parse-english < "Most who have tried it view Swype's mechanic as the future of touchscreen text input (and it will no doubt migrate in some for to the iPhone at some point)."
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Use of the words "good", "bad" or "evil" is almost invariably the result of oversimplification.
Funny, but seriously, it was missing 1 letter in "form". You probably could have picked a better post for this... ;)
"Yes, Virginia, there is a Great Cthulhu..."
To sum things up, I tried to avoid it, but so far I am not going for an Android Tablet. To sum things up
Archos: Cheap but Archos sucks
Toshiba: Nice Tablet comes close to what I want but the build quality sucks
Samsung: Too small for my needs, and costs a whopping 700 Euros for half the screen estate of the ipad, they outpriced it for me, but the screen size also is too small.
Only the Samsung one allows access to the Android market directly, the others need hacks to open the access.
In other words I finally gave in and ordered an ipad... Sorry Android but this year you only have made it to my mobile phone!
This sure was a lot lamer, and a lot more work, than one of those annoying "FTFY" posts. Surely a Ralph Wiggam "Me fail English? That's unpossible" would have sufficed.
$900 for their tablet? Are you flipping serious?
This surprised me as well, because I thought Samsung would be aiming for an equal price point, trimming features as needed to make it happen.
The thing is, Apple has a tremendous advantage now in terms of volume. They know they can sell millions of iPads so they buy all parts in huge quantities. Who else can go into that market assuming the same? All other competitors have to either cost more, or be of much shoddier quality for the same price - except for large companies like Samsung that could take a gamble on entry pricing to get a foot in the market.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Is it just because I'm a nerd that I think a thin netbook with a proper keyboard would be more useful and just as portable?
Even running WIndows (and then it's not thin) you simply don't have the range of usable applications for a netbook that you do for an iPad. Don't forget that every single iPad application is written to perform well on it, and be usable for the input choices you have. You can't say the same for running most applications on a Netbook except for some writing tools.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It was while trying to read your informative, insightful (and on-topic!) post that I stumbled over your minor typo.
I apologize for lowering the S/N ratio. I'll try to keep my humorless musings to myself (starting right after this post, evidently).
Use of the words "good", "bad" or "evil" is almost invariably the result of oversimplification.
I'm impressed that they can do Full-HD on a screen with a resolution of 1024x600.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
I'm tired of the constant announcements, and no actual products.
Agreed. About a year and a half/two years ago (post Kindle, pre iPad) Plastic Logic (pre)announced a large format e-reader. It then took them until January of this year to announce the price (~$1000), and release date (this summer). Then when the release date rolled around, they announced "Sorry, but we've decided not to release after all. But wait for version 2.0! It's going to be even better!"
I'm not holding my breath.
Leave it to us to make up new scummy standards for the rest of the world to copy --kinda like "unlimited internet" turned out:
At least on websearches, netbooks are increasingly advertised with an "all day" batt life, while the description on the same page details it as 7 hours for the traveller. That fails on many counts:
a day is more than 300% of 7 hours
a workday is 7 to 8 hours, lunch not included --no room for a crafty "this is a *business* machine following a shorter day's quantification."
If I went to lunch, I would enjoy plugging my laptop to the lunchroom's WAP, but the laptop would not guarantee the power that would be stolen from my work.
I prefer more subtle advertisement lies to the ones that pretend the buyer's IQ is 0, since packaging lies imply dozens of invisible hardware lies... only in the US can sell a lie in ads if worded in loophole talk and defended by the lawyer-commercial conglomerates
Um no, your information is WRONG. The galaxy tab will be cheaper than the iPad.
'Our first moments with Windows 7 were surprisingly painless, too: we expected the Atom processor and 1GB of memory to be horrendously sluggish, but it wasn't the case,' PC Pro reports.
I'm not sure how "pro" I'd consider PC Pro if they had no clue that Windows 7 runs perfectly fine on all the 1GB Atom-based netbooks that are out there. This is something that people have been reporting success with for well over a year now, yet PC Pro is taken by surprise by it. And yes, I'm aware of the difference in form factor that we're dealing with here, but that doesn't change the fact that the underlying systems are essentially identical.
Oh good, some remembered the MeeGo option, I was surprised you Open-source buffs didn't pounce on this one immediately.
Check out the video, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EdNBTwHxWk, it's quite nice, and seeing it run Open Office give me great hope that it will not have to worry about the whole "does it have apps?" question, since it will most likely run all existing linux apps.
Details here: http://wetab.mobi/en/product-details
Amazon( http://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B003JFKUSK ) lists this as starting from EUR 449, though I would take that figure with a pinch of salt.
I am hoping a lot more companies seriously consider MeeGo, I kinda like it :D
I am an ACCA student. Got a query on Accountancy/Finance? Maybe I can help!
If they are flops, that means the iPad really is just coasting on the Apple name and fad-status for sales and probably doesn't represent the shape of the future. If they succeed, then I guess people really do want giant phones that are too big to stick in your pocket.
