Android On HP TouchPad

NicknamesAreStupid writes "As fast as you can say '$99 blowout sale,' PC World reports on an Android port to the now defunct HP TouchPad. 'Of course, it will turn out to be the best Android pad ever, making the iPad stink by comparison,' reports Muphy's Law Reports."

Comments

"No ecosystem"

[EponymousCustard]

HP have inadvertently discovered how to create huge demand and massive customer base overnight: find the right price point and lots of publicity

Re:"No ecosystem"

[jawtheshark]

I know you are right, but the problem is as following:

• You either have to be significantly cheaper than the iPad to compete on similar capabilities. When I mean "cheaper", I don't mean $50 cheaper, I mean really much cheaper. If it's only 50€ difference, get an iPad, then you get something "known to work". This is the "perceived" value, you talk about. Capabilities includes quality hardware, so the cheaper ones you talk about are not competition.
• Offer something that that the iPad doesn't have and beat it on capabilities while matching the iPads price. That is very hard as the iPad has so much going for it: large installed base, great "walled garden" app store (Which is a "pro" for most people, I assure you) , quality hardware. You simply know what you get... It cannot something that only few people care about, as that will not give you a great install base.

The iPad has become the "Windows of Tablets". The two arguments above are exactly why Windows still rules on the desktop.

Re:"No ecosystem"

[squiggleslash]

I'm not sure either are that hard, and I think people are over-thinking the whole thing.

Tablets are "selling" right now because... well, because they seem like they might be a nice idea, but in practice they don't really do a lot, and they're not that practical. Most people who get them don't really use them that often. And realistically, when they do, it's to browse the web.

Given that, virtually every tablet selling for above $250 or so (which, generally, are tablets that include capacitive touchscreen technology, decent sized screens, etc) is "better" than the iPad, in that 99% of them include Flash. You and I and the average Slashdotter can go in circles as to whether or not Flash is actually a good thing for the web, but there's a world of difference between whether a technology is a good idea, and whether having it available to a user benefits that user. A web browsing device that doesn't support Flash is, right now, a second class web browsing device.

So the question really is, given that, why are they not selling as well as the iPad?

Well, quite honestly, it's the marketing. It's an impressive device rather than a (right now) utilitarian one, and while Apple happens to have done a lot of good innovative work in the last decade and a half, they also have done an astonishing amount of marketing based upon brand image.

Remember that what restored Apple to profitability wasn't Mac OS X, or the iPod's scrollwheel UI, or Firewire. It was the rather weird decision to replace the case of their Beige G3 all-in-one with a retro-shaped translucent colored plastic, and to name the resultant product the iMac.

Like the iPad, the iMac - the first version - sold like hot cakes. It was bundled with Mac OS 8/9, which quite honestly was, at the time, an ugly, kludgy, unstable alien OS that only hard-core fans of the system had any love for. It required an Internet connection or external floppy drive (external hard disks weren't common at the time) to transfer files from it. It didn't even have an outstanding software base at the time, as most of the software world had given up on the Mac platform.

But it sold. It sold because Apple marketed the hell out of it, and concentrated on it as a device that looked nice rather than had some kind of specific functionality that you had to have.

Now, Apple's ads for the iPad do spend a lot of time concentrating on functionality, but it's notable that - step away from the RDF for a second - and virtually nothing it's advertised as doing is something it's particularly good at, at least compared to a comparatively priced laptop or a much, much, much, cheaper e-reader. Why do the ads look impressive? Because they concentrate on the look of the functionality rather than the functionality. Nothing you see is something that works better on an iPad, but virtually everything you see looks really slick and aesthetically amazing.

Beating Apple is going to be hard for the moment. The major decider will be whether tablets take off in general. Once they become things everyone's accustomed to, I think the importance of functionality will become more of an issue. Until then, if it's going to be a beauty contest, and right now it is, you can't expect the supermodel to lose against the greasy engineer.

Re:Best Android Tablet ever?

[neokushan]

No, it's obviously much simpler than that: Price.
When it comes to android tablets, there's a lot of high-end offerings that can compete with the iPad in terms on performance, the problem is that they cost as much as (if not more) than the iPad.
Then there's the other end of the spectrum - the "cheap" android tablets. They're cheap in every regard: resistive screens, slow processors and minimal memory, they're mere toys. The fact that the touchpad is flying off the shelves shows that people are waiting for decent tablets to come down in price and don't care if it's not an iPad.

Android's tablet offerings could learn from this (And yes, I know it would be impossible to produce this tablet at this price and make a profit).

Terrible article. Terrible summary.

[HumanEmulator]

The "summary" makes it sound like a port is available now, and then throws in an iPad comparison that's nowhere in the original article. From TFA:

"Figure this will take a good long while. Keep your expectations very low and for now enjoy WebOS..."

and my favorite...

"Further complicating the initiative, some of the developers don't yet have TouchPads."

So this is 3 guys planning a porting effort of an older version of Android. (Google hasn't released the source code to Honeycomb yet.) Also from TFA:

"Still, people who bought it took a risk, since it's not clear if HP will continue to develop the operating system."

Really, that's not clear? You think HP might be planning major OS updates for a tablet they just fire-saled?

Re:Terrible article. Terrible summary.

[netsharc]

Indeed...

Hey PCWorld, I'm planning on porting Android to the iPad, no I don't have an iPad yet, I have no time and I have no idea how to do it, but I have a wiki. Why don't you write an article about me?

Well, it was fucking PCWorld. Should've expected that shit from them.

Re:Logical contradiction

[Dracos]

Mods, please irrevocably suspend user account MyCleanAss (#2444274) as an obvious spammer. Also, please pursue legal action against this person who is clearly violating the Geeknet terms of use.

Re:Logical contradiction

[DarwinSurvivor]

Perhaps the mods should modify the script to auto suspend any account who links to MyCleanPC?

TFTY