Slashdot Mirror
Why Are There So Few Honeycomb Apps?
Fudge Factor 3000 writes "PC World's Brent Rose investigates the reason behind the dearth of Honeycomb apps even though the OS was released in February with the release of the Xoom. One would have expected an explosion of Android tablet apps like that seen with the iPad but the Honeycomb-optimized apps remain in the low hundreds. The answer, it turns out, is not that simple. The main contributing factors appear to be the low demand for Honeycomb tablets and the difficulty in discovering Honeycomb-optimized apps in the Market. Hopefully, this will be rectified in the near future."
...and platform fragmentation, perhaps?
How many are waiting until Google gets it act together with Honeycomb and comes out with Ice Cream Sandwich?
How many just don't have Honeycomb devices?
How many are protesting that there has been no Honeycomb source release by Google?
How many Honeycomb apps were expected?
Google does and can not force honeycomb actively onto the devices. Right now the majority of devices is not Honeycomb. So i would not program for Honeycomb. I am not even sure i would test on Honeycomb. The facilities which pre-Honeycomb Android offers are quite enough for nearly all application i can imagine.
And if we talk about "tablet-specific" well there are application which make use of the older tablets.
The main contributing factors appear to be the low demand for Honeycomb tablets and the difficulty in discovering Honeycomb-optimized apps in the Market. Hopefully, this will be rectified in the near future.
Seems simple to me. I went to Best Buy this weekend, and the number of competing, often incompatible tablets, is enough to drive someone to give up and just buy an iPad. Not only the Xoom and the Galaxy tab, but also HP's latest webOS tab, and Blackberry's Playbook, and a number of other random ones. It was hard to figure out (especially standing in the store) what the differences were. I can easily see why someone would go for the iPad after seeing all that, since it has some name recognition.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
If you look at past responses on Slashdot, many here seem fine with UI that is simply scaled up to whatever size screen is presented.
Apple made a case to developers that the UI should be re-thought for something the size of a tablet - a sentiment I agree with. The iPhone supports just as many auto-scaling abilities as does Android, but the simply truth is that something the size of an iPad cries out for a different UI layout, not just windows that grow larger. You hold a tablet differently than a phone for one thing, so control positions should be re-thought. Having a whole screen slide over ala a navigation controller on an iPhone makes no sense on something with a huge screen, or at least looks goofy.
So while I really think the number of Android tablet apps is underestimated because of the number of applications that properly support scaling, the average quality is quite low because of the lack of developers willing to totally re-think the UI for a tablet form factor.
I think the intermediate 7" tablets really muddy the water. If that's the only "tablet" you had simply having a UI autoscale would probably seem sufficient.
If HP can improve WebOS performance in time on their own tablet, they might actually be able to out-do Android on tablet sales!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's a waste of time, money and effort writing apps for the handful of people with honeycomb devices.
If honeycomb had been released for all Android devices capable of running it rather then Google admitting that it is such a hack that they won't even release the source there might be the numbers and confidence behind it - but as it stands people are just waiting for it to be done properly in Ice Cream Sandwich.
Google succeeded in fragmenting Android even more.
This seems like the worlds longest circular argument. The iPad had similar problems when it was released, but people bought it despite not knowing what the killer app was and because people bought it developers developed for it.
There are no Honeycomb apps, because there is a lack of Honeycomb tablets in the market. I don't know a single person with one, yet every second friend has an iPad regardless if they have a iPhone or an Android phone.
People aren't buying the tablets because reviews are negative usually always on account of a lack of apps for it.
And round we go again.
... just wait till your app is out in the wild, trying to run on dozens of very different devices. It aint pretty.
I posted almost 6 months ago complaining about searching in the market app. In the meantime, none of my complaints have been addressed. Given that Google is still primarily a search engine with a bunch of OSs, browsers, apps and features designed to steer people towards their search engine, I would have expected them to implement a better Market app.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2042754&cid=35526684
My final point still stands. Google does not want users to be able to easily differentiate between poor apps and high quality apps since they still won't allow you to sort results by number of downloads, rating, and a few other criteria I can think of. In the case of honeycomb I guess it's working against them.
Android has been written from the ground up to support different resolutions / dpi. There is no need to write "honeycomb" specific UIs, because well written apps would have already moved things around for a higher resolution, lower DPI screen. Honeycomb brought "fragments" (reusable parts of the UI) to make it easier for developers to switch between screen types, and "Renderscript" (easier to make fancy looking UI)
Most of the apps that I use on my phone work well on a 10" screen, and some even reformat themselves (adding a side bar with commonly used controls, etc.). There are a few crappy apps that decide to use fixed pixel coordinates so they don't work (they are either uninstalled, or I email the dev about it and they fix it).
Factoring the above in: why would you reprogram to use HC when your app is already doing the same thing? That's why most of the HC apps are *NEW* apps taking advantage of fragments, etc., and not ones that have been scrapped and redesigned for HC. If you use HC features, you need to use reflection / second code path for Gingerbread / non-tablet devices support -- adding extra work.
Apps for the i-series devices had NO provision for higher resolution displays (most were using 320x480 or whatever the original res is), and therefore must have applications rewritten to take advantage of higher resolutions (blowing up 320x480 @ 3.5" to 1024x768 @ 10" = blur city. 800x480+ @ 4" to 10" is ok). Your options as a dev were either: your app looks like garbage (and therefore lower ratings), or your rewrite it (and count towards the "number of tablet apps").
TL;DR: Good Android apps already support higher res / lower DPI tablets without needing to depend on Honeycomb specific features. As such, it doesn't count towards "honeycomb apps".
Just last week, I went shopping for an Android Tablet (in Central Europe). The only Specs it needed to fulfill was to be on Honeycomb and to have UMTS onboard. And I wanted to have Hands-on-Test
I've been to over 20 shops and the only Tablets i found were the first Samsung Galaxy Tab - UMTS but no Honeycomb, one by Acer, no UMTS and an Archos tablet which had neither of my requirements.
Guess I'll have to wait until Samsung and Asus release their new tablets and hope, they actually hit the shelves.
The Honeycomb tablets currently in the market are expensive, many even more expensive than an iPad and yet less polished.
Trying to break into a market against a well-established player, when your product is more expensive, has less marketing and is lower in quality isn't going to work
I myself have some really nice ideas for Honeycomb, tablet optimized apps but am holding off from developing them until the platform gets some traction.
It might very well be that Honeycomb is this beautiful, hard-working, honey-making bee of the mobile OS world, but if hardware makers persist in sticking it on top of turds and hopping it sells, Apple is going to dominate the tablet market for the next 20 years.
