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Android Tablets Were Born Too Soon
adeelarshad82 writes "When you look at the Apple iPad's sales figures, it's not hard to see why every technology company on the planet is jumping on the tablet bandwagon, a lot of which are Android tablets. Unfortunately though, some of these Android tablets were born way too early. They are haunted with a series of problems including flimsy hardware, low-quality resistive touch screens, serious display resolution issues, and old Android versions with limited or non-existent access to apps. Even the Samsung Galaxy Tab came well before its time. Even though it's fast, well-designed, and comes with a decent Android implementation, its functionality is limited to that of an Android smartphone. So here's to hoping that Honeycomb's functionality make up for the lost ground."
Are you joking? Look at the situation of android phones vs iphones. Iphones are getting updates the android phones are not doing very well in that regard.
Samsung's Galaxy Tab sold well with a small return rate
16%? A small return rate? o.O. Compare this to other devices in the same sector having a 2% return rate. No, I don't think this is a small return rate at all.
Compare this to other devices in the same sector having a 2% return rate.
You were saying,
It's best to check your sources, rather than believing every rumour on the internet.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
A single accidental homonym in a post made at 1:30 in the morning? Thank you for the correction, but honestly I feel no shame.
Apple re-wrote the built in apps to take advantage of the increased screen size. Android won't do that until Honeycomb comes out.
No offense, but if you ever TRIED using an iPhone 3G with iOS4, you'll quickly find out that Apple would have been better off cutting off upgrades for that device at version 3.
The interface goes from being perfectly usable to damn slow, and applications running on the phone constantly run out of memory and crash.
That's like saying 90% of iphones are running IOS 2.0 and greater.
2.1 was released 2 years ago.
2.3 was released last year and yet the majority of android handsets sold right now are with 2.2 and 2.1
When Apple releases it appears in the delivery channels with in a month.
At best Android handsets are 6-9 months behind google with most handsets running 12-18 months behind, If they ever get updates at all.
That is the android problem. Maybe when the phone features stabilize a bit more in 2-3 years will it be less of an issue, but right now it is a bloody mess.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
> I own a Galaxy S and since the Nexus S is basically the same phone
If your Galaxy S is GSM and you don't use T-Mobile 4G, you're mostly right. If your Galaxy S is CDMA, and particularly an Epic4G, you're mostly fucked.
The loadable kernel modules are what will kill you. Linux doesn't have a stable ABI, which means that drivers (.ko modules) compiled for an older kernel won't necessarily (read: won't) work on a newer kernel (think Win98->WinXP, but worse... like being unable to use a driver made for XP Pro/32 under Vista Business/32. Officially, the Linux kernel could break binary compatibility over the equivalent of going from XPsp1 to XPsp2. Samsung gets partial credit for releasing drivers as proper loadable kernel modules (so they can at least be used with recompiled versions of the same kernel), but source-wise, their drivers are as bad as HTC's -- they aren't directly buildable because they have unsatisfied dependencies. The difference is that HTC at least releases new kernels in a timely manner, so the community can grab them and move forward instead of being stalled for 6 months waiting for 4G drivers that work on a 2.6.32 kernel (needed for Froyo) to metaphorically fall from the sky.
All we ask is for Samsung to at least practice benign neglect and say, "Look, bitch to Sprint if you want an official 2.2 upgrade, but in the meantime, here's a zipfile of everything proprietary that you can't compile yourself, recompiled against 2.6.32. Same drivers, same bugs, but automatically rebuilt for 2.6.32's ABI. Have fun."
Of course, Samsung won't do that, because it would mean that by the time the official carrier upgrade makes it out (if ever), it would be *totally* eclipsed by community builds that do more with fewer bugs (because the community versions would have a real-world 4-6 month head start, and several orders of magnitude more hours of developer time behind them). The truth is, though, the carriers would actually have a reasonable excuse to give less technical end users who complained about having to wait: "Our upgrade doesn't make you blow away everything and start over from scratch every time. It lets you upgrade in-place, and should be relatively seamless." Diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks.