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The (Mostly) Sad Fates of 32 First-Generation iPad Rivals
harrymcc writes "Back in August of 2010, I rounded up 32 tablets — existing, announced, and rumored — that weren't the iPad. So much has happened to tablets since then that I decided to revisit my list and look at what happened to all 32 contenders. The results aren't pretty, but they do provide plenty of evidence that competing with Apple was far harder than most companies expected."
One of those tablets became the Asus Eee Pad Transformer. It's a gorgeous little Honeycomb tablet (currently 3.2.1) with IPS widescreen display and a docking keyboard option. It uses the dual-core nVidia Tegra 2 processor, 1GB RAM, and has a selection of ports you're unlikely to find all of on most other tablets: SDHC, microSDHC, miniHDMI, dual USB. Build quality is great and the color and texture are very nice. It has Flash and Netflix now, the full Google Android experience. The speakers are just awful, but there's really nothing bad about it otherwise. On Amazon 500+ people have given it an average of 4 stars. It's not been discounted much ever off its original $400, and appears to be selling quite well. I bought one and couldn't be happier about my return on investment - no fiddling with alternative flashing and rooting. It just works.
The next-gen version is likely to be one of the first quad-core "Kal-El" Tegra 3 tablets out this year, and rumor has it the one dock will work for both and battery life will be even better than the current 8-16 hours.
So not all of these were disastrous it appears. At least somebody got it right. I hear the Acer Iconia Tab is doing well too at its new $400 price point. Yes, the vast majority of the initial round of iPad challengers were quite wide of the mark. But we seem to be narrowing in on a family of choices that can move a lot of units at their various price points. Amazon's Kindle Fire looks to be interesting at $200.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I waited patiently for the Xoom WiFi before buying a tablet. I am glad I did. A lot of pre-Xoom products looked interesting, but lacked one or more of the following: solid OS, large name manufacturer, real (capacitive) touch screen, good compute power, decent amount of memory and storage.
It was too expensive... but so was and is the iPad. I didn't want an iPad, and now the Xoom is $100 less and LOTS of Tegra II, 10" honeycomb tablets are available. Perhaps too many! And Amazon's recent product intro and the success of the Touchpad firesale has FINALLY shaken up the market and prices are starting to drop rapidly.
It's a Darwinian thing. Nature floats a lot of trial balloons. Some of them work out and are improved upon. Some of them don't. But progress moves forward.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
They're not really "iTaxes" as the iPad is the same price or cheaper than almost all alternatives.
I love mine. And my non-techie wife loves it. And our 5-year old daughter loves it. That's really what was important to me in my household. I have my servers and plenty of other tech toys to tinker with - the iPad was perfect for the whole household, though.
The issue is all these companies crammed shit out the door hoping to capitalize on Apples success with tablets. Yet, they didn't realize it isnt just a tablet, but more. If they would have sat back and built something smart that works well, decently priced they would have had a chance. Hopefully Amazon has taken that and realized what it takes.
There's nothing worse than Apple fanboys. Except Apple haters.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Same here. I have two 45U bays in my garage. a few servers in those bays. A Linux desktop. HDHomerun in the attic. Media centers all across the house. And I bought my wife an iPad. Everyone's happy, except those people that think that owning an iPad makes you a stupid moronic cretin. But I don't give a rat's ass about them, so all is well in the end.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
iPhones and iPads are solidly engineered all the way around (hardware and software) and [yes] targeted at a non-technical audience, but still quite usable by nerds.
I don't understand the condescending attitude that many nerds have about iOS devices and their users.
Same here. I have two 45U bays in my garage. a few servers in those bays. A Linux desktop. HDHomerun in the attic. Media centers all across the house. And I bought my wife an iPad.
Well, see right there I know you're making this up, because no one with 90U in their garage and a linux desktop has ever kissed a girl, much less married one.
Advice: on VPS providers
You are not being honest with yourself. Apple has well and truly moved out of the fanbois base and now sells to the masses. Non-tech people totally love it. They barely have to do any marketing about the iPad, it's been very hard to get these past few months, it's been literally flying out of the shelves.
The iPad is good, face it. Eventually the PC industry might make a few good contenders but right now they suck. Win7 is not up to the task, Android is in between states waiting for 4.0 to come out and finally merge the smartphone and tablet versions with a reasonable "market". WebOS is a goner with HP calling it quits.
I understand you not liking Apple's products. No one is forcing you to buy them, you probably don't need them anyway. But you have to admit Apple has caught the PC industry on the backfoot with this one.
Also the MacBook Air, I totally want that one.
I bought an iPad for my mom from the same reasoning - everyone says it's good for the casual user, so she'd be able to handle it easier than any Android tablet, right?
Well, nope. She thinks that the whole UI is inconsistent from app to app (compared to her desktop PC), and she absolutely hates iTunes. Indeed, her first question when she saw it was, "Is this really needed? Why can't I just drag and drop files on an icon in Explorer, just like I already know how to do with my USB stick and my phone?".
