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Is Tablet Success Bound To Their Crackability?
Hitting the front page for the first time, rippeltippel writes "The Economist recently published an article about HP quitting the tablet market. Nothing new I said, until I read 'the announcement showed that the firm had finally seen the light about the tablet market — namely, that there is no such thing.' But are the games closed with the iPad as a clear winner? Possibly not: 'hackers have embraced the Nook, "rooting" its underlying Linux software ... so it can run many more applications from Google's online app store and elsewhere.'
A review on Amazon's Kindle tablet page reads: 'They've cracked it — this is the future.' Can it possibly be read as 'Crackable tablets are the future of tablets?'"
Smartphone vendors seem to have gotten the message: users want to control the software on their phones. It is a shame that Palm/HP, who were one of the only vendors open from the start, more or less lost the game. Unfortunately it seems that tablet and ebook reader vendors have yet to get the message.
HTC seems to have been the only one to actually "get" it with the others having pretty locked down phones including e-fuse locked down bootloaders.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
So hackers like it but do companies want hackers as their customers?
Fickle and prone to viciously turning on anything for any perceived slight does not sound like big pluses for a target market, let alone their "love" for the nook is because it is cheap.
Have people seen the light? Is the current cycle of the curated computing craze coming to an end?
I sure hope so.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
in every nook and cranny
What most people want from a tablet is email, web and angry birds. Anything beyond that is just gravy. Frankly, I dont see much in the way of serious software for tablets due to hardware limitations. This is the same problem thats plagued the form factor since its inception back in the late 80s. Too much simply requires a keyboard and mouse. A tablet and touch interface works best for viewing content, not creating.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Very vocal minority are making noise that they want hackable widgets. How about some statistics showing just how many widgets are actually hacked? Is it even 5%?
The real story, much to the chagrin of the FOSS fan boyz is that sometimes closed and functional will sell better than clunky but open.
Tablets will become successful once the price drops. They are being marketed as a replacement for a PC or laptop, with appropriate price. But for most people, they perform badly as a replacement (who wants to input a long document with one hand, or place the screen on a horizontal surface to use two hands?). Once they are marketed as and sold at the price of what they are, a portable media center and multimedia player, I am sure more people will start getting them as a third or fourth machine (behind desktop, laptop, and phone).
The iPad is so successful because of high quality industrial design and ease of use. Software is everything. If you focus on "crackability" you'll be as successful as Linux on the desktop.
"Smartphone vendors seem to have gotten the message: users want to control the software on their phones. It is a shame that Palm/HP, who were one of the only vendors open from the start, more or less lost the game."
If users really wanted to control the software on their phones then Palm/HP, who were one of the only vendors open from the start, wouldn't have more or less lost the game, now would it? If the control was what users wanted, would they buy devices with no keyboards on which they can't even run their own software if it doesn't get a blessing from The Man? The sad truth is that users don't give a damn about freedom. We here do, but they don't. They just want to have a cooler version of TV which they can take with them and impress their friends with all of the apps they have. This is sad but true.
Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect)
Irrelevant. What we want isn't what most people want. The catch is that we can have what we want without impacting what most people want, but they actively fight to deny it.
And who is in first place again? https://www.idooble.com/posts/1434 Amusingly enough when you add HTCs android share and Windows Mobile share, you get 20% of the market, with only Apple having more.
Which is fine, really, considering that all you need for "keyboard and mouse" is just a bluetooth keyboard for the tablets. My Acer Iconia A500 has been surprisingly useful, especially once I added a Bluetooth keyboard to the mix. If I expect to do content creation (documents, etc...) I just tote along two lightweight devices instead of one. Bam! Everything my netbook was supposed to do and didn't quite provide.
Having said this, for many, they don't need more than the 200-300 dollar devices (with 3G/4G access...)- the stuff we're seeing is more pricey toys than much else.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Which is fine, really, considering that all you need for "keyboard and mouse" is just a bluetooth keyboard for the tablets.
So you end up with an expensive, underpowered laptop with lousy ergonomics. Sounds like a win!
That's not to say you can't so work with them. In fact, I do. But tablets are about consumption right now, and Apple's taught that dog to hunt. Tech folks need to step out of Mom's basement and realize that the rest of us just want to be able to do shit, and if we've got $500 to drop on a toy like the iPad, we sure as hell have $40 a month to pay for content through the iTMS.
If you buy a $150-$200 tablet so that you can rip/download content and serve it up in its native format, it means working on that house of cards to get everything operating. I know, I set up a media center PC and a usenet scraper, and have MyMedia to catalog my movies after I rip them. It's all quite snazzy, but God damned it takes too much time to keep running and if anything goes wrong my wife looks at me like she's never seen a PC or a remote control and expects me to fix it.
Tablets are about quick access to things you want to do. It's all the things you want a smartphone to do, but in the right form factor and without having to worry about making or receiving phone calls (and in return you can't put a tablet in your pocket).
Those of us who go back far enough to remember programming in BASIC to generate stats for D&D characters should be the ones to realize that these are not computers as we know them, but entertainment devices. Once you get past that hurdle, the usefulness of tablets makes a lot more sense.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
The N900 had very high crackability, and still failed in the big market. Its proper successor (not the N9, the N950), was just for developers, and very few were made, even where it would have been a dream for the ones wanting an even more crackable phone.
There are people that want something that just work, and the ones that want to push the limits of what their devices can do, but the last group is a small minority compared with what companies seek as a market.
What? HTC locks their bootloaders and forces you to void your warranty (for real, by permanently modifying part of your EFS) to unlock them. Meanwhile Samsung's bootloaders are completely unlocked from the start, and they really don't seem to care at all what you do with the phone - I sent back a rooted Galaxy S running a custom ROM for warranty repairs and they sent back a new one, no questions asked. I think LG leaves their bootloaders wide open, too.
Motorola could be a wild card in this regard now that they're owned by Google. We'll see.
Until you dock it which turns it into a workstation (of sorts). I expect this is the future.
HTC has the advantage of not having chintzy hardware either.
They appear to have decent designers, even Sense has some nice features (though I eventually reverted back to Cyanogen on my G2, mostly to get 2.3 though).
All of their phones I've seen have been pretty solid feeling, and decent. I feel the same-way about LG, they have the best low-end stuff by far IMO.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Smartphone vendors seem to have gotten the message: users want to control the software on their phones.
Users have sent no such message. Actual users are perfectly happy with the vendor's app stores. Actual users don't even realize that Apple's app store is curated and the various Android app stores are not. People cracking/rooting phones to get greater control are a tiny tiny tiny minority.
There is only one tablet that sells in significant numbers, and that's the iPad. Apple knows how to make highly polished and easy to use devices, and that's what people want: stuff that "just works". Everybody else who jumped on the tablet bandwagon after Apple created it is a poor imitation, but one you have to pay about the same price for. Given a choice between a knock off an the same price for the 'real thing', most people will chose the real thing, which gives you all the advantages of the app store and so on.
People don't care if it's hackable, outside a really, really tiny niche of geeks. The 99% of the population doesn't even know what that *means*, let alone care. They care if it's an iPad.
You need to friend HTC on Facebook. You're out of date.
If I used a sig over again, would anyone notice?
Motorola promised an unlocked bootloader for the Atrix 4G with the Gingerbread update, but that never happened. Thank god for Pudding!
Smartphone and Tablet manufacturers are only after the mass market. The mass market doesn't give a shit about writing their own apps, or doing anything they didn't pay an extra fee for. It's not a computer to them; it's a toaster. Not only that, they also don't give a shit that it's weak hardware that barely runs a browser, as long as it browses at all.
You're not going to see tablets evolve the same way general computing did, because there is no need to humor the computer geeks as Joe Sixpack wants to check his mail, get driving directions, and buy movie tickets on his phone already....which is easier to monetize on a closed, restrictive system.
The success of a tablet in the hacker community hinges on the ability to hack it.
The success of a tablet in the community at large has nothing at all to do with packability, as the iPad 2 shows.
On a side note you can also do "well" in the tablet space by giving away $450 of hardware for $100. I am not sure how many companies can enjoy that level of "success" for long though.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
> Which is fine, really, considering that all you need for "keyboard and mouse" is just a bluetooth keyboard for the tablets.
Except that is not all that I need by a long stretch.
On a "pack light" trip to Europe, the iPad will be left behind because of it's limitations. Leaving the laptop behind is not an option because we may need to take advantage of a full web browser including flash. The iPad is convenient but redundant.
It's artificial limitations matter in the real world (or real web). It's being left home.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
One more time for the good times...
Apples model is working just fine. The average retail consumer (read that as not geeks) could care less that they cannot SSH or recompile the linux kernel on the damn thing. It does what they want the most.
The non-average consumer of this device ( read that as - Kaiser Permanente and other large corporate consumers ) is really really happy with it. The can write and distribute their own programs for it, get programming support etc. etc. from Apple, distribute those programs from their very own little walled garden and keep the rank and file from installing god alone knows what and breaking the damn thing.
Geeks will find a way to jail break the thing so they can SSH, etc, etc, and try to re-compile the linux kernel on the damn thing because that is what geeks do.
I know ALL of the FOOS geeks out there want desperately for Apple to fail, but guess what kids, that aint gonna happen. Jail break that damn thing and have fun with it, but please stop bitching and moaning about Apples successful business model since it makes you sound like nothing more the babies.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
If you are doing a form of business with your tablet or phone, do you really want to operate in an environment where security is deliberately compromised?
Do you want your employees carrying compromised machines and potentially have your company's data lifted?
Do you want the potential downtime when cracked devices go awry?
Do you have that much free time to play?
Possibly not: 'hackers have embraced the Nook, "rooting" its underlying Linux software ... so it can run many more applications from Google's online app store and elsewhere.'
Please... since when has "Hackers hacked this" brought something into the mainstream? While it may make it a topic of conversation on tech blogs for a while, and increase user base slightly (niche product, adding another niche user group), hacking is not mainstream. While I have read all day long on most of these blogs that a kinect can do really cool things and are totally hackable and awesome, even living in silicon valley and surrounded by engineers I only know 1 or 2 actual people who own one, and they just use it as it was intended. Same goes for the Nook. The only person I know who owns one of them is my Grandmother (true story), and she picked it because it seemed less complicated then an iPad for reading books.
I love the hacker community and I love being a part of it, I believe that the work we do trying new things and extending functionality of existing products shapes the future. But let us be honest, the mainstream adopts the end solution, not the hack. I see a future with augmented reality, virtual presence, and computers aware of your presence and position in space are common place. But these devices won't be powered by hacked kinects, but what was inspired by them.