Almost all applications that run on 2.x also run on 3.0 because it's the same JVM.
Apple used the same trick with the Ipad by including the number of Ipod applications that would run on the Ipad without modification. Why does Google not get this free ride.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
I went to Best Buy and on display were the Xoom, the new Galaxy Tab 10.1, and the iPad 2.
Scrolling around, web browsing, and other things, the 2 android tabs were choppy. iPad was smooth as silk.
Looking at the shell, the 2 android tabs have a lot going on. That's confusing. iPad is just a bunch of icons, but I get it.
The iPad 2 was way nicer to hold than the Xoom, though the Galaxy was, IMO, the iPad's equal in this regard.
Overall, the iPad 2 just feels like a refined device, and the Android tabs feel like, well, a Microsoft solution.
iPad 2 wins, and therefore gets the developers.
Perhaps they're obscured from view... in some sort of "Hideout" for Honeycomb-related things.
Its not like google lacks cash.
Why not just commission say 500 apps at 10k each to jumpstart the eco system?
The market issue is unbelievable esp for as company specialised in search
> Can we please stop to give stupid nick names for software projects?
But then I couldn't talk about us needing an Ice Cream Sandwich strategy...
I would guess the majority of Android developers do not own a Honeycomb device. That would mean the emulator should be good. But on its default settings, the emulator is very, very slow. Google "honeycomb emulator" and the top results will mostly be about its slowness. Someone recommended I increase its memory, and that did help out a bit, it's still slow but at least usable.
One of my apps has less than 1% Honeycomb usage, so it is not big on my radar screen. I recently noticed another has over 7% - my app that lets people iterate and search Microsoft Access databases on an Android phone. It's the only reason I revisited the dog-slow emulator and tried the increased memory trick. I saw my app was displaying correctly with Android 3.0, and was displaying correctly on the larger tablet-sized screen. So the primary concern went away - everything worked. I then looked to see if I could improve things for the tablet, and I saw I could, but have not implemented it yet.
There are really two things here with Honeycomb and tablets. One is the OS version. The other is the screen size. With 2.3 and less you usually have smaller screens, Honeycomb often has larger screen sizes. My concerns tend more to be toward dealing with the larger screen sizes properly than implementing some of the neat whiz-bang 3.0 features.
So I think some assertions that are being made about Honeycomb are a bit off-base. If I saw my app displayed poorly on a tablet-sized Honeycomb device, I probably would have fixed it and sent an update out already. It may not be Honeycomb-optimized, but at least I made sure it is Honeycomb compatible. Also, even if I do make those changes that make use of the extra screen space on the typical larger Honeycomb tablet, I don't have an intention at this time of specially marking the app as Honeycomb-optimized. So it still wouldn't count in these surveys, even if I did optimize it for Honeycomb.
For my two existing apps, as well as others I am working on, most of what I think about with tablets is using all that screen space, which is not connected to Honeycomb (version 3 over version 2) per se. That is what most Android app developers will be thinking about more than whatever new features are in 3.1 over 2.3, in my opinion. Honestly, I am currently more engaged with limitations the Android OS has rather than cool new whiz-bang features. For example, there is a 16 bit (i.e. 65536) sized identifier for dex files which I have recently bumped up against. Which you wouldn't easily know about, since their error message for it is pretty vague once you bump into it. I'm more focused on banging my head against this wall right now than the new animation features in 3.0. But different people are focused on different things.
Spoken like yet another "I have never used a tablet" sourpuss, replaying the same broken record about the glories of netbooks. But the net is flowing over with stories of people who have found that once they got one, the uses and benefits became apparent.
A netbook lacks a touch screen, and is uncomfortable and impractical to use when you need to hold it (e.g. standing on a commuter train). So, it fails to cover even two advantages of a tablet. Aren't you just really afraid of change? And that is why you scoff at tablets while promoting the familiar tech of a clunky keyboard and mouse-ish interactions?
The main factor is that no one has a Xoom, while iPhone and iPad have major markets.
Just FYI (not commenting on your entire post): Xoom is not the only one featuring HoneyComb. See asus eee pad transformer rumors has it to have the same price tag as iPad (or $100 lower if only with 16 GB).
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Yes. You're right. The millions upon millions of iPad users all over the world are all Apple fanboys with no capabilities of thinking in an individual capacity. The iPad is a failure just waiting to happen and netbooks will still come back and take over.
You keep telling yourself that. Please. Run with it.
When iPads came out, they created a new (or reinvigorated and old and dead) market. There was uncertainty in its capabilities outside of iHaters calling it an "oversized iPod Touch". Now, two years later the iPad has had a large penetration in vertical markets where before there were none for a tablet. Back then, perhaps it was correct to say that it is not meant to replace laptops or netbooks. Now though is a different story. I lost track of how many friends and colleagues that were looking for a new home computer or a laptop decided to buy an iPad instead. There is a huge, huge market for people that don't need the capabilities of a laptop/desktop PC and all the headaches that go with keeping one running. Tech-heads, geeks, and nerds hate that idea as Apple's model pretty much obliterates their definition of what computing should be like. I say it's about damn time. We've had decades of what was essentially garbage PC's devoid of any user-friendliness for the Joe-consumer. I think it's great that Apple saw how the PC-folks were screwing everything up and decided to make "computers" that hides the computer part from the user and just let's them use it like a toaster. Good for them.
It's the haters that try to convince everyone until they're blue in the face that the only "real" tablet is one that can be rooted. I can tell you right now that that kind of logic guarantees you'll lose 99% of your potential consumer base.
We're waiting for an explosion.....of Honycomb devices.
What do you mean? Weak batteries again? Or do you think HoneyComb will be chosen as a vector for a terrorist attack?
(peace, brother, just kidding)
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
This does not surprise me. There is simply not enough actual hardware out there. I mean, more then enough idea's and prototypes. But nothing actually being sold in the stores or even online.
And I'm not talking about the absurdly priced Samsung type tablets, but normally priced GOOD hardware for around $300 through $400 range.
Show me good hardware that will run honeycomb now and one or two future versions for $350 and I'm aboard.
eee pad transformer. Granted, $399, a bit over your $350 bid.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Spoken like yet another "I have never used a tablet" sourpuss, replaying the same broken record about the glories of netbooks.
By all means call me a sourpuss, but please preceed it with "I can find no good reason to use a tablet".
But the net is flowing over with stories of people who have found that once they got one, the uses and benefits became apparent.
For each example you could throw at me of those people, I could counter it with an example of people that consider them to be overpriced gimmicks. And the very fact that they are not selling well outside of iPad suggest that only the fanbois want them.
