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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."
Platform fragmentation - as in, different screen sizes etc., may be an issue but I don't know how bad it really is.
I'm developing an Android app; doing it exclusively on my own device; have tried the emulator but it is so slow! Takes some 10-15 minutes just to start up, and then literally minutes to start running my app after starting it out of Eclipse. Not to mention the sluggish performance in the emulator. Searching for solutions to this problem only resulted in many hits of people with the same problem.
So while I'd love to at least test my app on the "big screen", or even smaller screens for that sake (my device is double the minimum required), the shitty emulator makes it impossible.
This I can imagine will hold back many developers to optimise their app for the tablets, as it'd require them to buy the device. And if only that emulator would work properly I'd prefer to use it instead of my device, easier!
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."
Emulator Performance is the big problem. I've tried to develop a HoneyComb app, but the emulator is so slow it's absolutely unusable. Until that's fixed, developers are far less likely to flock to the new version.
That is something that in a way surprises me. I mean not to say Google is the greatest ever, but I do expect better from them than putting out such a poor performing emulator. Android itself performs well, their Chrome browser is also known for being speedy, then why can they not get this emulator to work at a decent speed?!
You and me have this speed problem, when I searched for possible solutions I found many other people have it, while others are using the emulator just fine (or so they claim).
Their Eclipse plug-in works well, makes development/debugging quite easy. But that emulator... such an important tool for being able to just test your stuff on other screen sizes (see whether it scales somewhat nicely)... it just doesn't work. And as a result I've never seen my own app on a different resolution than my phone's.
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.
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.
From what I can tell, that's what the whole "fragments" thing that Google is trying to introduce into android is about. It seems to me like the ability to make separate sections and display more if the screen size allows. Like instead of getting a list of articles, selecting one, then viewing it, it could just have the list on the left and the viewing on the right if the screen was larger (a tablet) while still using separate ones for small screens (a phone).
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".
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.
How many of us are holding off getting a tablet until we can easily bypass Android (of any flavour) and just load whatever distribution we want?
Hundreds, maybe even somewhere in the low thousands. And this is exactly the sort of reason there are so few Honeycomb apps: there's just not that much demand for Android tablets.
On the tablet, Android has to compete on a level playing field with the iPad. People don't particularly want Android. They don't particularly *like* Android. Not on the whole. But people *do* want iPads.
On the phone, the situation is pretty much the same, except that there are external factors involved. Specifically, carrier choice, service plans, and subsidies. Also, pretty much everyone is getting a phone, while not everyone is getting a tablet. These combine to give Android an artificial boost in apparent demand. I say "apparent demand", because the sales of Android phones don't really show the demand for Android specifically.
Have you ever wondered why there are no Android music players? Google places some limits on them, but as you are all so quick to point out, *anyone* can just take Android (pre 3.0, which is not suited for small screens anyway) and make their own version. If consumers actually *did* want Android, surely there'd be some demand, right?
But there isn't. And that's all right.
This brings up something the stereotypical slashdot Android nerd should come to understand. It's sage advice from your hated icon of evil, Steve Jobs. Paraphrased, you need to get over this notion that for Android to win, Apple/iOS has to lose. Android, like Linux, isn't terribly well designed for general consumption. Its strengths are very geek-centric. You should be happy that Android has found a viable market from which to offer hardware and software that meets your wishes. Macs don't have the market share MS has in the PC market, but they are more than strong enough to stick around providing me with the sort of computer I want. In the end, that's all that matters, right?
So, maybe if you guys come to accept that, you won't be stuck with this distorted view of Android, and you'll be happy with it how it really is, and not scratch your heads wondering why it's not something it will never be. Just like me (and tens of millions of others) with Macs, or you guys, with hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of Linux PCs, or even the hundred million Android phones and hundreds of thousands (again, *maybe* millions) of Android tablets, you can realize that what you have is pretty damned good for you, right now as it currently is.
Isn't that good enough? Isn't that what you really want? A toy, a geek toy, to play around with? You can call it a tool if you'd prefer, but if you're going to call an iPad a toy, at least be consistent about it.
I'm guessing no-one on this thread owns an Android tablet.
There is not a shortage of Honeycomb applications. The vast majority of 2.x Applications will run on 3.0 with no trouble. Some of the UI's are not made for 10" screens but that does not make the applications difficult to use at all. The TFA is just trolling for page hits (it's ComputerWorld, did you expect anything different).