- Holy crap, I've got MOD points! Who thought that was a good idea.
That is where it is now, what about in 2 or 3 years? Could we see a tablet that is as powerful as most laptops? You take a iPad 2 for example and add to it a ZAGG keyboard/case you now have effectively created your laptop. Is it cost effective no, but it could be someday, could it not?
No. The iPad has proven that dramatically.
Next question.
...no.
Enough with the wish-thinking, nerds. Hackers just aren't as populous as non-hackers and never will be, and it's the latter who are buying tablets in droves.
..pretty much from the get-go. Ok, it had Win7 pre-installed, but within minutes I had my favorite Linux distro running. Now I can write and use apps in basically any language available, you name it: python, java, assembler, perl, - hell, even lolcode!
Don't get any more hackable than this, but it didn't take off even though it was priced way below Apple's product; how so? Because most people are not really that geeky as TFA might want you to believe. They want their tweaks to be nicely packaged, preferrably with dozens of youtube tutorials on how to apply them, they don't really want to know what's behind or learn how stuff actually works. Sad, but that's the way it is...
Welcome to the future. Motorolas Atrix - a smartphone that turns into a laptop.
The CEO of HP is an idiot. Their product was way overpriced for what it is. at $99.00 it flew off the shelves because $99 is a impulse buy price point.
People will pay for a OPEN and NICE tablet that is REASONABLY priced. those three keywords need to be met.
Also if you are not Apple, then you have zero chance if you price your tablet the same as an iPad. Sorry, that' just reality.
Make a android tablet that is not locked in any way. use plain Jane Android and make it fast as well built for $259-$359. If you price it OVER $359 and it's not better built than the iPad you have an automatic fail.
the iPad sells better than anything else and the competition has to offer more for a lower price. Look at car companies. BMW is the standard and Kia makes an awesome luxury car with the Optima, it really is! go drive ne you will be surprised! but they had to offer a LOT at a very low price to get people to buy them.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
They're a *bookseller*; to riff on the "Gillette strategy", the Nook's the handle and the e-books/e-mags are the consumable blades. That's why they told MS to get stuffed on their patent-troll lawsuit; they want to minimize the cost of the reader to get you hooked, then sell you content. Paying danegeld to Ballmer isn't part of that strategy.
For me, I'm interested in the 7" form factor, but if it's locked to one book source, not so much. A vanilla Android tablet will support the Kindle *AND* Nook apps, Aldiko reader, etc. A hacked Nook Color (giving them points for telling off MS) might be just about right.
lousy ergonomics?
A bluetooth keyboard and mouse will (assuming you don't choose poorly) have much better ergonomics than a laptop keyboard and "mouse". The laptop screen being attached to they keyboard also provides extremely poor ergonomics since either the screen is too low or the keyboard too high. And yes you could just use the bluetooth keyboard and mouse with the laptop, but now you aren't using the keyboard on the laptop so why not get a tablet?
*Note: I don't use tablets, I use a laptop, but a tablet plus bluetooth mouse/keyboard plus some aort of stand for the tablet is the same ergonomics as a desktop machine which is *way* better than that of a laptop.
>> touch interface works best for viewing content, not creating
you are right, like 90% of all users are consumers, not creators.
Before I RTFS, I thought it meant tablets cracking> and people having to buy new ones. I mean how durable can they be? Then I RTFS..
its price, gee we cant sell these tablets for 500$ mark them down to 99$ so we can forget we even wasted our time
holy fuck we sold out in a matter of hours it must have been that crackability that wont come for a week
stupid article
Some of us demand crackability, but it's such a pain in the ass for most people and normal use. Even when rooting iPad was trivial I was the only one I knew personally with a rooted iPad. For most people, why bother? There are a lot of people here in my office who bought the cheap TouchPads, but only a couple of them are excited about putting Android on them - mostly it's just' Heck, for $99, it's useful enough!'
If Amazon comes out with a $300 Ice Cream Sandwich tablet that's 10 inch, quad core, decent screen, etc. etc. I'd probably snag it even if it weren't crackable (it probably be cracked after a while, but I wouldn't require it). For $200, instantly.
Note that what Nielsen calls "market share," isn't, by the common definition. It's actually installed base, which is a trailing indicator. People who bought phones almost two years ago, and haven't upgraded because they're under contract and not eligible for a subsidy are in those numbers. "Q2 market share" should refer to sales during Q2, not how many people owned a brand.
Since Android sales have been increasing faster than iPhone sales, Android market share is actually greater than what Nielsen implies.
Where Nielsen's "market share" shows Android/iOS at 39% / 28%, NPD's report on true market share (sales) shows 52% / 29%.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Here is, IMO, the most telling line in the article:
just because Apple has a runaway success on its hands, they cannot charge Apple prices for their hastily developed me-too products
And that is exactly how I feel. Don't get me wrong, I've been a PC guy since kindergarten, and while I do own a few Apple products, it is largely because I get paid to develop apps. I still hate OSX and IOS for being so restrictive and toy-like, but the one thing I can't take away from Apple is that when they put out an idea, they run with it. Everyone else sees dollar signs and rushes to copy what they see, which is like those bums on the street selling fake Rolexes. They all fail to appreciate what truly makes the iPad unique: it's idiot-proof! The other two tablets suffer from their PC ancestry: too many stupid goddamned apps and knobs and tweaks that should not be necessary on such a limited-usage device. Fire up a brand new iPad and you have about a dozen apps on the home screen. Fire up a brand new Android and that app menu is over 50 icons long. It's overwhelming, and most people will never use about 48 of those 50 apps :P
The impression I get is that the Android and Blackberry folks don't give two shits about interface design and usability. If these things have been put through user testing, they need to replace those useless users because there is no way in hell my mother would feel comfortable with one of their devices. Heck, it took me a few minutes just to figure out how to get Angry Birds on the wife's Android. But the iPad ? I just handed it to her, told her that "Safari is the internet" and off she went. Now she has every goddamned Popcap game under the sun installed, with no further interaction from me. That says a lot about how little thought went into the knockoff products.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Yes, yes, yes. 1 million times yes!
