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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.
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.
No.
You would like to believe this and you would like others to believe this but it's really not the case.
Apple is currently an over-hyped conspicuous consumption brand. A lot of iPhone, iPad, and MBA sales are due to that.
Fanboys even like to cultivate this idea by comparing Apple to the likes of BMW. (another conspicuous consumption brand)
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.