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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."
If you can't match the quality of a competitor that launched eight months before you, then you probably rushed the thing. (Yes, it is an oversimplification, but it's also hard to excuse a latecomer that offers little to recommend it over the Other Guy's first-generation product.)
If you can't convince them, convict them.
Are you joking? Don't get me wrong, I love Android and custom ROMs, precisely because with the right hardware I can enjoy all the newest features of Android for a long time to come, but pretending the situation with official updates is anything other than abysmal is, well, insane.
Froyo: HTC has updated most of their devices. Samsung is halfheartedly lagging behind, and Motorola, well, they've updated like one device (the original Droid), while deliberately sabotaging any chance other handsets had at home-cooked updates by locking up their bootloaders.
Gingerbread: Nothing to see here, folks. Even the Nexus One hasn't been upgraded yet, and I'm guessing most Nexus One owners are pretty pissed about that, what with having expected to buy a device that would be a supported Android dev phone for a few years (let's say two).
Sure, I'm enjoying Gingerbread (CyanogenMod 7 nightly builds) on my Desire right now, and I'm sure Honeycomb will be along soon, but Joe Sixpack is up shit creek... and outdated smartphones don't make great paddles.
The problem with this kind of "support" is that you are relying on the hardware being picked up by the community and developed for. What happens when your hardware isn't picked up by the community and the maker decides to EOL it before the contract ends? Or it ends up like the Motorola or Sony handsets where trying to root it is all but impossible?
Android tabs are a bit of a joke at the moment, and I'm advising all of my friends keen to get one to wait until their favourite flavour of manufacturer has Honeycomb tabs. Otherwise you're gambling on a possible update by the community should the manufacturer EOL it.
I was keen to get an Android tab mid last year, but there was nothing about. I got an iPad and have been pleased with my purchase. Sure, it didn't come with os 4.X, but it has it now and I know apple aren't going to drop support for the iPad when the iPad 2 comes out. Just as my iPhone 3G didn't lose support when the 3GS or the 4 came out.
This is something I have to explain to customers when we do mobile development, especially explaining our pricing for Android. We only give QA on the Nexus One/(now S). Each additional handset costs extra and typically most will want QA against Droid(Verizon), HTC Evo(Sprint), and Samsung (AT&T/T-Mobile). That makes the Android platform usually between 3 to 5 times the cost to develop for iPhone/iPod. Usually we treat the iPad as a separate device just as we'll treat these new tablets running Android as each being a different "platform".
Last year we tried to treat "Android" as a platform, but we ended up losing money on that side of the business because every time we turned around there were a half dozen new handsets and a new OS version to deal with.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.