(She doesn't have a music collection to sync, so she really just needs a way to copy the occasional picture or a document to and from the thing. However, she uses a desktop PC and a laptop, and the fact that you can only have an iPad "synced" to one of those is very inconvenient to her.)
Wow, you're totally missing the point. There are millions of consumers around the world with plenty of disposable income who like to cook! For many of them, using an iPad in the kitchen is quite a big deal and forms a significant part of their use case. It may not be how *you* use it, but it's certainly how they use it. (And me, too)
You are not being honest with yourself. Apple has well and truly moved out of the fanbois base and now sells to the masses. Non-tech people totally love it.
Not only are they selling to the masses (if you don't think selling tens to hundreds of millions of devices is mass market you're seriously deluded), but they are turning them into loyal customers. The iPhone has by far the highest customer retention rate around ("UBS: iPhone’s 89% retention rate crushes competition; next closest is HTC at 39%") and they continue to lead in PC customer satisfaction figures ("Apple scored 87 points, ahead of HP with a result of 78, Dell with 77, Acer also with 77 and Compaq with 75. [...] Apple holds the highest score on record for the eighth consecutive year.") They're obviously doing something right.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
Apologies for the long rant. I've seen the 'damn overpriced Apple' screed often enough that I've thought about it a bit.
Unless you're a programmer, you don't really know how much effort that simplicity takes. Your thinking that simplicity is a cheap trick is missing the point. It's not that Apple doesn't see all the good features out there, it's that they wait and spend many hours honing things before they see the light of day. Deleting features takes guts, it's telling a programmer you can't do your fun thing. It's keeping to a list of things that are integrated, even though checkbox marketers (Microsoft is the best example here) try to say you're inferior and you're getting nailed in product reviews. But, every feature that you have is actually usable.
You also seem dismissive of their tech. Apple has managed to put a hybrid microkernel/UNIX device with OpenGL graphics, 4 radios (CDMA, GSM, Bluetooth, Wifi), an inhouse designed CPU, and a capacitive touchscreen in wifes pocket. And as someone whose brain isn't wired for tech, she loves it. If you go out to a cellphone store now, you'll see many phones that copy that formula. For a desktop/laptop company to take over the direction of phone design in a few years says something about the quality of their engineers and designers. You seem to confuse simple with stupid, or rather simple on the interface with simple everywhere. It's actually a mistake Microsoft made with the Zune, and old versions of Windows CE. You also seem to make a mistake many people make where they think everyone is just like them but is missing some fact that would make them agree with you. Not everyone is just like you.
As far as the 'Apple Tax', you've evidently never taken economics. The price in the field is determined more or less by supply and demand. Every vendor would love to sell you their stuff for more. It's called profit margin. No one is ever forced to pay it. Consumers choose to. Only the vendors whose products are loved get to charge a decent margin. If they're not loved, no one will pay their prices. So, Apple charges iTaxes? Then, no one must be buying these things that are overpriced? Apple seems to be moving product fairly well. Only iPhones get to charge margin, and very similar specced android phones can not, because they're not quite the same. Even near-WIntel spec laptops with just MacOSX as a differentiator are getting sold. There must be something in that secret sauce of iOS and MacOSX that makes people want to pay more for them, even though Macs don't run Windows programs. It's all that effort you don't see, all that simplicity that makes iOS/MacOSX just work for most people. We have a macbook, and the wife's plan says to replace the aging Windows machine with some iMac once it finally kicks over. She's no fanboy (err, girl). Macs just are easier for her. And I'm a UNIX programmer, who ran FreeBSD for various jobs (besides Linux, Solaris, etc) and I'm low level enough to have done driver work (which shipped in a UNIX kernel) and I like the iMac idea. MacOS does quite well if it's simple enough for her to use, yet powerful enough for me.
As someone who has been on Macs since 89 or so, I can assure you there was no fanboyism about the Performa days or System 7.1.1. or the 'the Pepsi ex-CEO can design and move computers, right?' fiascos. Apple had their nadir, and they built up since then. There was no reality distortion field back then, they made hard choices, killed projects, (Copeland, Rhapsody, Pink, Taligent, etc) and started slowly building Apple to where it is.
When the iPad came out and the /. thread was full of hows and whys other tablets would killing it in the coming year?
Then they said the same thing when iPad 2 came out.
How is that going exactly?
I agree. The major problem was the hurry with which the competition went to market. Apple spent *years* refining the iPad before attempting to sell it. HP and others tried to clone it in half a year, and predictably most of them failed. The survivors will be releasing second-generation tablets soon, and that is when I will judge the strength of the iPad's competition.
Ah, but it's not about "just like Windows" - at least not with respect to the iTunes requirement. Rather it's not just like pretty much anything else out there (the only other modern gafgets I'm aware of that require a special program to transfer files to/from them are WP7 phones - hardly a good company).
More importantly, I would understand if there was a good reason for that difference, but I just don't see any. I understand why a lot of people do like auto syncing stuff through iTunes, but it's not like it's hard to do that and support direct file transfer through UMS or MTP. So it looks exactly like the usual Apple case of "you're doing it wrong".