Although I think Google does need to work on a resolution independent API for Android, the reported "dearth of applications" is vastly overblown for the reasons mentioned above. I've got a Honeycomb based Acer Iconia Tab and have got more applications on it then my HTC Desire Z (runs 2.3), but the ones I use most often are the inbuilt Google applications (Gmail, browser, Maps, Navigation) with the exception of flash (which absolutely flies but that's because it's connected to fast DSL via WiFi).
Probably WYSE would be the most used application that is not from Google but the web browser on Honeycomb is good enough that it eliminates the need for a lot of applications..
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.
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
Platform fragmentation from the hardware side isn't the huge issue it's made to be. Anyone who has developed desktop software shouldn't have a huge issue having to target a variety of devices! There are problems that you have to think about very small screens, as well as portrait/landscape display, but it's really not that bad IMHO.
From the software side, on the other hand, it's a right pain. Honeycomb adds the concept of a "Fragment", which is a re-usable UI grouping, so on a tablet you might put three next to each other left to right, but on a phone you display each Fragment as a single screen by itself. However, as no phone runs Honeycomb, this is basically useless; you have to write a Fragment based UI to make effective use of a tablet, and an Activity (or whatever) based UI for phones, so you have two UI layers. Once Ice Cream Sandwich comes out and phones start having Fragments, that will start solving this.
That is something that in a way surprises me. I mean not to say Google is the greatest ever, but I do expect better from them than putting out such a poor performing emulator. Android itself performs well, their Chrome browser is also known for being speedy, then why can they not get this emulator to work at a decent speed?!
From the SDK Tools v9 revision history:
Known issues with emulator performance: Because the Android emulator must simulate the ARM instruction set architecture on your computer, emulator performance is slow. We're working hard to resolve the performance issues and it will improve in future releases.
Um, unless I'm misunderstanding you (i.e. the emulator actually executes native code, although then it's not really an emulator), this should be obvious. The emulator emulates a different instruction set (arm) on your PC (x86). Virtualisation has nothing to do with that, as that executes native code for the processor on the processor itself. As no instruction translation and emulation is needed, a virtualised OS will run much much faster (assuming no IO/mem bottlenecks, it should run as fast as the host OS).
You have a 1.8GHz x86 processor, well I can tell you that it's highly unlikely to be able to run at anywhere near 600MHz arm speed. If you're lucky it will emulate about 200Mhz arm. Emulation is hard to do, and it's no surprise that it's that slow.
Emulation != Virtualisation. They are very very different beasts. You can't say "Or, my machine can run X on virtualbox really fast, so I should be able to emulate a totally different processor just as fast". Different systems entirely.
Have you ever wondered why there are no Android music players? Google places some limits on them, but as you are all so quick to point out, *anyone* can just take Android (pre 3.0, which is not suited for small screens anyway) and make their own version. If consumers actually *did* want Android, surely there'd be some demand, right?
It's not 'some limits', it restricts access to the Market. Of course nobody wants Android if they have no apps to run on it. How many would want iOS without the App Store?
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Almost all applications that run on 2.x also run on 3.0 because it's the same JVM.
Careful, or Oracle is going to quote you in its case against Google...
Just what is it that makes iOS so glaringly obviously better? I mean in real, quantifiable ways, not the usual fiction.
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.
"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?
The whole Android system itself is platform independent - you can install Android on an Intel netbook (I have seen netbooks in the shops that are dual booting Android and Windows). So why emulate an ARM processor? Totally doesn't make sense.
Android is platform independent only if you stick to Java/Dalvik. However, pretty much all games, and many other serious apps, use native libraries written in C/C++, calling them via JNI. For many games, most of the code is in fact in C, with only the event loop in Java. At that point, you need to decide on some architecture for those binaries - which, in practice, is invariably ARM. Hence why the emulator needs to emulate ARM.
Take it from someone who owned two Honeycomb tablets (Xoom and Transformer), and now also an iPad 2: Honeycomb is unstable and buggy. Force closes are the norm. Music app crashes when playing any MP3 from one of the albums that I have. The whole thing is pretty slow - even swiping screens with icons left and right is slow, especially if you rotate the tablet from its "normal" orientation (landscape, camera near the top). On some websites - most notably, Slashdot when posting a comment - it's so horrendously slow as to be unusable, which is why I had to resort to Opera Mobile specifically for the sake of those websites; but it has its own problems.
In comparison, iPad is pretty limited in what it can do, but in practice I've found that 90% of the time I spend in the browser anyway, and the remaining is split between mail, games and books, all of which are available on both platforms (and good games in particular are more abundant on iPad - it has Civilization, a StarCraft clone, several good shooters etc). And on iPad, these all are silky smooth, so it ends up being the tablet of choice. That, and its battery life - it's 1 hour more even as far as specs go, but both Honeycomb tablets - and particularly Transformer - seem to leak it faster when sleeping.
