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Why Google Isn't Pushing Android For Tablets
Brad Linder of Liliputing posted an interesting analysis today about Google's reluctance to endorse Android for tablets. Linder argues that while there may be legitimate concern that Android just isn't polished enough for devices without phone access (because some apps need it), it would be smart for Google to segregate the apps themselves, so users can simply know which apps will work on Wi-Fi-only tablets. But from Google's perspective, he observes, "pushing a version of Android that isn't exclusively for phones could be all it takes for Chrome OS to be dead on arrival."
I don't think this is the case considering Motorola is expected to launch a tablet-ready android tablet this year. (And so is Acer too, according to rumors)
ChromeOS will probably ship on tablets AND on netbooks, while Android will probably only ship on tablets. (at least officially, since there are already some netbooks running android)
I don't think Google will want to let everyone down releasing non-optimized android versions for tablets, which would only genererate fragmentation (that magical word again) as far as tablet-specific implementation is concerned.
Also, why wait even more when their competition (Apple) is already singing the infamous "Its printing money!" song?
I expect them to release a tablet-friendly Android version this year so everyone can start working on top of that new "standard". (i.e. they want to set the standard so Android doesn't end up having 100 tablet implementations)
Who knows if that will be Gingerbread or Honeycomb...
Someone remind me, what is the point of ChromeOS after all? Because I can't see any.
An actual OS can run a browser, and, in addition, any other program. Having an OS that's an one-trick pony seems to be useless to me here. For flight controllers, that can be good. For non-embedded computers, big or small, not so.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
I use my Android constantly with airplane mode turned on and wifi turned back on since the cdma radio is such a hog. I never run into any app that doesn't work as expected based on this setup.
My Babylon
With Chrome, you can focus all your attention on ads without being distracted with other software.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
As TFA explains:
Google Chrome OS, which is basically an OS built around a web browser. Instead of downloaded apps, it will run web apps, although we expect there to be some offline caching capabilities which should let you do things like read eBooks or watch videos even when an internet connection isn’t handy.
I agree with the author that this is a bad idea:
Don’t forget, when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, it didn’t have native apps either. He insisted that the development platform for the iPhone was the web, and the phone was designed primarily to run web apps. Today, there are over 250,000 native apps available in the App Store because, let’s face it, web apps just aren’t always going to do the job.
I don't know how much info is in the wild about Chrome OS, so maybe it'll have some wiz bang features that will rule, but I doubt it. Having two operating systems where one will certainly do just doesn't sound like a good idea -- especially when one is out, the other isn't, and the unreleased one is built around a questionable concept.
I would consider a Chrome OS that runs Android apps to be basically a merger of the two. At least it is a merger from the point of view of being a platform.
Whether or not ChromeOS is better than Android at this point is largely academic. Android is here, now and (arguably) ready for mass consumption. ChomeOS isn't. It's a shame, and it would suck to jettison all of that work put into ChromeOS, but it's just too late to the party at this point. People are already packing up and heading out to the retail store with Android and diluting the development of Android to push ChromeOS out to market a day late and dollar short does a disservice to both platforms.
They need to retool their Chrome developers to start making Android more tablet friendly and rolling the most positive features of Chrome into Android.
The netbook market is largely static and is likely to self implode or at the very least be rolled into the ultralight laptop market. I mean, really the current generation of Netbooks are really just small laptops; calling them netbooks is paying lip service to the netbook form factor only - a 12" screen really isn't a netbook anymore and people have largely figured out that anything smaller really isn't useful for much in laptop form - but it is in tablet form. So the netbook market is all but gone as separate entity. Where does that leave ChromeOS? Pretty much nowhere. It has no real platform and it is too late to the party to do much of anything.
Meh... I'd really like to see it rolled into Android, that's really the smartest move at this point.
Android was designed from the beginning to fight with guys like RIM and Microsoft, and to a lesser extent, Palm.
I don't know which "beginning" you are referring to, but Android was released on the market to compete against what was at the time iPhone OS.
iOS on the other hand, was inteded for a tablet style device.
No, it was iPhone OS before it was iOS.
Also, with the advanced operating systems today, such as iOS and Android, it doesn't matter what their original release device or the intended device was. They are both equally flexible enough to be adjusted to and support multiple different resolutions, architectures, and other hardware.
What makes more sense is that Android started gaining traction at a much higher rate than Google initially anticipated. So, Android may be stepping into Chrome OS territory with tablets. However, Google still wants to give Chrome OS a legitimate shot. Maybe they think they can repeat what they did with Android. I think it's going to be hard.
pardon? This from the guys that literally double the dimensions of the iPhone's apps just to run on the tablet? This from the guys that didn't and still don't multi-task on these devices? Designed for Tablet computing? What are you smoking?