A netbook lacks a touch screen, and is uncomfortable and impractical to use when you need to hold it (e.g. standing on a commuter train).
Why is this the only example I ever hear about how advantageous a tablet is? Why is it that important to you to be connected to the Internet while on a train? Are you an Internet addict, or someone of such importance that you constantly have great knowledge to impart on the world? Ever heard of a paperback book? Or staying in the office a while until the rush hour dies down?
And touchscreens are great for portability but most people are born using computers with keyboards and mice. Nobody in their right mind would choose to use a touchscreen if they have a keyboard and mouse nect to them.
Aren't you just really afraid of change?
Not at all. I've been working and playing with computers for 30 years, I've witnessed massive change and embraced a lot of it. But I'm not prepared to be carried along on a wave of hype and marketing for an expensive gimmick that does not replace anything that I currently have.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
"One would have expected an explosion of Android tablet apps like that seen with the iPad"
If as many or more Honeycomb-running tablets were being sold, then yes, one might have expected that. Aside from that, there seem to be the issues cited in other comments, to the effect that it's hard to find apps in the marketplace, the emulator runs slowly, and not every Honeycomb tablet has the same technical specifications. So it seems like making this explosion of Android tablet apps may be harder than making them for the iPad, while serving a smaller audience.
Who expected this explosion and why? What reason does anyone have to think these issues are being rectified?
Most PC apps are C ... Android is Java, which is not suitable for a PC. The reason iOS has so many apps is that it is a desktop class system with native C, so you can easily port Mac, Windows, Unix, and game console code. If iOS had no C, iMovie and GarageBand and Keynote and many other PC apps would not be running there yet. They are there already because they did not have to be rewritten.
As much as I hate to admit it, and I have more reason to champion Honeycomb than most since I wrote CoolNote which is clearly designed to appeal to both phone and tablet users, the emulator sucks. I *want* to optimise my apps for Honeycomb but 5 minute load times, 30 sec response times make this impossible. Its not the PC either as the other emulators are fine.
For each example you could throw at me of those people, I could counter it with an example of people that consider them to be overpriced gimmicks. And the very fact that they are not selling well outside of iPad suggest that only the fanbois want them.
I've always wondered about this. How is it that there were only enough fanbois to garner Apple 3-5% of the PC market, but enough to get 70%+ of the MP3 player market, enough to move Apple past companies with much more experience in handsets in the smartphone market segment, and now to sell millions of tablets?
In the last (calendar) quarter of 2009, Apple sold 3.3 million computers-- their best quarter ever at the time. In that same quarter they sold 8.7M iPhones.
Where did Apple, a company with such a vanishingly small share of the personal computer market, get all of these "fanbois" from? Is every person who owns an Apple computer buying 2-3 iPads and iPhones each? If someone buys an iPhone or an iPad without previously having owned a Mac, or any other Apple product, are they a "fanboi"?
The problem with your argument is that you're trying to prove a negative, and you can't. Even a handful of people who bought the device because they have a legitimate use for it establishes firmly that there is, at least theoretically, a legitimate use for the device. If it were not selling well one could say that those who have a need for such a product don't constitute an addressable market, but that appears not to be the case.
Conversely, any number of people who don't consider the device to have a legitimate use does not establish that to be a fact, since the assertion is of a negative-- that the device lacks any legitimate use. I'm not sure why you'd choose to frame your argument this way, since it precludes you from actually winning.
My take is that starting with the iTunes/iPod combo Apple attracted the people that were more willing to pay for digital goods. Most of those good customers are gravitating around Apple's products now. Google and other companies might be able to steal some of them to their business but it will take time and a lot of skill.
Regardless of my assumption being right or wrong, I believe that making money out of apps (even iOS ones) is not any easier than making money in any other business. What I do is look for a company that needs an Android or iOS app (or both) to complement their commercial strategy and develop an app for them. That's been a well respected way of making money in the IT industry for ages and still works. I don't say that it's a risk less strategy (it isn't) but it's very different from building your own product and selling it to people. You know exactly how many money you make (maybe you don't know how much work you have to put into it) and you trade that safety for the (small) chance of getting very rich by building an app that makes history.
I wouldn't argue with the your statement. If your parents have always been uncomfortable using a standard PC with a keyboard, then in that instance an iPad will be more usable for them.
But it's not really much to do with my original point that tablets don't replace laptops or netbooks, useful as they no doubt are to people who have no need for the functionality of a full PC.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
The only Galaxy Tablet users I've met who are actually pleased with the platform are the people who will force themselves to like the things they bought no matter what. They're also the type of people who will try and convince everyone else they love their new toys. After all if they can convince someone else they're justifiably pleased with their new toy then it must not have been a bad decision to buy it.
I'm sure there are some people out there not outraged by the fact the the second they invested in a tablet, Google informs them that the specs are too low to run the next generation of the software which will be due out soon, but in reality, most people were quite upset.
This was a major failure on Google and Samsung's behalf since the Galaxy Tab should have been released for developers only to get them started writing apps for the Android tablet platform. In reality, the the newer Honeycomb devices should have been the generation 1 device.
The end result is, tons of people heard all the hype about the Android tablets being the ultimate iPad Killer. Then they heard about how all these major sales numbers of the Galaxy Tab was based on how many hit the shelves, not how many got to actual consumers. Then they heard about how the Galaxy Tablet was so underpowered that it couldn't possibly run the next version of Android due out a few weeks after everyone just bought their Galaxy Tabs for Christmas gifts. Then they heard about how there were no programs for the Galaxy Tab because developers were having problems with it.
If Android Tablet and Honeycomb takes a long time to catch on, it'll be almost entirely because of the Galaxy Tablet.
I've always wondered about this. How is it that there were only enough fanbois to garner Apple 3-5% of the PC market, but enough to get 70%+ of the MP3 player market, enough to move Apple past companies with much more experience in handsets in the smartphone market segment, and now to sell millions of tablets?
Your figures don't stack up. There are more Android hand sets now than Apple iPhones. All Android handsets play MP3s. Therefore Apple cannot have 70% of the MP3 player market.
In the last (calendar) quarter of 2009, Apple sold 3.3 million computers-- their best quarter ever at the time. In that same quarter they sold 8.7M iPhones.
Put the figure in context of the number of desktop or laptop/netbook PCs sold worldwide - those numbers are dwarfed.
And as above, Android handsets are outselling iPhones currently.
Where did Apple, a company with such a vanishingly small share of the personal computer market, get all of these "fanbois" from?
Vanishing? Where? Over 50% of computers connecting to the Internet run Windows XP, Windows 7 has, erm, about 30% of the share currently - they're rough figures but I'm a Linux guy so don't claim to know the exact ones off the top of my head.
