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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.
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
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.
Barnes and Noble seems to not mind. The hackability comes from the fact that the device will boot anything that has the right bootloader and OS information on the microSD in the reader. They've not changed that behavior with subsequent releases of the Color hardware. It's such that you can run the pre-release Honeycomb that was hacked out of the Simulator image and a bit of CyanogenMod 7 kernel and other bits on the SD.
Several of the other vendors are no longer preventing the practice by way of locked down bootloaders, etc. Like HTC, they just tell you that it will likely void your warranty and you're on your own after doing it.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
"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.
Why not have both?
Say it was possible to install any OS you wanted on the iPad, and Apple even provided the tools to do so. How would that negatively affect the iPad's sales? This doesn't even break the Apple fanboy's mantra, that open isn't usable and usable isn't open.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
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?
Hackers aren't great software customers but they're great hardware customers.
Since hardware and software companies(or perhaps the service providers) want to be able to team up to sell a unified, coherent stack, the hackers are a source of tension between them.
I expect this will culminate in the hardware designs being a bit two-faced; they'll play ball with the DRM-aware, trusted-platform specs well enough to not lose their service-provider contracts and be accused of bad faith, but poorly enough that savvy customers can still jailbreak them and run what they want to. This is a good way for hardware manufacturers to have their cake and eat it too.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
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.
You need to friend HTC on Facebook. You're out of date.
If I used a sig over again, would anyone notice?
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
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?
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.
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.
Correction, you did not need to jailbreak/root the device at all.
Nokia never had any intention of making it a big thing, and they had no hope of pushing it in the US unsubsidized. And everyone was already held in rapture by Google's promise of an "open" platform that ran Linux.
It became a developer-only phone because US carriers rejected it because of the hinge design.
These devices never even got a chance at the market. The N9 and N950 were undermined further by Microsoft shenanigans.
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
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!
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.
Since when is "friend" a verb? I enemy that.
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?
Indeed, after tax, my Thinkpad was just a bit north of $600 and much, much better hardware. Sure it would be nice sometimes, to be able to turn the screen around and use it as a tablet, but most of the time I really need a keyboard, and after you buy an iPad and a keyboard you might as well just buy a proper laptop.
Or a somewhat less expensive laptop and a Nook or Kindle.