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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.
"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)
Not likely...
Hell, the success in the tablet space has been exactly inversely proportional to the ability to "hack" the device. Look at the iPad 2.
Someone needs to figure out that the average dumb schmuck doesn't give two shits about "rooting" a device. They just want something that gets email, surfs the web, and allows them to consume the content of their choice. In fact, if anything, the more options/tweaking/etc you give an average user, the more likely they'll just fuck up the device/os/etc.
Us geeks of course want to fuck with the shit we buy...but we're not the target market either. The target market is the average dumb schmuck.
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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?
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.
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
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!
In the UK, 6.2% of the general population hack their consumer products in order to improve them. If you adjust that to the part of the population that actually owns a tablet, you will probably get an even larger number.
OS Reviews: Free and Open Source Software
Since when is "friend" a verb? I enemy that.