If someone buys an iPhone or an iPad without previously having owned a Mac, or any other Apple product, are they a "fanboi"?
Probably with iPhones, no. Most people with iPhones have contracts and have a range of handsets to choose from within their specific price range, they therefore may choose iPhone because someone has one, they've heard it's the best, whatever...
As for iPad, I know several people with them, they all have iPhones and some have Macs. But the iPad does not replace either the iPhone or the Mac. Therefore they are probably brand loyalists and therefore fanbois.
If it were not selling well one could say that those who have a need for such a product don't constitute an addressable market, but that appears not to be the case.
But it's not selling well compared to the number of laptops and netbooks being sold. So what its target market - apart from people who simply MUST be online while stood up on a crowded commuter train, which is the one and only legitimate reason, albeit an unlikely one, for using a tablet that I've seen so far. (Note I said "tablet" not iPad there, BTW.)
Conversely, any number of people who don't consider the device to have a legitimate use does not establish that to be a fact, since the assertion is of a negative-- that the device lacks any legitimate use. I'm not sure why you'd choose to frame your argument this way, since it precludes you from actually winning.
Sorry, lost you now. You're argument-steering by moving into semantics, please try to stay on topic. Thanks.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
The carriers don't like generic firmwares. Not only do they like to disable useful features, they also have to take a long time to negotiate deals bundling bloatware on devices. This makes them slow on the uptake for device software and even more slow on upgrades which often never happen to encourage people to buy new devices and extend their contracts.
Manufacturers also want people to buy new devices as well, so there is less incentive for new software on old devices.
Nobody in their right mind would choose to use a touchscreen if they have a keyboard and mouse nect to them.
You make unwarranted generalizations. My mother - who is 48 now - has always had problems with "technical" stuff, and in particular using computers. She had a laptop, but using it was always a pain for her. Last year I bought her an iPad, and it became her primary device for surfing the Net and reading email. It also got her into the whole e-book thing.
As for myself, I've had a netbook for a while, but I've got a tablet now (two, in fact - a Honeycomb one and then also an iPad 2, since Google is slow in getting their shit right), and I don't use it as a portable device so much so as a convenient thingy that I can use while sitting or even lying down comfortably.
The example of your mother, whilst valid, does not counter my argument - as you said yourself, she's never been proficient with computers, therefore I could only agree that she finds it easier to use.
But so far, the only target audiences of tablet users with any validity appear to be older people with no PC skills and people who are stood up on packed computer trains.
Incidentally, I'm actually very slightly older than your mother, am fortunate to be very PC literate over 30 years of experience with them and cannot see how a tablet would negate my not carrying a netbook or a mobile phone.
Oh, and while I'm at it, SIT UP PROPERLY, BOY! :-)
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I even remember clearly on here about 18 months ago when the fanbois were justifying their buying iPads and themselves saying that they are not designed to replace laptops or netbooks - therefore a tablet is still one more portable device you have to carry with you because there is no single device that does everything most people need to do.
I think you've got that wrong. The Apple fanbois were claiming that iPads were the new wave and were a replacement for laptops, netbooks, and even quite possibly desktops. The concept was that iPads would drastically alter the very face of computing.
I would think it's a much more reasonable to look at tablets as a different interface for specific tasks. That is - tablets are ideal interfaces for consumption of media. If your use of a laptop is largely watching videos and updating your social messaging service of choice, then sure... a tablet could probably take the place of your laptop.
Android apps scale a lot better than their iOS counterparts, because they were designed for multiple resolutions from the ground up. Because of this, nearly all of the apps designed for phones and games work and look great on and Android tablet.
I have had my tablet for two months now, and except for a very small number of extremely specific exceptions, I have never once come across a situation and said "there is no tablet app for this, and the phone app doesn't work".
I don't know why none of these articles about android ever bring up this fact. It always seems like they harp on and on about the number of tablet specific apps, without ever asking the question, why should an app have to be tablet specific in the first place? Like, look at Angry Birds. That is not tablet specific, but it has looked great on tablets from day 1. Or Google Skymap. I can name lots of other examples.
Your above post is totally misguided. IOS has no auto-scaling reflow capabilities whatsoever. This is a combination of the strange habit of many iPhone apps not using the standard iOS GUI toolkit, and iOS taking shortcuts.
As a result, for the vast majority of iPhone apps, running them on an iPad results in an ugly pixelated mess.
This is not true for Android tablets * at all *, because Android frameworks and applications are designed from the ground up to work on many resolutions, not just one "golden" resolution.
But so far, the only target audiences of tablet users with any validity appear to be older people with no PC skills and people who are stood up on packed computer trains.
And there are a shitload more of THEM then there are of US. Apple is laughing all the way to the bank about it's lousy strategy to target non professional computer users for their media appliance.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Nobody in their right mind would choose to use a touchscreen if they have a keyboard and mouse nect to them.
You make unwarranted generalizations. My mother - who is 48 now - has always had problems with "technical" stuff, and in particular using computers. She had a laptop, but using it was always a pain for her. Last year I bought her an iPad, and it became her primary device for surfing the Net and reading email. It also got her into the whole e-book thing.
As for myself, I've had a netbook for a while, but I've got a tablet now (two, in fact - a Honeycomb one and then also an iPad 2, since Google is slow in getting their shit right), and I don't use it as a portable device so much so as a convenient thingy that I can use while sitting or even lying down comfortably.
Generalizations are a potential trap in any discussion, but anecdotes are at least as bad. At 48, your mother must be near the inept end of the scale (not intended as an insult, BTW) if she has difficulties using a PC. I could believe such difficulty as a general attribute of my own mother's generation - she's approaching 90 - but not of mine. I am several years older than your mother, and know of nobody in my generation who has such difficulties with laptops and suchlike. Everybody uses them, at work and/or at leisure. Many of us use multiple different systems (Linux, Windows, OSX, Android, iOS, and various proprietary systems) with comparable facility.
Although I have used computers for almost four decades, they were initially mainframes accessed with decks of punched cards and minis needing reels of paper tape. That's probably further from today's desktop metaphor than the working environment of a typical non-computer person of that time. The required adaptability is for changes in interfaces, not for any particular interface. Most interfaces are not eternal - how well might someone like your mother cope in 10-15 years, when the current tablet interface might be fading away?
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Apple fanbois will buy anything Apple that releases
Sounds like an emotional argument from someone who hates Apple with a passion. In another post you call Steve Jobs Fuhrer. You also remind me of the mainframe people when the home computer came out. Why would I use a less powerful home computer when I can use a more powerful mainframe? It is also the old Android defence of it doesn't sell well because tablets are gimmicks. If Android tablets suddenly start selling well what does that mean? Are tablets gimmicks then? Or does it only suit you when bashing the iPad?