Android isn't designed for Tablet either to be fair. Both platforms had a very small profile and screen requirement. IOS's GUI core was enhanced to include another GUI profile target. There's nothing specifically brilliant about IOS that makes it a tablet user's wet dream besides the fact that it already had touch as its primary interface (admittedly this is one of the primary reasons that previous tablet computing initiatives died out quickly).
Bye!
Well ChromeOS is not really an OS so much as an Idea..
From Google's perspective, the underlying linux is not really relevant, what they are pushing is the idea that you can live entirely within the walls of Chrome (the browser) and the underlying OS does not matter.. this in contrast to Android which is far more tightly coupled with the underlying Linux based mini-distro (you couldn't just port the user facing front end to say .. windows mobile or iOS or blackberry and call it a day)
Now that we have an MS fuckwit running Nokia, I don't really care what runs on phones or tablets. The available choices all require giving up my right to make choices, period. The whole smartphone tablet space really really fucking sucks.
Your opinion is as valid as anyone else's - but I think it's pretty obvious most people couldn't care less about, as you call it, "giving up my right to make choices". Thing is, most people don't seem to see anything problematic about Apple's walled garden or with any limitations Google might put on their marketplace. They just care that it's easy to grab the Facebook app.
#DeleteChrome
Read this in an interview with Jobs. They basically made an iPad prototype and Jobs said, "let's make a phone out of this". So they did.
No, internally from the ground up it started as an unreleased Tablet OS
http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/01/steve-jobs-at-d-iphone-os-started-on-a-tablet/
Jobs was just never happy with battery performance and other tablet problems... Then they figured out that they could start out even smaller with a phone and do a good job...
EA David Gardner -"... but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun."
iOS on the other hand, was inteded for a tablet style device.
No, it was iPhone OS before it was iOS.
If you dig a little further, you will learn that the iPad came first in Apple's R&D pipeline. They had to wait for some reason, and so they made the iPhone in the interim. If you've used the iOS SDK, it becomes pretty clear that it is not something that Apple just shoved out the door in 12 or 18 months or whatever it was. It's obvious that it had already had years of effort put into it. Perhaps the SDK was indeed intended only for iPad, and they rushed it out for iPhone due to popular demand, or perhaps it was a parallel effort. But it's not something Apple just cobbled together and shoved out the door and later updated to work with iPad. iOS was built for a tablet device from the beginning, IMO.
Also, with the advanced operating systems today, such as iOS and Android, it doesn't matter what their original release device or the intended device was. They are both equally flexible enough to be adjusted to and support multiple different resolutions, architectures, and other hardware.
The wildcard here is device and OS compatibility, which Apple obviously had thought through pretty well. While Android seems to just march forward ignoring it, creating a challenge for app developers. I don't have an Android device, but it is my understanding that it needs to be a phone to use their app marketplace, e.g. I'm not an Android dev, either, but from the sidelines, it looks like they just keep making things tougher for devs as time goes on. Not as bad as Rim or others, but not nearly as nice as iOS. My money is on the fact that the next revision of iPad will work with 99.999% of the apps out there. I'm not sure you could say the same for an Android tablet. Correct me if I'm wrong...
There aint no pancake so thin it doesn't have two sides.
not just that, but Google TV is based on... Android. I guess all TVs will have to come with cameras and GPS too :)
Ars Technica has a article about it, they say that Google gives out varying answers depending who you talk to.
One one hand, we have a radically new set-top form factor that will supposedly run Android applications, and on the other hand, we have a Google product director saying that Android isn't a good fit for non-smartphone devices and that those devices may pose insurmountable application compatibility challenges in some cases.
I reckon this will quickly be a non-story in the end. Someone from Google will provide the necessary foot to the bum of the marketing department and all will be well.
The official android market is dependent on a sim card. Even a phone wont work unless it has a sim card in it. The trick that Archos did with their tablets is they have their own market for apps that work with tablets. Android market could detect apps that assume its a phone (in fact it does now, see the permissions system) and just not display those apps for tablets. The problem has more to do with the Android team is not confident because they have not set up the CTS stuff for tablets. That's ChromeOS's realm. The CTS stuff however is set up for Google TV already. It probably would not be too much work for them to be confident in Android's ability on tablets, they just haven't invested the time/money in it.
I see you got the talking point memo Jobs put out this week.
Put identity in the browser.
iOS 4 updates for iPad have been delayed multiple times.
They have? In July, Jobs said the iPad would get it iOS 4 "in the Fall," and at the beginning of this month he said November.
Doesn't look like it's been delayed to me, looks like it's right on track.
~Philly
I've yet to discover an android app that's incompatible with my phone.