Manufacturers of (non-apple) tablets, I say to you on behalf of all of /.:
WE DO NOT WANT YOUR WALLED GARDEN. THOSE OF US THAT DO HAVE ALREADY BOUGHT AN IPAD. THE FIRST OF YOU THAT CAN DEVELOP A DECENT, OPEN-SPEC/DRIVER TABLET THAT CAN BE SUPPORTED INDEFINITELY THROUGH THE OPEN SOURCE COMMUNITY WILL SELL MILLIONS.
By the way, geeks aren't the only ones who want this...even my sis-in-law of average computer-savviness figured out how to get CM7 on her smartphone.
Pads are a fad. Trying to type anything on a touchscreen is horrible. Thats why a laptop is and will always be a better portable computing option for doing anything practical.
By far the biggest reason the iPad sold so many is that its an Apple product. On its release it plugged right into the existing market of rabid buy-anything-Apple-makes fanbois.
I know several people that have bought an iPad. They all have one thing in common: After the novelty wears off in about 2 weeks, they don't actually touch their iPads other than to play games.
Honestly, Flash is not a really good reason to pack a laptop. I spent 5 months travelling across 3 countries with a 1st gen eeePC, and I don't recall visiting a single Flash-requiring website. I was getting tired of the weight of the pack as it was, a laptop would've been murder. What I probably would've missed is the ability to run OpenVPN, and a few things of that ilk. I would've had to go to the trouble of setting up a proper L2TP VPN, etc. I might have run into a few connection problems here and there. But I suspect an iPad would probably have worked out just fine. If you're serious about packing light, don't take any kind of damn computer. Even the iPad weighs too much really, and you will be constantly worrying about someone stealing it, especially because, like me, you will have made it into your primary link back home. My advice is to organise your trip around locally-available means of communication. No, I wouldn't follow my advice either, but that's being a geek for you ;)
Rgasuya aata! : I have been coding Perl and cannot tell where my fingers are now!
Depends on your definitions of "real web" and "pack light", no? I would argue carrying a laptop is by definition not packing light. Heck, carrying any computing device isn't. For many people, an iPad is sufficient. It's all I carried on my last Europe trip, and I surely didn't miss Flash based websites for the few times I was web browsing at all in Burgundy.
Biggest issue was that O2 in all their wisdom refused to sell me a prepaid 3G data SIM without a French bank account.
If you bother with a bluetooth keyboard and mouse, than you've got a device that is significantly less portable than a tablet, would require more time to set up, and would be far more limited in where you could use it, and many of the places where you could sort of use it would result in ergonomics inferior to a laptop. I will concede that a laptop has inferior ergonomics to a properly positioned desktop with a monitor, but I wouldn't call it extremely poor. Extremely poor fits better for a tablet design, as it has the keyboard, mouse, and screen all on the same plane
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Bingo. The iPad is to tablets as the original Macintosh was to GUI computers. We're only on the second generation tablets, there's really no telling where this will go.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
After all, the iPad can also be cracked to be as open as you want.
And now you have three devices with batteries that you need to charge and worry about running out. If I connect a mouse and/or keyboard to a laptop, there still is one power source to worry about.
Also, for a tablet+keyboard+mouse you need a desk, you can put a laptop on your, well, lap and only need a chair to sit on.
When it comes to tablets, there are only losers.
iPad isn't the only tablet. All others support flash including the Iconia 500 which the OP mentioned having.
A review on Amazon's Kindle tablet page is a sure sign that the tide is turning!
I mean I do love hacking my gadgets, but I'm part of a very small minority, that vast, vast majority of people don't want to hear about hacking.
What people do want is something easy, safe, and that does what they want. Free is good too, but most people are not ready to hack for "free" instead of "5 bucks". I think the issue right now is Tablets not doing what people want. Things like accessing my LAN/NAS should NOT require a hack or an app for a device whose main fucntion is to watch my f**ing media !
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
....let me do as I please with it. Why would I want a computer or device that I can't use any way I'd like? I don't buy tables from the furniture store and have to agree to never use them as anything but a table -- not a desk, not a step ladder, not for parts for the neighbor kids treehouse, etc, etc. So why would I want to buy a computer of any sort, that is entirely limited by the manufacturer? That's why I haven't gotten excited about all these eReaders and Pads yet.
They've gotten the message, but they responded with "Then let them eat cake"
That is true, just look at Windows. However, you have to have some extremely tight market control to maintain a closed monopoly. Blackberry tried it, and failed. Most people just hate giving up BBM, but not enough to leave a sinking ship. Apple tried it with the iPhone, but iTunes isn't that captivating, really. Unless it has a trick up its sleeve besides patents, the iPad has no clear advantage, software or hardware, that can't be recreated. Unless they can have exclusive content, the way other monopoly platforms do (or are super cheap, like a windows pc), they can't ultimately hold out.