Also I work in a job where you have no place to put a netbook, but still needing a computer I use a tablet. The fact that you don't have such problems with your job doesn't mean that others don't. Some people need a desktop, others a netbook and others need a tablet.
There are still coming out new phones and tablets with fucking 2.2! Not even 2.3, ffs...
1.6-devices are still being sold in stores.
The only few tablets being sold with Honeycomb are more expensive than the iPad 2. As much as I prefer Android over iOS, if you ignore politics, lock-ins, etc for a little while, iPad 2 is simply the better product for 95% of the population right now, because it has the apps and its UI is quite polished, AND it's cheaper than less polished tablets with less apps.
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
...and there's only so much ground Unicorn horn and Pixie Woofle dust to go round - so there is a limit to how many they can make and sell.
Perhaps if Santa Claus could get the Easter bunny to get the enchanted elf assembly line to work overtime, things would be different, and every litte Peter Pottlemouse could own one!
So fly away Tinkerbell!
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Does a cereal, even a tasty one, really need apps? You've got the box for entertainment, what more do ya need?
We have emulators for everything from the old 2600 and C64 right up to the Nintendo DS and PS2
For one thing, the CPU in a modern Android device is at least twenty times as fast as the CPU in a Nintendo DS. For another, DS emulators high-level-emulate the boot process; they just drop the executable image in memory and start the CPU. This doesn't work so well when an app needs to interact with other apps, as is the case in Android.
So why isn't google working on a proper x86 version of Dalvik VM?
I can emulate much faster consoles with unofficial emulators done by enthusiasts.
Consoles up through 2001 don't support multitasking. Each game has full control of the primary CPU, and no firmware is dynamically linked. This means emulators can skip emulating most of the system menu.
Apple gets round the problem by compiling code for x86 in order to run it in their iOS Simulator.
How does this interact with non-free binary-only libraries licensed from third parties?
I think the key tends to be in whether somebody does a lot of content creation vs content consumption.
For example, senior managers and executives tend to be content consumers. They consume data and recommendations (often MBs of information), and produce decisions (likely just a few bits of entropy). With a tablet they can browse through 10 emails, attached reports and powerpoints, and browse some articles on the web. Then they can hit "reply" to the project manager and type in "yes" or "no" and hit send. Nothing could be easier.
People who like to passively consume media on the web also consume MB or GB of data, and produce nothing but cookies and hits. Tablets work great.
Many hip teenagers actually do produce a fair bit of "content" (at least they sure type a lot in various messaging apps). However, I suspect that utility ranks right up there with comfort when they select shoes. A laptop sounds like the sort of thing their boring parents would use and would likely be a hand-me-down, but a shiny new expensive iPad is relatively exclusive and sure to make somebody the envy of the crowd.
On the other hand, somebody like me who takes the time to type a verbose slashdot comment isn't going to be terribly interested in doing that on a touchscreen. Ditto for the people creating those videos everybody stares at on Youtube (in large organizations directors/producers/etc might use them, but the guy doing frame-level splicing is only going to use it if they have to do it someplace where there isn't room for a conventional workstation - I wouldn't say a laptop is any better).
I've piloted tablets at work. Usually the reaction is the same - "wow, neat" for the first 5 minutes, and then "well, it's OK" after a few days of using it heavily for actual work. In some workflows they excel, and when they do we buy them. Usually a regular laptop costs a lot less and is actually more usable. People doing real work usually avoid doing it standing up on trains and such...
Then how can the licensee of such a library be sure that the x86 binary and the ARM binary are functionally equivalent?
When the iPad came out, it had polish and the market to itself. This allowed it to grab a surprising toe-hold in a field that many thought futile. Android 3.0, by contrast, comes to market with a bit less polish and facing stiff competition. The field is no longer empty- Developers must decide whether to focus on Android, WebOS, iOS etc.
The iPad 2 builds evolutionarily on its first-to-market experience... Faster, but with no changes in the physical layout. As a result every iPad 1 app looks as good on the iPad 2 as it did on the original. If you develop for the iPad, you shoot for one resolution (1024 x 768) and one ratio (4:3). While there isn't a guarantee, future displays seem sure to maintain the same 4:3 aspect ratio with a doubling or tripling of resolution. In other words, the transition will be no more difficult than iphone 3 to iphone 4. Screen elements will be no larger or smaller... just the same or clearer.
Because Google doesn't control the hardware (for better or worse) it can't give the same guarantees. Thus, developers face multiple resolutions, e.g., 1024 x 600 (Galaxy Tab 7 and Viewsonic Viewpad) vs. 1280 x 1024 (Galaxy Tab 10.1, Motorola Xoom) and, at the same time, design for different aspect ratios, e.g., 16:9 or 16:10. This will only get worse when Ice Cream Sandwich throws smart phones into the mix. So... assuming you KNOW you're target audience is running a compatible version of Android... what resolution and aspect ratio do you go with? If you let Android do the corrections... can you expect your app to display with the polish you designed into it? The iPad's 4:3 aspect ratio may be limiting and imperfect... but its constancy allows design to move forward with certitude. If you're spending time and money to develop for a platform, you want to deliver something that looks good now, will look good later, and does so on tens of millions of machines.
I've tried several electronics stores in the Fort Wayne, Indiana, area, and none of them appear to carry the latest Archos products. Nor does Archos appear to advertise on U.S. television that its products are available for purchase over the web. So how is a prospective end user expected to become aware of Archos products?
But considering it's an AC first post, the probability of it being a racist act is approximately .983.
You are welcome on my lawn.
you're saying that the reason Android music players haven't taken off is that people don't know where to buy apps?
Archos devices come with AppsLib, and users often install Amazon Appstore afterward. But a lot of big-name applications aren't made available on AppsLib, on Amazon Appstore, or as a direct APK download from the developer's web site. For example, the check deposit application from Chase Bank is exclusive to Android Market.
Remember, the iPod touch launched before the App Store did.
It also rode the coattails of the incredibly popular click-wheel iPod brand. What brand's coattails should Android-powered music players have ridden?
Also, pretty much everyone is getting a phone
Getting a phone != getting a smartphone. I generally make fewer than 30 minutes of mobile calls per month, mostly to arrange rides. (Longer calls can wait until I have access to a land line, which in my city has free local calls.) So I pay $15 per 90 days to Virgin Mobile USA for service on my Audiovox 8610 dumbphone. I'd have to pay five to fifteen times more for smartphone service with a minimum voice plan that provides over 10 times more minutes than I'll ever use.