Maybe that's because the Galaxy S has a superset of currently available features - but as far as my experience with a user goes, I don't care. All I know is I haven't seen personal evidence of the much talked about fragmentation and incompatibility.
Unlike my previous experiences with J2ME, where pretty much no applications ever worked with my phone, no matter which manufacturer it was from, or if they did work, they were very clunky (like not taking advantage of a touch screen)
Advanced users are users too!
Isn't Chrome OS already dead on arrival?
I don't think you realize how well the Commodore 64 actually sold....
Never understood this myself. Android works, and works well. Sure Chrome will be great, but can't they get the Chrome browser in Android? Then get the best of both worlds. More online apps running in a browser, and Android apps to cover everything else. To turn away people wanting to use your products, making them harder to use, seems an odd path to go down..
Chrome is targeted at devices with one to two orders of magnitude more RAM, flash storage, and network bandwidth than a typical Android device. Chrome assumes you have a mouse and keyboard, Android does not. Naturally the designs will differ. A few examples:
* Chrome renders web pages in separate processes, and sandboxes the renderers to make malware harder to write. A desktop PC is fast enough that the slight performance penalty and increase in RAM used is worth the extra security. On a cell phone with a slower processor and much less RAM, users will complain about the browser being too slow.
* Chrome's Javascript engine does some impressive work to go fast including JIT compilation and caching class layouts in memory. Nice if you have a fast CPU and lots of memory. Not so nice on a low memory device.
I once read a an article complaining about Microsoft's decision to release three different versions of Windows: NT, Windows 98, and Windows CE. Somehow the author did not grasp that the right way to implement an OS for a PDA might not be the right way for a server. Were you the author of that article?
I expect that Google will release Chrome for Android. They do tend to give users what they ask for. However, if you take Chrome and remove the RAM hungry multi-process architecture, the power hungry Javascript engine, and all the other parts that make no sense on a slow, low memory, power-constrained device, you will be left with something that is not substantially different that the Android browser they have now. So they will change the icon. And when they do, I expect 100+ comments on the slashdot article saying how lame it was that they did this.
Google went out of their way to communicate the great technical work that went in to Chrome to laymen. A normal company would have submitted an article to IEEE Spectrum or ACM Queue. They had a comic book made that a 15 year old could understand: http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/ . But even the people on slashdot don't see why you can't write one platform that makes the right tradeoffs on every piece of hardware out there. Sad.
Unless your Android app is specific to some telephone thing, like SMS or a dialer, that app is going to be just fine on a tablet without phone features or even service. WiFi will do.
Really, let's go down the list of apps on my Android phone:
The Google Stuff: Calendar, Calculator, Amazon MP3, Camera, Contacts, Email, Gmail, Clock, Gallery, Google Search, Maps, Latitude, News & Weather, Navigator, Places, Talk, YouTube. None of these need phone service, they are happy with WiFi or nothing at all.
Android Market likes to have your SIM I think to validate ya. OK, ONE.
Messaging, of course, likes SMS. That's TWO.
Phone, obviously, THREE.
Oh darn, Mobile Backup. Oh, FOUR.
Other Apps: AppMonster, Terminal, World, AK Notepad, Astro Player, Barcode Scanner, AndroZip, Barcode Scanner, Bonsai Blast, Browser, Classic Tetris, Craigslist, CraigsNotifier, eBay, Facebook, GPS Status, Music, Pandora, SetCPU, Superuser, Twitter, WiFi Analyzer, World.
None of these need phone anything. WiFi will do where needed.
Out of 44 apps on my phone (not counting some very, very obviously non-phone-dependent one I haven't listed), only 4 need or just use phone service.
Reality check. The many Android apps that want phone permissions just want them to screw with your contacts or to check the phone state. Woop.
It's not at ALL about Android needing a phone. It's about Android being more suited to small screens and small machines (minimal RAM and lesser CPUS), and Chrome pointed directly at the desktop and netbook/notebook markets. More exactly, pointed directly at Microsoft.
Fracturing a market with Android and Chrome competing for share doesn't work for Google, so they will try to avoid it. It's just that Chrome is not as ready as Android is, and Android will have to keep itself lean to be workable on smartphones.
Of course, ARM is working on giving smartphones the power that netbooks have, and Intel is growing the Atom line up and the Duo line down to crush AMD's hopes in emerging markets.
It's actually not a bad strategy to be competing with yourself. IBM gave that a go in the 80s and 90s.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
50M+?
More like 5M+. They're making between 2 & 3 M a month now.
But they'll hit 17M easily by next year. And probably another 17M the year after.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Holy cow! Someone gets it!!
If Android users already have an Android phone (and a monthly bill to go along with it) what sense would it make from a consumer standpoint to have an additional monthly bill for an ancillary device?