The iPod held out for a long time, but that didn't translate to the iPhone. Most mp3 players were shit. Companies that make cellphones saw Apple coming onto their own turf, though, and they have much more pull at the carrier. But the tablet market isn't as clear. We'll see how soon iPad is displaced. I think it will be slower, due to different turf. But I don't see the tablet having the iPod effect, because there are major players in it who aren't about to just give up.
I8-D
You need to friend HTC on Facebook. You're out of date.
My god. Is this what the world is coming to? Friending soulless corporations on Facebook to get info?
Everyone off my lawn please. I'd like a couple of moments of silence to grieve.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I've tried HTC* - only thing less stable are the 3 blackberries** the bosses insisted I use.
As far as I can tell, the need for HTX phones to be open is to let users fix the software.
*: It would crash every 2-3 days
**: Generally, they've all crashed daily, forcing me at least weekly to pull the battery and the find that while crashing they ate half the charge somehow. Customers cannot call me, as 66% of the time my phone is waiting for my PIN after crashing.
Captain: Who will speak for all of you?
-silence-
Captain: Here, you.
Villagers: Fetch Gruber! It should be Gruber!
No.
You would like to believe this and you would like others to believe this but it's really not the case.
It is you who are mistaken. If sales were due to hype, eventually sales would taper off as the fad wore off.
But sales have been strong and continuously growing ever since the release of the iPad. That is not the sign of a fad, but a product that people genuinely enjoy and recommend to others.
You can also tell by the number of people who use them in public, if they were just a fad they would get left on shelves at home.
You cannot admit they are useful, therefore you are blinded to why they succeed...
If you want to make a claim like that you must have some evidence for it; but all the evidence points the other way.
Fanboys even like to cultivate this idea by comparing Apple to the likes of BMW. (another conspicuous consumption brand)
BMW's are a bit of status, but mostly about driving.. there are other cars you would get if all your cared about was looks. BMW's are rather bland otherwise.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's all about how much I have to pay to sit on the couch and quick check my email during a commercial, without having to lug out my 15" laptop. For me that'd be about $100 to $150. When I saw that the iPad was doing well at a $500+ price point I just assumed that it was half apple rep pushing the price up higher, and half me being a big cheapskate. Then the whole TouchPad thing happened and we got a whole bunch of good data. Here's what we can learn:
1. At $99 people will fight for your tablets. I saw two people here ditch work and race to the local Meijers when they heard that there might be one or two left there (there wasn't).
2. By checking scalpers prices, I can deduce that about $235 (16 gig), and $250 (32 gig) is where people stop buying them on impulse.
3. Your 'casual' market doesn't give a flying rip about apps. They'll use it if it's there, but that's not why they're buying tablets.
The tablets that have to be cracked, in order to function properly, are clearly going to be the leaders of the market.
When I see that, then people can claim that tablets are for "real" work. I hope it is soon, I hate the "toy" phase so many devices go through.
I8-D
The first thing I do when I buy a computer is wipe everything that came on it and install Linux. If I can't do that, it's not a computer --- it's an appliance, or a toy. Most computer users may not be Linux users, but I think a lot of people (subconsciously or otherwise) realize that if they can't do what they want with a computer device they're looking at buying, they don't want it either.
Liberty in your lifetime
Since when is "friend" a verb? I enemy that.
Wow, what a bold deduction. Too bad it doesn't account for the fact that nobody wanted these devices before they were discounted deeply.
Give any polished turd away at a loss and I predict droves of people who yearn for 'something for nothing' will flock to get that 'deal'.
Imagination drew in bold strokes, instantly serving hopes and fears, while knowledge advanced by slow increments...
just a bluetooth keyboard for the tablets
Do you realize that at least 80% of the population in the US likely could not figure out how to pair a bluetooth keyboard to a tablet? It might as well not exist for the majority of consumers.
The Nook's strength is that it's a cheap Android tablet - the fact that it's rootable means you can install your own apps on it, which is important. If it weren't cheap, hackers would root some other cheap Android tablet, or consumers would buy some other cheap tablet that does let them install software.
The issue for the bookstore tablet vendors is that they want to be able to sell DRM'd books, but enforcing that on a non-locked tablet is difficult.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
There's no doubt that the generic and modular hardware and multiple software options contributed (even propelled) the PC desktop market. We not only need to be able to be able to customize our tablets' software, but to be able to choose different hardware vendors as well. Android is doing a good job, it can satisfy power users as well as casual users, and power users don't mind being cut off from drm-encumbered services if it means we can customize as much as we want. That's a good trade-off, compared to being locked in to the DRM environment with no choice whatsoever, or being forced to crack it and jump through hoops every time there's an update and being vulnerable if you don't elect to update because you're working on jailbreaking it first.
Twinstiq, game news
Depends on what is it you need to do.
If I was on a truly "pack light" trip that wasn't work related, I wouldn't need a laptop. The ability to check my gmail from a wifi hotspot is all I really need. In fact, when I visit my parents or the in-laws, I only bring the iPad, and it works out perfect. I also have big enough memory cards (and spares) in my cameras that I don't offload while on the road anyway, so I don't need to do that. (If I go over the 20GB or so of memory cards I've got ... well, they're easy to get.)