Have you ever wondered why there are no Android music players? Google places some limits on them
It's not Google that places limits on the Archos 43 Internet Tablet as much as short-sighted developers who make their applications available only on Android Market, not on Amazon Appstore or on AppsLib.
The example of your mother, whilst valid, does not counter my argument - as you said yourself, she's never been proficient with computers, therefore I could only agree that she finds it easier to use.
You are thinking about this in the wrong direction - years of mouse and keyboard (ab)use have trained us to completely miss what is truly "easy to use". Do you remember first learning to type? I do, it was hell with lots of repetition to get any kind of speed (touch typing). Do you remember first learning to use a mouse? I do - it didn't make spatial sense at all for a good while. Do you remember learning how to drive stick shift? I do - it was one of the most strangely hard things I've ever done.
Now think of predictive texting - T9. Do you "get" that? I sure don't! I think it's a royal pain in the ass, and I HATE the fact that my "smart" internet TV requires me to use that abomination to enter text without supporting USB or wireless keyboards. Yet all around me are teenagers getting WPM counts close to my touch typing on these things, and they think I'm a fossil that doesn't get it.
After all those years of use, many hard things are now completely second nature to us. We don't think of them as difficult or even easy, they are just facts of life. However if I think back honestly I cannot claim that these things were easy to learn.
My two-year old cousin was playing with an iPad. He "got it" almost immediately. He's *two years old*. No matter how much we detest these gimmicky things because we can do so much with our keyboards and mice, they really are simpler to use with much less training.
Among my peers, all but two have some sort of smartphone. They routinely bust it out and use it when out and about for one thing or another. Only one has a tablet. To make matters more grim, despite having that iPad with him for hours and using his iPhone several times, and even his laptop several times, he only used his iPad once, and that was *just* so he could say 'look at my iPad'. He may have borught it with him multiple times, but he never borught it out again and no one asked about it again.
Meanwhile, a lot of manufacturers have fixated on tablet computing as the next big thing, more because Apple did it than actual good reason. It's frustrating to me as a consumer, because a lot of the important players in the phone market have to some extent seemingly are de-emphasizing advancing the smartphone market to chase the tablet. Google made a dead-end honeycomb release just-for-tablets, for example. HP seems to be putting the Touchpad above all else (I think this really hurt what remote chances they had at a comeback). All this to chase a market that hasn't achieved the pervasive status that smartphones did in the same time interval.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Well, project code names are older then software development itself, so don't go tilting at windmills or anything.
Besides, Google did actually intend to use release numbers, it's just that consumers enjoy the silly names so much that the very selection of the next name becomes newsworthy. Go figure... but Google certainly ain't stupid enough to to argue.
I can't speak for others - but here is my story. I have a software product that would be perfect for tablets. iPad market is pretty crowded and I'd love to go the Android route. My product is currently multi-platform and I can easily build it for Linux. It's a graphics-heavy application with fairly extensive UI. And therein lies a problem - I don't mind re-writing the entire UI, but Android requires me to do so in Java. Now, I don't know about you, but to me the though of building a complex UI in Java and having 100s of interfaces to/from it into native code seems simply terrifying. I've seen the "basic examples" and they are extremely convoluted and unmaintainable.
So my choice is to either write the entire product from scratch and in Java (no-go, don't even ask) or write a fully native Android product without UI (like game developers do it). Can't really go the second route, since unlike games - this application requires some amount of user interaction.
So, there you have it - I very much want to enter Android market, but technical design of that system (which to me seems braindead) - is a huge obstacle. It's not that it is impossible ot overcome. but the resulting product would likely be difficult to maintain and uneconomical.
On the other hand, I could easily develop similar product for iPad - but again, the money is not there anymore, too late for the party:)
note to self. self, don't work on web apps while moderating.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
<minirant>
With the death knell sounding for the N900 a friends I recently decided to buy a Xoom figuring that Android is where things seem to be heading. I have to confess that I've been rather underwhelmed by it. My current list of gripes are:
Aside from the Android-specific gripes there are also Xoom-specific ones (proprietary charging interface, a pain to root the device, highly reflective screen, ...). I really wanted to like this device but it feels like an uphill battle right now. It feels like the only way it beats my N900 is on screen size and CPU power; that may have been a niche device but it's still a much better user experience IMHO.
</minirant>
While it is very true that practically nothing uses the Honeycomb-specific Fragments UI, the simple tweak using an app called Spare Parts will scale pretty much every app to an appropriate size on a big tablet. Only the most sloppily designed apps don't scale well on my Galaxy Tab 10.1 (which has been well worth the three days after release of going from store to store to find at 32GB version in stock). Don't let the "lack" of apps keep you from buying a tablet. Again, the Spare Parts app fixes just about everything, and there's lots of tutorials on the web about how to do it, notably at jkkmobile.
Rumors? I'm typing this on a Transformer now. The transformer is alread out in all regions. I paid $550 USD for the 16 GB tablet and the dock. 32 would have been $100 more. I completely recommend it.
Aside from one or two applications that I use (Touchdown being one of them), the apps on my Thunderbolt are exactly the same as the ones on my Acer Iconia. Most apps are smart enough to know when you're on a tablet and change their function (Shortyz for one).
There's only a few old apps that still assume you're on a phone and look horrible on a tablet, but they haven't been maintained for some time.
The fact that you do not agree with the statement makes the probability of you seeing it as a racist act is approximately .983.
FTFY
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
Sounds like excuses to me. Explain to me how your application is different to a game when it comes to user interface and explain how it would be easier in IOS to run native? They both have their challenges and it just sounds to me like you feel it would be easier to do nothing and just complain about it. If you have a compelling app all those other things don't matter and can be overcome. This really isn't a Honeycomb or tablet issue either. Contact someone who has done something similar as far as UI for native apps and move forward.
None of this stuff is easy, and at the same time if you really want to do it, it isn't that hard either.
> Can we please stop to give stupid nick names for software projects?
But then I couldn't talk about us needing an Ice Cream Sandwich strategy...
Or calling a dev's cube the "Honeycomb Hideout".
I'm with you. The genuine tablet market is very small. Apple's apparent success with the ipad is based very much on their previous record of bringing out "the next big thing" but has a very weak foundation. It's basically a fashion item.
As for actual usage cases, I agree with the older, unskilled person who is not likely to be generating any content. I would also include business uses which require mobility and where a keyboard would be inconvenient. I have to disagree with the commuter train example. My Android smartphone is ideal for such a situation. Small, light and trivial to put away when needed. A tablet would be heavy and bulky and unwieldy.