Tether the damn tablet to another connection and be done with it. It's not difficult.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
November is very definitely Winter...Steve needs to learn his Irish Calendar before making promises that will be listened to Worldwide
Hi, southern hemisphere here. We'd like a word about your concept of "worldwide"...
Blank until
Well Captain Donut Hole, I'm going to go out on a wild and wacky limb here with a guess that by "beginning" he means Android's inception, which took place prior to Google acquiring it. And since that day, up until Eric "the snake" Schmidt was blessed with his great idea to shoehorn Android behind a touchscreen, the form factor for which Android was designed was definitely NOT a touchscreen. Here's the original turd:http://tiny.cc/2041u And their long-term strategy:http://tiny.cc/paid_search_is_all_we_do So far as iOs is concerned, Apple had conceived and was planning the iPad BEFORE the iPhone became an idea. So by saying that iOs was designed for a tablet form factor is DEAD ON.http://tiny.cc/ynsy3 Dumb-dumbs should never even pretend to be smartasses.
You do understand that cdma phones have their equivalent of a sim card built in right?
Well one of the points is that, by having your computer run only a single programme (with 99% of everything else being a webservice), it should be able to run very smoothly on low-powered devices.
Not that I really agree with this. The big resource hogs these days are HD video, games and picture editing- none of which are helped much by running over a network.
Not only that, but it feels like it has missed the boat. Android is already taking care of the pocket-computing (these days- smartphone) niche, and the netbook market has already reached a sort of equilibrium with Windows and Linux versions covering all bases. If ChromeOS had launched 2 years ago it could have stood a chance of establishing itself as a market player. Now though?
It actually really worries me that you had to post this reply. Have we really reached the point where people have forgotten that you can buy things from hardware shops? Do people now really believe that hardware must always be dealt with through a carrier, who owns the device over you?
I feel like I should blame somebody for this. I want to say Apple, but that might just be habit.
Oh well they lost a potential android user here. I've waited for months to have an android tablet but even if you ignore the shoddy hardware sometimes, it is hard to overlook the fact that the App Store is something problematic. Because of the fact that Google don't give access to the app store every frikking manufacture introduces their own. And even in the hypothetical case that Google does let tablet users access the app store here in Belgium it wouldn mean sh*t as for some kind of reason it is impossible to buy paid apps in the android market. It is one big mess at the moment no matter how you put it. I was done waiting and bought an iPad yesterday. The Samsung Galaxy Tab (the one that can make a dent in the iPad market) will cost about 700 euro here , making the iPad look dirt cheap.
Don't forget your anti-virus and spamware programs.
Of course - you can have a small-footprint OS without the annoyances of other software LOADING. Your OS can start in 5 seconds. You'll rule the world. You can run everything in the cloud nowadays, and on your own personal cloud, too, like Bibud are trying to do, just more socially. I wouldn't say I needed my audio/video players, my torrent downloaders, my skype, my anything else when that thing is finished. It's just all on a cloud, running wherever you want it to run (not excluding just your own PC). And with the introduction of WebGL, games are moving to the browser. You don't have to have a cloud, but it's there if you want it.
ChromeOS as far as I can judge from what I have seen on the pictures and the emulation is pointless for tablets the entire ui is centered around a mouse and a smallish screen estate. Trying to push chromeOS on a tablet would be a huge mistake. I personally dont think google is that stupid, and I beliefe their arguments the OS simply needs a tablet refinement to work fine. Heck apple did the same for iOS on the ipad, you need to change the aspects of various distances, better even introduce resolution independence, you have to ajust the layout system of the apps so that they can use the bigger real estate better than just presenting themselves blown up (the classical example is the mail menu system on the iPad)
and you also have to adjust the market apps decently.
I would be surprised if google would come up with ChromeOS as solution for Tablets, I rather expect a Gingerbread reference design given first to the Google Employees on christmas with decent Android based tablets following the upcoming months from HTC and co.
People with iPads do the same thing. Personally I like those mobile MyFi type devices like Virgin Mobile sells. This way I can just purchase 3G access when I really need it and not have a data plan stuck on my phone.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
The major design decision of ChromeOS was to make it secure even when used casually. It's unfortunately hidden in the press releases and security documents of the ChromeOS project page. The idea is that you can lend or borrow a netbook and not have to worry about keyloggers getting installed or your friend later viewing your private data. To achieve this goal, Google requires a TPM chip installed on the netbook so that a user can easily tell that the OS is unmodified, and the OS is stateless (modulo careful caching). This design is what makes ChromeOS so difficult to reconcile with Android, which is a single-user OS for very personal devices.
I hope that ChromeOS becomes successful because I do care about securely sharing computers, but if not enough other people care about this use case (or even understand the security concerns), then I can see how it may fail in the market.