Lack of Flash for me is a non-issue ... I don't have Flash installed on any machine that I don't use for work. In fact, I don't think I can name a single application of Flash that impacts me ... occasionally, I watch something on You Tube, but they've already converted everything.
To me, what you perceive as an artificial limitation, I perceive as functionality that I wouldn't install on a machine anyway.
Now, obviously, what you need out of a machine on a trip can only be defined by you ... for me, the iPad is more suited to that than a laptop. In fact, if there weren't a few things that I might truly did need my laptop for, I wouldn't even bring it on business trips. The last few, except for airport security, it didn't even come out of the bag.
Just out of curiosity, what is Flash based that you can't live without? I've avoided it for almost a decade, so I genuinely don't know what that might be.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I'm sure they'd rather have hackers as customers than as enemies. Let us boot into a custom environment, I don't care if you cut us off from anything DRM-laden, I didn't want that anyway. Even if I do, I can boot into that environment. Choice is good. Just don't be an asshole and remove the option of booting into a custom environment "in future products" or somesuch bullshit.
Twinstiq, game news
Market Share is NOT Sales. You are a retarded shit.
Now that we've totally lost the war to reserve the word "hack" for what hard-core coders do only (tinkering with their devices and making software run), and not what blackhat infiltrators do, (accessing systems illicitly), I guess it was only a matter of time before someone started using "crack" wrong too.
"average schmuck"? Hell, 99,5% of the users don't care about this at all. they just want a device that works.
Stop making a big deal about something that is for a super small group of users. jezz.
How so? I was under the same understanding, which had removed HTC from the running for my next phone replacement.
Have they changed their minds about that or something?
Hard to believe that many serious jobs don't require serious software, and neither do all serious people. Of course, Geeks want a TopLiberator 5000 to open a bottle. For many people, less is more.
The only reason that anyone would ever buy a computer that they cannot run any arbitrary software they want to is ignorance, or not bothering to think about whether or not they can before they buy it.
There is indeed a tablet market, and the problem with the tablet market isn't platform or product related. The problem is Wallstreet related. Corp execs have been neutered. If companies come up with a product that is not successful within 1 or 2 quarters, they can it. There is no staying power anymore. This problem is not limited to the technology sector. Execs are soooo obsessed with short term profits and "pleasing the stockholders" their judgement becomes clouded, and they're lacking in vision or plans for long term sustainability, thereby failing the very stockholders they claim to serve.
I once worked for a company that stated their priorities were: 1. Shareholders, 2. Diversity, 3. Customers, 4. Employees, 5. Environment, 6. Etc. Time to bail! Glad I did. Company went down the tubes. They no longer exist, well, not entirely - the CEO was canned and they were bought out by a bigger fish. Lesson: Put your customers and employees first, and all the rest will fall into place, and your shareholders will be happy.
Please. You should be happy that he's using facebook in unintended ways. Just because they write "friend" on the button doesn't mean you have to treat it like a friendship.
I am trolling
He wasn't comparing iOS with Android (iOS has outsold Android, btw, in TOTAL sales to date, and at least as recent as June, the *iPhone* has outsold all Android devices combined).
But back to the original claim, the iPhone is the top-selling smartphone handset. The handset OS market share breakdown might be something along the lines of 50% Android, 30% iOS (where's iPod touch and iPad?), but Android's 50% is split among many manufacturers, so the OP's claim is correct.
The only successful tablet in the marketplace is as locked down as they come ... so I'm going to guess that its a No.
If you think 'People' want to hax0r thier tablets, you're a ... and let me see this as clearly as possible so you get the point ... you are an ignorant fool.
'People' just want to run cool apps, browse the web, and fuck around on their tablets. 'People' don't give a flying fuck about running Android on a HP tablet, or Linux on a Nook, or installing Cydia on their iPads.
'People' are not 'Geeks'. This story seems to think that the general population cares about the same shit that geeks do. This is in fact why the other tablets keep failing and why Geeks will never rule the world. NOT EVERYONE THINKS LIKE YOU AND DOES THE SAME SHIT, in fact, most of the rest of the world doesn't want anything to do with the crap you do.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
In Canada we get boned. Having to deal with Rogers and their policy that if you do ANYTHING to your phone you get kicked off the network. I got so ripped off from the original Android experience that it would take a cold day in Hades before I'd even think of getting another one in Canada. It makes Apple look like Open Source.
There is no Tablet Market.
1) There is an 'i' market for iPod/iPhone/iPad etc. This is a high end market where buyers only consider which model(s) to buy and no other brand can enter, mainly because of the App Store.
2) There is, at a somewhat lower level of pricing, an Android market for phones, tablets, transformers (with keyboard) and netbooks. Brand does not matter. Price probably does.
3) There is a lower price market for eReaders and other tablet shaped devices, as long as they are inexpensive and do one thing well.
4) There is a separate corporate market which overlaps somewhat with the above and also includes WM6.x and Blackberry.
WebOS tried to be in the 'i' market, but wasn't. It wasn't Android so failed to be in the second. It wasn't given time to be in 4. Price cutting put it firmly into 3 where it was a success (but lost money).
WP7 tried to create a new market (though MS failed to realise this) and failed. It didn't keep faith with 4 because there was no compatability and it didn't have corporate features. It wasn't Apple, it wasn't Android and it wasn't cheap. It was also Kin Mark 2 and who wanted that ?