That said, I'm still keeping Transformer around, hoping for one of the two things: either Google fixes responsiveness and stability issues in Ice Cream Sandwich (earlier I was hoping for 3.1, but it turned out to be a meh kind of update), or else we finally get a full-fledged Linux distro that can be installed on the thing - and then I'll get a nifty Linux tablet/netbook with loads of battery time (thanks to the keyboard dock). My overall feeling is that the latter is more likely at this moment...
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.
You should understand that there is a difference between how iPhone apps look on iPad, and how Android 2.x apps look on Honeycomb. On iOS, the app is not resized to fit the screen - at best, you can bitmap-scale it 2x, which looks ugly as hell. On Android, the UI designed using standard layouts is dynamic and reflowable, and so it actually resizes to fit. You don't end up with 2x-sized buttons and text and so on. You might end up with a lot of unused space, though, but that depends on the app. Some look meh, but surprisingly many end up looking very good. Most file managers, for example.
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.
You can use C and C++ in Android apps for two years now. In fact, most Android games are 99% C++. And did you think all those file browsers with SMB support implemented it from scratch? They just link to libsamba.
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.
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.
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.
I know a guy trying to do an app in IOS and android. He says the android emulator is rubbish (and he's a java guy in his day job lol) and a big handicap, and that in comparison, the IOS one works perfectly.
Apple gets round the problem by compiling code for x86 in order to run it in their iOS Simulator. Is there any reason that Google couldn't do the same?
For instance, does the increased freedom given to Android developers relative to iOS make it a more difficult thing to implement?
ARM is the same instruction set used by iOS, right? And yet the iPhone/iPad simulator runs at almost real-time. If Apple can do it, why can't Google?
Exactly. We aren't asking for tablet apps because we don't need them. Everything works and looks decent.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Last time I checked the emulator for Android was just qemu. If you don't know what you're talking about, look it up.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
That's not how the iOS one works. It compiles native x86 code to run in the iOS Similator. As a result, the simulator is radically faster than on real hardware (desktop cpu + loads of ram available).
Why can't they do the same for Android?
Because Google has zero experience developing for embedded devices; while Apple has decades, and knows how to do development on its own hardware. Google has none of that experience, and I submit, really doesn't care to.
Google's approach to Android has been to push it out to as many carriers and phone/tablet makers as possible, as fast as possible; so that they would abandon whatever platform/OS they were targeting, and shed their expertise and experience in same. That way, they would be locked-into the Android platform (with the PHBs cheering them on, because they get sucked-in by the "free" (as in beer, not freedom) aspect of Android), and Google would more quickly achieve what everyone agrees is their real goal: Increased Ad Revenue.
I held out getting a smartphone for a long, long time. like, until now. so, there *are* people that are both smartphoneless and/or phoneless.
the data fees turned me off. I found my way to work it out, though. pay as you go and local wifi gets me by on a non-contract (no lock-in, very important for me) non-data (they can't force it when its a-la-carte) and I only make voice calls when I want. mostly its in airplane mode when I'm near wifi; and my carrier (tmobile) finally gives the ability to turn off all 'texts' (annoying juvenile PITA; good riddance!) so that my balance of prepaid won't drain for someone else's jollies. this system is now manageable for me, no crazy data fees or plans or overages. but no data 'right here, right now' - I have to wait until I'm near wifi. and so I take that into consideration. I've lived 40+ years with tech toys and have not *needed* data right-here-right-now. nice to have? yes. needed and can't live without? no. not when you see the fees and costs to join and maintain.
I bought the unlocked nex-1 and I own the farking thing outright, in every way, shape and form. no carrier bullshit here. I can choose which sim to use or even none at all and go full wifi only, even voice. (I do have voice just for the rare times you really do need to make/take calls).
anyway, you can make it work on non-contract and non-data. there's even the 'daily data pass' if you set your phone up for cell-data as well as wifi-data. I just leave my cell config empty so that there's zero chance of any costly outgoing data calls, but if you really want 'here and now' data, you can do that on a per-day basis with prepaid.
contracts are for suckers. I refuse to sign 2 yrs in high tech on a toy like this. I'd rather just own it outright and do as I please.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Do you drive a Ferrari to go to the corner store? Why not, after all it is MUCH better engineered than a Honda! And bass amps? WTF? With bass you have VERY low frequencies that are frankly a royal bitch to reproduce without distortion, especially 5 strings so my amp is nearly $2000. Would I have bought a cheaper one if it didn't muddy up on the low A note? yes but since it wasn't suitable for purpose I had to go with the more expensive.