Everything I've seen about the Galaxy suggests that it will retail stateside for between 200 - 400 Euro. (max $519). If they somehow manage to bring it in at $400 (or even a little more), I'm pretty much there. I'd love a great competitor to Apple's iStuff.
the device is capable of Full HD playback
They must mean to an EXTERNAL display, because the display on the device is only capable of 600 pixels vertically, which is pretty far from 720p, much less the 1080p of 'full HD'.
If you put out a device that costs more and offers less, don't expect it to unseat anyone.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Everyone was complaining that the Ipad "is too big", so the competition seizes on that, and what happens... "It's not big enough!".
I swear, among slashdot nerds, 99% of them can never be pleased about anything.
I don't know what planet you live on that you can display 1080 full resolution dots using 600 pixels, or 1920 full resolutions dots using 1024 pixels, but given that the Samsung Galaxy Pad (10 inch version) has 1024x600 pixels, it's complete marketing BS to claim it can play "Full HD". It can't even do 720i/720p, let alone 1080. This is akin to the "1080p" stickers on every TV at the TV store, when all those LCD panels are 1366x768 at the absolutely biggest (and most are less than that). Yes, you can decode content that has that many dots in it. Yes, you may even have some nice hardware scalers and fancy perceptual algorithms for de-artifacting scaled images. But "Full HD"?? Time for a class action lawsuit, is what I say.
Oddly enough, people were suggesting that the price for the iPad would be $800 or $900
They were all saying $1k (my guess was $500 because it had to be $500 to sell).
But all those estimates were pure speculation, just based on what it might do and how much parts would cost - no-one had any idea if it would be running iOS or OS X, for example.
In the case of Samsung we know way more. We don't have price speculation, but instead a lot of pricing numbers from places like Amazon in various countries. Samsung is not aiming for the same level of secrecy Apple goes for, so these numbers are probably pretty accurate. We also know exactly what it does. , it runs Android.
Now my estimate on price for the Samsung tablet is on the low end- I think $800. That's based on the German pricing of £799, things in the U.S. seem to cost roughly the same as things overseas in Euros or Pounds.
Now in reality the Samsung will be cheaper for a lot of people because you can buy it with a contract. But I'm not sure how that will fly, people are used to phone contracts but a contract for something else may be excessive. It will be interesting to see if you get the same data plan flexibility as you do with an iPad.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'm going to be heading to Belgium soon on exchange, and so I've been looking into buying an auxiliary device that I can take with me traveling so that I don't have to bring my 7.5 lbs. beast of a laptop. The things that were most important to me were to have decent hardware and overall user experience (touchscreen responsiveness, etc.), the ability to make VoIP calls using Skype or SIP, and to have a decent terminal emulator and Unix-like subsystem (bash, ssh, vi, and GNU screen are most important for me). Ideally, it would also cost around $200 (I'm a student, after all).
What I found was that in order to install a Unix subsystem on an iOS or Android device, you need root access. And, rather than just giving you root access, for some reason all devices, including the Android ones, require you to jailbreak the device via some exploit in the OS. I was expecting this of Apple devices (and I'm still waiting for the jailbreak for iOS 4.1, which should be any day now), but somehow I thought that Android devices would be more "open" or something because they are running Linux. But in fact, they are often, in effect, even more locked down than the Apple devices, as there is not a dedicated team of hackers searching for exploits, and so jailbreak techniques may not exist. For example, this is the case for the new Archos internet tablets, which at this moment may not be jailbroken.
It dawned on me that this was the difference between old-school PDAs (remember those?), and these new handheld iOS and Android devices. With PDAs, I think it was unquestionable that you would have administrator rights on your device. Why? Because they were seen as personal computers that incidentally could also fit in your pocket. Somehow, the expectation of these new devices is not the same - they are seen as phones or media players instead - and for that reason, it is seen as acceptable to lock them down, restricting what the user can do with them. This shift in the expectation of the manufacturer regarding what the user may do with their device seems to have happened very quickly and quietly, perhaps commencing with the release of the iPhone, and it's something that I'm only beginning to grasp now. This is not something that anyone seems to be talking about, however.
Unfortunately, this is a complete deal-breaker for me. I won't be able to buy an Android device until it comes with root access out of the box.
That's actually one of the main features I'm looking forward to in "Gingerbread": bluetooth keyboard support. Touchscreen seems to be good enough for basic usage, but a real keyboard (for me) is necessary to do any substantial amount of text input in any form. Being able to pull out a "real" (small) keyboard when necessary will be nice.
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
Shouldn't that be 'no such file or directory' since you're redirecting stdin?
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Have you looked at the iPod touch?
...that what they are doing is not "realistic". Then maybe they'll stop watching those movies on those small screens.
Seriously, many, many people have no problem watching shows on the small screens. You do obviously, but you are not the millions that do.
Why do you think that preferring the iOS over Android by a dominant margin is unreasonable?