Perhaps. If it was anything else besides Facebook I wouldn't be so depressed. But between Dick Cheney, George W. Bush and Facebook, well you've pretty much sewn up all of the evil in the world....
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The article says that "The ultimate killer feature that Android and other tablets have failed to replicate is the care Apple took from the start to ensure enough iPhone applications were available that took full advantage of the iPad’s 9.7-inch screen. Today, over 90,000 of the 475,000 applications available online from Apple’s App Store fully exploit the much larger screen size. By contrast, only a paltry 300 or so of the nearly 300,000 apps for Android phones have been fully optimised for the Honeycomb version of the Android operating system developed for tablets—though many of the rest scale up with varying degrees of success."
If this is the "ultimate killer feature" that distinguishes iPads from Android tablets, you'd think there would be some basis for them saying that only 300 Android applications are optimized for Honeycomb. What is that basis? They do not say. An educated guess is that some months ago some unofficial lists of which applications are Honeycomb optimized were created, and at least one of those lists tallies only 300 or so applications. But this means nothing, it is just a random list made by some random person out there, which never claims that it lists all, or even a significant fraction of which applications are Honeycomb optimized. This is a rather paltry basis for what is supposed to be a killer feature.
I have an Android Honeycomb tablet - a Samsung 10.1 Galaxy Tab running Android 3.1 (Honeycomb). I also have two applications, the more popular one of which is optimized for Honeycomb. But that Honeycomb-optimized application of mine is on none of those lists of Honeycomb-optimized applications, it is one of the many applications which are not counted in that "300" number.
I have downloaded many applications for my Honeycomb tablet - so far 100% have been usable in Tablet format. Maybe 5% of the applications are badly optimized - they only use 1/5 or so of the screen space. Another 10% or so are fine, but could probably benefit with more tablet optimization - larger text size, bigger buttons.
The 300 Android to 90000 iPad comparison is ludicrous - my Honeycomb-optimized application is not counted in that 300, and I'm sure many hundreds, or thousands of other Honeycomb-optimized apps are not included. Google already has a lot of features which make tablet development easier, such as Fragments - which is part of the compatibility package, making it doable for even early versions of Android. Ice Cream Sandwich will come out later this year and further ease smartphone/tablet integration.
I should point out that Android is not just playing the following tail lights game. Google TV devices are built on Android as well. Smartphones was the first big market, and then tablets, but who knows what devices Android will target and try to replace in the future?
What a surprise (not). In other news "Crackable PCs decreed the success of the PC". You can install any OS on any computer, maybe with some gimmicks as in the case of Hackintoshes. That's why you can start with Windows XP, install Vista, then Win7 or Linux all on the same hardware. Most computers run the same OS for all their lifetime but crackability of computer is taken for granted by everybody. Is it not a surprise that the crackability of those little but quite powerful computers known as smartphones and tablets could be a very desirable feature at least for some people. The surprise is that they've been locked down and consumers seldom raised an eyebrow. There have been attempts at building locked down PCs but they went nowhere. Would anybody buy a locked down computer? Even Macs are not locked down. Why tablets and smartphones should be any different?
Rojnet.Com | Doru, Tarafsz Güncel Haber
http://www.rojnet.com
Sure, crackability is a selling point that will result in a more units sold, with sales profit increase of x dollars. But an oft-cracked tablet that let's people do what they want means that they won't do things the way we're telling them to, which would have earned us y dollars. For now, pretty clearly x y, or at least I think so. That makes the answer to the question "no".
Is anyone else cringing when they see company websites as
http://facebook.com/facelessssoullesscorp
instead of
http://www.facelesssoullesscorp.com?
Facebook, the new AOL of the Internet?
On a "pack light" trip to Europe, the iPad will be left behind because of it's limitations. Leaving the laptop behind is not an option because we may need to take advantage of a full web browser including flash.
Ironically, the HP Touchpad has a working web browser including flash.
I've experienced this constant crashing too with my HTC phones (a few Moguls back in the day and a Touch Pro 2 now). I'd always written it off to the crappy OS's: Win Mobile 5.0, 6.0 and 6.5 ... could it be that the hardware is also crap?
The tablet market is dominated by a company that has cultivated a huge following of people who respect the "Warranty Void if Removed" stickers, because they just want it to work, not work better or different. What the HP fire sale proved is that there are X hackers with $99 where X = number of HP TouchPads. If someone made a tablet with 90% of the capability of an iPad at $199 and then marketed the hell out of it, they would do what Android has done in the phone market. But until then there will be the iPad and the experiments in hacking.
"Q2 market share" should refer to sales during Q2
Does this refer to all sales or just to hardware sales? I can see two ways that application sales would be proportional to hardware sales: A. If app licenses couldn't be moved to a new device, a new device would prompt re-buys. B. If newly developed apps aren't made compatible with 2-year-old devices, owners of old devices can't buy apps. But if neither is true, I'd imagine that application sales are proportional to the hardware installed base more than to hardware sales.
In order to protect the ingenious idiot from their natural proclivity to screw things up it is necessary make it impossible for them to do so.
You have to make it possible for non-idiots to override the safety measures; otherwise, nobody will be able to develop applications for idiots to use. Apple and the video game console makers have traditionally done this by locking developer tools behind subscriptions. So why not make it dirt-cheap to allow non-idiots to unlock the device, like Google with the lifetime $25 Android Market enrollment fee,* as opposed to Apple with the iOS developer program that costs $396 over the estimated four-year useful life of an iPod touch, iPhone, or iPad device?
