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Tablet Makers Try To Beat iPad's $500 Pricetag
The iPad has sold extremely well at a starting price of $500 but "that kind of pricing doesn't work for many tablet vendors," says a story at CNET. And recent price drops reflect this. It's been a rough year for tablet makers, and it's not even Black Friday yet.
I think Amazon pulled it off with the $200 Fire.
Apple fanboys are not like ordinary people. Most people don't need and don't really want a tablet. It's as simple as that. They only buy one as an additional gimmick if it's dirt cheap, around USD $200 seems to be the sweet spot.
Personally, I'd buy a tablet with a 10 inch b/w screen for $99 as long as it has long battery life and the screen is readable under sunlight. Oh, and it must run Linux, of course.
There has never been an "tablet market". There is an "ipad market" now. It didn't exist when Apple initially launched the iPad, but they managed to "open the market" (clearly that legion of loyal fans had a role on that).
The rest of the vendors don't have that critical mass of early adopters, and/or their product isn't as good (or perceived as good) as the iPad.
The people who can afford them, pick iPads, or nothing at all. The rest of us have higher priorities than buying second-class tablets.
This is changing. Tablets are finding a place in business especially in places where portability has value and you don't want or need the power of a full laptop implementation.
I'll meet you at the intersection of "Should be" and "Reality"
I'm never sure what to make of a statement like this. Are there people outside of insane asylums who think that Apple has some sort of a lock on any market?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Macbook Air 11"
It's just as portable. No sane person chooses a tablet instead.
Other vendors are pushing products that are feature complete, but not design complete. You can't sell high end stuff in the same way as you sell low end stuff. For end stuff you need attention to detail and a presentation that reassures people it is not some random cheap product sold at a higher margin.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I have both 2 iPads and a Xoom. The price didn't matter since the 32GB models cost the same but my iPads get used a lot while my Xoom is mostly sitting on the shelf due to the lack of good apps. Flash doesn't work very well on a tablet (the late Steve was right) so I uninstalled it and most sites don't detect the Xoom's user agent properly and send me to the mobile site instead of the real site because of cheap user agent detection. Even Slashdot gets it wrong. The lack of tablet optimized apps means that most apps still assume a phone style UI while the iPad app store is properly designed to filter out non iPad apps that have to run in "2x" mode.
The recent iPhone keynote was right, "Despite everyone and their brothers making a tablet, iPad has over 75% market share".
I may not be a mac or an iPhone Fanboy, but I am an iPad fanboy and proud of it. Fanboys are everywhere and haters are running away because they can't take the truth. Windows 7 could be the next XP if Windows 8 doesn't make the non-tablet UI worth it.
It's a rough year for tablet makers who *are not Apple*. Apple created the market, and the trouble for everyone else is that in most people's minds, you can buy the "real thing" (iPad), or you can cheap out a little and get a knockoff. People want the real thing, and if you aren't that, you better be a LOT cheaper. So far, that's hard for anyone to do, and even if they do, you don't get the Apple app store along with it, so it has much less value to most people. The software ecosystem is seen as inferior on Android, and the apps tend to be ported phone apps.
Like it or not, Apple is doing really well in the tablet space. They are the ones who figured out how to do it right, not to half-ass it. The iPad is THE thing people want now. Desktops are all but dead, and laptops are not dead but are being hurt.
Times change, but of course there are always people who cling to the past.
Well, I wouldn't know, it's been so long since we've been outside the asylum, hasn't it, Bats? WAHOOOHOOOHAHAHAH!
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Or, they could just apply absurd levels of marketing (especially product placement) to convince everyone that the cool people use your product...
Great Intellect...
Seriously? The iPhone 4S has presold better than any iPhone before it
All your 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 are belong to us
Now they just seriously fumbled the iPhone ball by ...
... selling out the complete stock of the new device in only a couple days?
Nothing says failure like profit. Nothing says fumble like tripping over piles of gold.
I don't have a dog in the fight; I have no desire to own a smart phone. But I do like laughing at the android folks, those guys are hilarious. I hope they win, they have a cool idea, ethic, and philosophy, but that doesn't mean the rest of us aren't laughing at them.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
How can anyone not do well when their product has pretty much been the only one around so far? Now they just seriously fumbled the iPhone ball by releasing a half-assed update rather than the iPhone 5 their fanbois had been pretty much promised, even the most gullible of them will be questioning their loyalty in the face of a full 12 months wait for the next one - hell their "new" one is getting spanked all over the place in terms of network speed, horsepower, screen size etc and its not even out the door yet. When they do get round to it, again the competition will be 12 months ahead and so it continues....