Ipad supporters feel free to disagree with me if you want but arguments are pretty pointless. This is one where time will tell.
Numbers don't matter. I don't need hundreds of apps, or even "low hundreds". I need the apps that I actually use to work really, really well. This is how we should judge a platform, not the slush pile of wanna-apps that don't see more than 1000 installs.
Proposed solution: tech writers pick a basket of 20 most used apps -- let the crowd decide which ones matter. And evaluate those for UI, stability, etc. Then we can have a conversation about platform communities.
Since December 2010 you can do a Native Code Only Android application (revision 5 of the NDK). Basically, the only thing you are pointing towards as a show stopper for you hasn't existed on new/upgradable phones for 8 months now, and has never existed in Android's tablet OS, 3.x.
how many devices run honeycomb, I suppose a few hundred Thousand, and that's not enough to get lots of apps.
That doesn't make sense - why would I replace a laptop with something that costs more but has less functionality.
I'm sorry, you and all the other fanbois are trying to find rational reasons for buying iPads when there are none - it's basically a case of doing nothing more than falling for some very clever Apple marketing, marketing that other tablet manufacturers do not use in quite the same way, therefore they don't sell as many.
Take your blinders off - you're seeing fanbois where there are none. I am no Apple fanboi.
Go back and re-read what I wrote. I'm not saying that the iPad is a good replacement for a laptop. What I'm saying is that it fits a particular niche. It's a good platform to consume media; watching video, reading, etc. That means it could replace a more general purpose device only if you don't care about anything beyond media consumption. Why would someone give up functionality? Because they don't care about that additional functionality (or at least, don't perceive that they care - people CAN be short sighted).
Just as you're mis-labeling fanbois, you're also mis-labeling the argument. The fanbois have always claimed that the iPad is a revolution in general computing, not a niche platform for specific tasks.
Your above post is totally misguided. IOS has no auto-scaling reflow capabilities whatsoever. This is a combination of the strange habit of many iPhone apps not using the standard iOS GUI toolkit, and iOS taking shortcuts.
I have been developing iPhone applications for many years now. How long have you been developing? How many iPhone applications do you have in the store?
The fact is that the auto-resizing works just fine. For any window, I can specify that any edge either can be a fixed distance from a containing edge, or expand as the view that contains it shrinks or grows. I can further specify that either the height or width is fixed, or is allowed to grow or shrink. It's as flexible s any GUI resize handling system I've ever used, across many languages.
The reason the iPhone had to have that at launch, and that developers would use it were many - for one thing, rotation means your views expand and shrink on the edges - but also things like call notices expand the navigation bar and shrink the containing view.
What confuses you is that most iPhone applications running on an iPad simply scale to 2x. But if a developer REALLY wanted to, they could simply declare the app universal and the application would properly expand to fill the iPad space using the specified view resizing constraints with no other code changes.
Of course almost no-one does that, because iPhone developers know an iPhone interface that simply scales to fill the screen looks like hell, at 2x or properly resizing. So no-one does it, while in the Android world few developers seem to think it matters and so you get very few apps taking proper advantage of the extra space.
There is one additional way in which you are wrong. If you have an image view that is holding an image larger than the view it is displayed in, on the iPhone it can be scaled down to fit in that space - but on the iPad it will actually use the "real" pixels in 2x mode to display the image in a higher resolution. Why they do not also do that for any system drawn text is a mystery to me...
As a result, for the vast majority of iPhone apps, running them on an iPad results in an ugly pixelated mess.
Which is why there are now over 100k apps built with the iPad in mind now, because no-one wants to use iPhone apps just scaled up (blocky or not) and everyone wants to put more thought into design of them. If Apple had simply said that apps by default would use auto-resizing to fill the iPad screen then the iPad would be in the same mess Android tablets are in where few things were tablet specific...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If it's a niche then it's one invented by Apple to make money from, and good luck to them to he honest.
But the fact is that since we have both clearly stated that a tablet does not replace a netbook or laptop, then it just becomes one more device to lug along WITH a netbook or a laptop.
However, having identified that a laptop and smartphone combined do more than a netbook, then it becomes a moot point actually buying one in the first place.
Why do I have to repeat stuff 3 or 4 times and STILL they refuse to get it?
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
There's many reason why Honeycomb doesn't attract developpers
- first, most apps make money through ads since the average Android user won't buy any app ever, in contrast with iOS. "Apps cost nothing to make, heh ?".
For ads to make money, apps must be downloaded massively (> hundred of thousands). And there's lot more phones out there than tablets as phone are way more ubiquitous than tablets which remain an expensive toy.
The fact that most Android users just wouldn't buy Honeycomb apps is a real problem. Android user wants everything free. Android user won't have Honeycomb specific apps because of that, his fault.
- Making an app optimized for Honeycomb using its APIs is very time consuming. Most of the time you can easily adapt an existing phone app so it scale and handle appropriately on Honeycomb without using Honeycomb custom APIs. That's a great difference with the iPad, on which most iPhone app looked like crap because of no modern layouting taking into account scaling.
On Honeycomb, the new Fragment APIs are kind of complicated and require a lot of refactoring which some developpers may be reluctant to do for various reasons. At this point you'd better write the app UI twice, externalizing the app logic in Library.
So at the moment it makes no sense to write Honeycomb specific apps: it is too much work for too little benefit. Now if the number of tablets grows significantly it might change but nothing is certain.
-- il fait bo
Many Android apps work fine on bigger screens, so there is no need for a separate "HD" version. The HD version of iPad apps is really a boondoggle.
Yes, if Android tablets start selling well then this will do nothing to change my opinion that tablets are gimmicks.
And I hate Apple because I believe in Capitalism. In the same way that when I buy a car I can fill up with petrol from any vendor, when I buy a computing device I should be able to fill it with whatever software I like - free, Open Source or commercial, I don't care, whatever does the job - purchased from whatever software vendor or supplier that I choose. Not just one location that happens to be controlled by the hardware manufacturer.
Also I work in a job where you have no place to put a netbook, but still needing a computer I use a tablet.
I would suspect then that you have a case for some kind of employee tribunal since I would have thought they would be obliged to provide you with a desk or workspace if you need to use a computing device.
Or this is just an attempt on your part to mimic the only conditions where a tablet beats a notebook - i.e. stood up on a packed commuter train when you are simply THAT important a person that you simply MUST be constantly connected to the Internet.
In other words, do 50 of you all work in a single 10 foot x 10 foot office such that you all have to stand and can therefore only use iPads?
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
And this is all I want the fanbois to admit - that they buy fashion accessories with the sole intention of gaining peer approval - then I could have no argument with that whatsoever.