* True, this isn't necessary in the current Android climate where anybody can adb install. It's a hypothetical.
According to your theory, only 1/3 of the smart phone market is made up of "dumb schmucks", and 2/3 are made up of "us geeks".
But who has the lion's share of the market for smart personal media players in North America? There's iPod touch, and then there's what?
In the end all these arguments mean the same thing. Sheeple follow the crowd because most of the time they will need help figuring something out and someone in the herd can help them.
Geek are far more likely to solve a problem themselves so they tend to actually look at what their buying so they shop around more because when problems arise they can fix them themselves, and they may even get some satisfaction out of it.
Personally i will most likely get a archos g9 to replace my 4yo laptop. My laptop is only used when traveling and 99% of the time for media consumption. My reasons for choosing archos over ipad are simple. archos, drag and drop any movie in any format i have from my main computer and it simply plays. ipad i have to convert everything and sync through itunes. archos will play all of my music files and once again just drag and drop and play.
I am personally choosing archos because of price per gb is great, with a 250gb hard drive in it will be nice. plus it may even be upgradable. I do not worry about the moving parts because i dont treat my stuff like a frisby and am extremely unlikly to drop it.
So in the end i am really choosing archos since it is designed for media consumption.
So what?
None of that has anything to do with which has better ergonomics.
The hyperbole, it burns!
o rly
Sent from my ENIAC
Interestingly, the pattern looks even stronger when you consider the easy one click jailbreak for Apple.
A laptop and a tablet are about equal on the "packing light" scale.
All you ninnies trying to defend your brand at all costs are funny.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Mostly people are cringing at the number of consecutive 's'es in the URLs.
Because consumers don't care about crack ability. smart phones and tablets could be compared to game consoles, very few people buy a Wii or PS3 and expect to be able to install a new OS. Hell you can't even buy software that hasn't been licensed by Sony or Nintendo for those platforms seems pretty similar to Apple system doesn't it.
Mine was also Windows Mobile, but if HTC has no qualms selling obviously unstable phones running Windows Mobile, I expect the same holds for Android or whatever other software platform they may choose.
Root cause may be Windows Mobile, or it may be the hardware - either way, I've written off HTC due to the very poor experience.
It is not clear to me how you would count the enormous return rate andoid suffer is a returned android phone still a sale?
I bought the nook for a few reasons, and payed basically a premium for it as it is not sold in germany so far.
To clarify, I got this touch screen all black Nook (sometimes it is called second edition), you see a picture on Barnes&Nobles start page.
Instead of $110 I payed with shipping â140 on ebay plus â28 import sales tax because in my town the customs office seizes everything shipped in from the USA. So bottom line I nearly payed twice its price.
However, the prime reason for buying it is the option to root it and have not only apps on it but to be able to sketch ideas and program on it while traveling.
It has a touch screen, on an e-ink display, that is just so awesome. It can be hold with one hand, the form factor is perfect. Would be better if the frame would be narrower and the screen a bit wider for compensation.
It has WIFI, super! Battery run time if you only read of about 150h! Great!
It can be "rooted" by booting from an SD card (did not do it yet, but will do it soon).
I have 3 Macs (Laptops) but an iPad is completely out of option for me as I can not install my own software on it, or more important: can not hack small scripts/programs directly on it.
Imagine how über cool an iPad would be if it had AppleScript and Automator and a bash on it?
Anyway, I'm totaly baffled about my Nook, I never thought I would ever buy an eBook-reader (in fact I doubt I ever buy true e-books, right now I convert PDFs into epub format with calibre) but the feeling of holding it in the hand and read some ages old SF stories from Gordon R. Dickson on it ... it is extremely geeky.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
That is absolutely not true. Current human interfaces might suck on most devices. But being able to directly manipulate content (except pure text like a novel) makes a lot of work much easyer and faster and more intuitive. E.g. look at photo manipulation software on iPads.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I guess most people have no clue about ergonomics at all, that is for you and your parrent.
I only use laptops, becouse I find them perfectly ergonomic. In the company I work right now I use a desktop PC however, and don't find it particular unergonomic either.
I assume ergonomics is in many cases just a personal taste and nothing else. However using a tablet + a bluetooth keyboard + a bt mouse in a train or plane ... I doubt that it will be ergonomic. A laptop is much better there.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
No, the other guy is still mostly right. The HTC web tool for unlocking the bootloader also voids the warranty.
I spent 5 months travelling across 3 countries with a 1st gen eeePC, and I don't recall visiting a single Flash-requiring website.
That's because a lot of the Flash-requiring web sites are also web sites requiring an IP address that geolocates to a given country.
Regardless of what is running under the cover computers only do what people [i]expect[/i] them to do, because they are programmed by people to cater to those expectations.
Yes, tablets "are programmed by people". But a tablet supporting "Unknown sources" gives more people the opportunity to do such programming.
Until it works better I can't get the wife to sever the $1200/yr DirecTV cable for feat that she can't watch her History Channel shows.
If I understand your post correctly, The History Channel makes its programs available on DVD. Netflix DVDs by mail might carry them.
If it weren't for live sports
Someone posted a comment to my journal claiming that true sports fans can do without the live part of live sports. They tape a game and do their own rewinding to see what parts were win and what parts were fail, and they do so for multiple teams.