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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."
you're kidding right? Have you been hearing all the issues early adopters have been having with getting their Android devices updated? I'm no iToy supporter by any means, but Android is much more fragmented than iOS, both in hardware and software.
Pardon? Are you serious?
It's hard to name android devices that even got the bump from 1.6 to 2.0, hell, 90% of them don't even get *minor* OS version updates from the one they started on, there are still plenty of 1.5/2.0/2.1 devices out there for exactly that reason.
Compare this against iOS devices that are guarenteed to get 2 major OS updates and all minor ones for those major versions. Sure, some functionality is disabled in the newer OSes, but that's typically because the older hardware can't deal with it (e.g. old 3G iPhones with a measly 128MB of RAM and multitasking).
Basically, you're comparing being at the mercy of {motarola | samsung | ...} to get OS updates (hahahahaha), against a guarentee written into the EULA that you'll get upgrades. I know which I consider to be the non-issue of those two ;).
Very much so. It's amazing to see what a terrible job is being made, when really, there isn't a mad pressure on to come out with something that quickly. /does/ get something close to a decent competitor to the iPad, they either disable half the functionality in a market (no voice calling on the Galaxy Tab), or throw a bunch of carrier specific nonsense on (Verizon/AT&T), or disable simple features like sideloading apps/hotspot functionality.
We saw Android Tablets before the iPad was even officially announced, and a year and a half later, we're still seeing those same lousy specs being produced.
And when someone
Really looks like they're trying hard to fail.
They're pushing the Android Tablets with comms functionality when it appears /most/ customers would be happy with wireless and stock Android. Now, considering they're getting the fees for 2 years, how they justify a HIGHER cost than without that cost is... mad.
I keep waiting for a decent Android Tablet, only to be disappointed by /someone/ (and yeah, the telco's point to the hardware supplier, and the hardware suppliers point to the telcos. Android's getting out there because Google's backing off, but they really need to start throwing their weight around, perhaps that 'Approved by Google' stamp for stock Android?
Waiting for an amusing sig.
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.