But, you could get a bass rig that didn't cost $2k and still would reproduce that 27.5 Hz low A bass note. (And I submit your amp does it fine; but I'll bet quite a bit that the speakers and cabinet don't make it down to the fundamental within -3dBspl. 27 Hz is quite low for musical-instrument speakers and cabinet designs. Most of the people on TalkBass are face-palming stupid, BTW).
And it is THAT, that right there, where you are fucking up. Did you catch it? Suitable for purpose. These folks aren't watching 1080p video, hell they ain't even watching 720 or even 480. They aren't wanting to, in no particular order...watch movies, listen to their album collections, do video conferencing, or play FPS games.
And of course, you have a stranglehold on the App Store sales figures to know that? I submit you are talking out your (b)ass; because, there isn't a day goes by that about another half-dozen games (including some pretty graphics-intensive ones) gets released for iOS. As for the rest, I would imagine that people are using their iPads (and to a lesser extent, because of screen-size) their iPhones/iPod Touches) for a very wide variety of things, from recording (8-track GarageBand on a iPad!!!), to controlling their synth rigs, to writing/drawing/composing, and everything in-between.
So WTF would they need with some over engineered device with power blowing out its ass, when ALL THEY WANT is to check their email and read a book?
Because, obviously, that's not all their doing; since they have a tablet (and the apps) that can actually DO those things.
And this is why I'll be getting me and my GF each one. I have NO desire for an "app store", nor do I want to watch movies or play games on the thing because I have a desktop AND a laptop for that.
You just don't get it, obviously. This is a more portable device than either of those things. A laptop is portable; but is just not the same degree of portable. And you know it, or you wouldn't be getting a tablet of ANY kind for you and your GF.
All I want is a little basic tablet, with plenty of battery and easy to slip in a jacket pocket, so I can check my email or catch up on some light reading while I'm waiting in line somewhere.
Oh, I get it! YOU can't see the need; so therefore, there IS no need. Riiiiight.
So look Mr "Macs for All" (Nice ID BTW, enjoy that nice markup on X86?)
Yes, because it buys me nice engineering to go with it. Which you obviously don't "get" in the computer realm; but curiously DO "get" in the musical-equipment realm (and even when it's nothing more than mystical musician-voodoo "knowledge").
if the latest iShiny floats your boat, although what you are even reading about Android if you are a Mac head I don't know, then I'm happy for you.
I'm here because I was interested in what IS holding Android tablets back. Sounds like there are a LOT of disgruntled Android developers out there, and Google isn't exactly stepping up to the plate to address their concerns. It's just an interesting article. Since I assume you don't do Android development, and could care less about having a tablet that can do more than the basics, why are YOU here?
I hear Ferrari is a nice ride but I don't think it is worth the price premium either.
Me neither. That, and about $180,000 (guessing) is why I don't (and probably never w
The people who vote with their wallet say you are wrong.
Facts is Facts.
You can get well over 4GHz out of server chips. The Power6 was a 4.2-5GHz in-order design, while the current mainframe chip (z196) is 5.2GHz out-of-order, and probably has the highest single-thread scalar performance of any processor ever built.
I could spend hours replying inline to your arguments,
But I can't so, this ad hominem attack will have to do...
but another slashdotter summed it all by pointing at your login name.
Add it that your post is factless
I said "Please tell me why anyone in their right mind would buy a Xoom? It costs more than an iPad, doesn't have very many apps (the point of the article), has shorter battery life, slow-ass graphics, etc. The list goes on and on." That doesn't sound "factless" to me. And it was an interrogatory; which you dismiss on the basis of my Username?!? Riiiiight. That's a compelling response...
and you reference "people" that you have no statistics about.
The only reference to the word "people" comes in this sentence: "I'm sure that when you show people your Xoom, that you carefully avoid the rough edges on Android, and take care not to mention stuff like the nonfunctional SD slot."
That was simply making a presumption. Tell me I'm wrong, and that you make sure to point out the Xoom's non-functional SD slot, the dearth of apps, the inadequate GPU, the low battery life, the fact that it actually costs a bit more than an iPad. C'mon, tell me I'm wrong. Show me that my "statistics" are incorrect.
We probably do not revolve around that same 'people' according to what you say.
I actually don't "revolve around" anyone. I do actual research, and form my own opinions.
Keep telling yourself that. And keep telling yourself you didn't make a mistake.
So far I am just fine, thank you.
I'm sure you are. It's amazing the lengths most people will go to to justify a bad decision...
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.