The fact that non-Apple tablets have had low sales so far, despite the fact that more people are buying Android phones than iOS ones at the moment, clearly shows they are a niche market.
And Steve Jobs has done a fantastic job from a marketing perspective of getting the fanbois to part with more money for what is essentially just a bigger iPod Touch - from that perspective, I give him real kudos.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
There are three more reasons that there are so few apps for Honeycomb:
1. Super slow (practically unusable) Honeycomb emulator (that Google is working on, and even demoed a pre-alpha version at google io, so hopefully this will come soon).
2. Honeycomb tablet users are not allowed to leave ratings on the Market directly from their Honeycomb tablet (otherwise, the most incompatible and the most popular apps would have been flooded with negative ratings, and I'm sure that the developers of popular apps would have done something to maintain their good ratings).
3. Most android developers have been flooded with information on how they can optimize their existing Android application, all good information of course, but I don't think all of them realize yet that changing just one line of xml (namely the android:targetSdkVersion attribute to 11 in their manifest file and leaving the minSdkVersion number to the same as before) may just be all they need to do -- to keep the new Honeycomb users happy (and sure, this tiny change will not give them the nice Honeycomb menu/the action bar, nor will it reorganize the layout into fragments for them, correct any accelerometer game defaults, or even turn their assets into super-high resolution tablet graphics), but at least that should help make their app use the entire real estate of the screen, instead of a tiny little part of it -- which is my biggest gripe right now with some of the Android apps that I still use everyday).
PS: Technically, it's more than one line if you count the fact that you have to increment your android:versionCode counter as well (which is something you have to do anyway anytime you change something in your code, that's why I'm already assuming an android developer already knows about that part).
Not an issue if you only use FREE software.
iOS is not free software, and neither is Honeycomb. In fact, all versions of Android include patented MPEG decoder software. Does there even exist an operating system that comes on handheld devices sold in the United States and is 100% conformant to DFSG?
That's just coincidental, not causal.
My almost supernatural ability to detect peoples' intentions is what makes the probability so high.
You are welcome on my lawn.
...the possibility that you *can* write an app that works well on a phone or on a tablet, without a special release for different devices?
we are just coo-coo for coco puffs.
So what your saying is that the iPod is for the unwashed masses that are too ignorant to use PC's? Yikes, don't be the marketing guy for a global computer company, please.
Oh, and please please list these successful verticals you talk about because I really want to know. I say the Apple iPod commercial showing how doctors and musicians, and xyz used the ipad and I laughed out out at how ridiculous it and the 'apps' they presented were. The idea that an Ipad would ever supplant a laptop or the such for someone working in finance is laughable. The only one that was truly believable was the kids play book thing which I'll agree is a meaningful vertical for tablets (children's play toy).
Bye!
Ignoring politics is the wrong decision particularly in a discussion involving honeycomb. Check out the forums at tabletroms.com and you'll find that the notion ink adam is far and away the most popular tablet among enthusiasts - the group containing the largest amount of current and potential developers. There's no honeycomb for the adam or for that matter most of the other tegra2 tablets which are equally capable to the motorola xoom. Android has a great position in the market because up to now google hasn't resorted to the bullying and special treatment of other platforms. Google has failed to realize that this fair treatment and openness is a key to their success before honeycomb, and this failure is having a large impact on the success (or ultimate failure) of their current version.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
If it's a niche then it's one invented by Apple to make money from, and good luck to them to he honest.
Not at all. Tablets have been around well before the iPad.
But the fact is that since we have both clearly stated that a tablet does not replace a netbook or laptop, then it just becomes one more device to lug along WITH a netbook or a laptop.
You're missing a more subtle point. It doesn't replace the laptop for general purpose computing. But it might replace the laptop where a laptop is being used for a specific subset of tasks.
Right now, my phone trades off as my main communications interface. I do more email and IM than phonecalls. And I trade off between my laptop and my phone depending on what I'm doing and how involved the communications are. In most cases, I could get away with just the smartphone until the task got involved enough to warrant breaking out the laptop... in situations when said laptop wasn't already running. The point here is the right interface for the task at hand. Not all platforms work well in all situations.
However, having identified that a laptop and smartphone combined do more than a netbook, then it becomes a moot point actually buying one in the first place.
For you maybe. I'm in the market for an inexpensive Android tablet. But I wouldn't dream of tossing out my laptop for one. And as interesting as netbooks were, I'm more interested in a tablet.
Why do I have to repeat stuff 3 or 4 times and STILL they refuse to get it?
I'd suggest you're missing things yourself in your zeal to put "fanbois" in their place.
You've proven his point:
"You do realise that if you're not possessed of the patience to learn how to use a computer by trial-and-error yourself, you can go to things called "computer courses" don't you? Billions of people around the world seem very happy using PCs, I would suggest a tiny percentage of them are PC nerds and an even tinier percentage have purchased iPads. And I suspect most of them still use PCs."
People shouldn't have to take a training course to learn how to use a PC. They don't typically need one to learn to use a Mac. The PC users? Very few are actually happy. That's one of the reasons Apple has gotten so much traction. They have gotten that traction despite the efforts of people like you, who when approached for advice have steered people from Apple for years.
You supposedly have not needed to buy an Apple product for 30 years. That says to me that you either used Amiga, an Atari, or stuck with DOS for about 8 years after Apple introduced the Mac. If the latter, then I have also been informed that you are a slow learner. You like to take the hard way in order to show yourself better and more capable than others. Thus the Gentoo sig. Thus the self-ascribed inability to absorb why a business needs customers. Thus the observed inability to see what will make a typical user most happy, while fulfilling their needs. If you are an engineer, I would venture you are employed with some state's Department of Transportation.
The last thing you should be doing is giving anyone advice on which computer product to buy. They shouldn't need to be dependent on you, despite how good it makes you feel. In fact, it looks like you could use some computer buying advice yourself.
The brains of a chicken, coupled with the claws of two eagles, may well hatch the eggs of our destruction.
I have been in best buy a few times to see what android tablets are out, I find the ones that people are buying are 2.2 based and that seems to be the majority, the only 2 Gingerbread ones were more expensive that the ipad. So the average consumer is going to go with ipad or 2.2 tablet out of a cost differential with 3.0 . The market place could stand to make it easier to find tablet apps.
Seriously, unless a bee lives there, or its a brand of cereal that has a bee for its spokesman, I am not aware of it.
I consider myself fairly well versed in technology and technology news, so if I am asking wtf it is, I bet your average consumer has zero clue. So if your selling it as a feature, it is one that no one is aware of or cares about.