Jobs dead, iPhone screwed up and now real head on competition from tablets on their own turf. No wonder they got so ludicrously litigous recently with the rounded corners fiasco and the bullying of German courts to ban the competition - sounds like someone there saw all this coming.
It was fun while it lasted, but now it really is time to think differently.
I suspect by the end of next weekend, at least 3 million iPhone 4S models will have been sold. Compared to 1.7 million iPhone 4 models in the same span of time during its introduction. AT&T has already said it's their most successful preorder device ever, completely sold out. Same goes for Verizon. And Apple. Only Sprint is still offering preorders, and only on the 32GB and 64GB models.
That certainly goes make it seem like you know exactly what you're talking about.
Oh wait...it means you're basically full of shit and know nothing.
When I got a Thrive there were the inevitable "Why didn't you get an iPad?" questions. I can program it without paying a fee. It's open source. It's Linux. I can run Python apps. The list goes on and on, but all the people who ask the question don't care at all about any of that. Pity, they should. Top it off: you weenies WISH you had 10 inches.
Many readers have submitted stories about a new $35 tablet computer released today in India. The Aakash (meaning sky) has been handed out to 500 students for an initial trial run, if successful a $60 commercial version will hit the shelves later this year. The Aakash computer runs Android 2.2 (Froyo), has a 7-inch touch screen, 256MB of RAM, 32GB expandable memory slot, two USB ports, and weighs in at only 350 grams.
the true cost of aakash is 21 dollars but due to replacement gaurantee, they have to jack up price to 14 dollars.
The tablet is made with 800 components without any intermediate modules so that cost can be kept down and the touch screen is under 10 dollars price.
OS is free (android).
If by just as portable you meant in no way just as portable.
You cannot used a laptop of any kine efficiently standing up. Laptops need to be resting on a surface. You cannot use a laptop when there is no surface to place it on.
Have you ever considered that there are jobs out there where you don't sit behind a desk?
That can't hurt. There is a reason marketers make big bucks. Still, if you want to maintain sales you have to deliver value.
3 million iPhone 4S in 7 days is less than 7 x 750k daily Android sales. In fact its about half. Or 3 months for WP7, take your pick.
If you define losing by making gobs of money then Apple has clearly failed.
Considered it? He probably can't even imagine it.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Kindle-like devices are market-transforming for the eBook market, but from the standpoint of the computer market, they're basically a niche player. 10" tablets are big enough to replace many uses of a laptop or desktop computer and handle the equivalent of a full sheet of paper, so they're not just supporting niche applications like Angry Birds or phone-sized mini-browsers, they're enough to do full-sized web browsing. Maybe a 7" tablet can steal part of that market at half the price, but I'm skeptical.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Well yes. There are always people with such low self-esteem that marketing that plays at their pathetic need to perpetually hip or cool will succeed with spades. Witness the success of Starbucks, which makes some of the worst coffee I've ever tasted, and yet all the hipster doofuses line up to get their dog vomit crapachinos because "I look kewl..."
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Sure, they've been around a while, and we had various attempts at getting the pen-based computing market going since at least the early 90s. But they're typically tied up into an integrated vertical business model of applications, and never get the economies of scale it takes to be a mass-market product, and typically cost significantly more than a notebook computer. That's ok if you're Fedex making your drivers more efficient, but it's still really a niche market.
On the other hand, taking an iPad or competitor and adding a "fill out the forms" app? Easy.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Sign me up right now to fail just as badly as Apple has here.
Perscriptio in manibus tabellariorum est.
what many people don't realise is that the apple ippad's FOB price, out of Shenzen (FOB - "Free on Board" as in "your responsibility once it's on the ship"), is $USD 150. that's in direct contrast to that article which back-calculated a completely arbitrary set of prices for components, which came up with a number "$300". it's wrong. here's the major components: battery: $15. ARM processor: $20. NAND Flash RAM: $10. DDR memory: $15. screen: $25. capacitive panel: $25. that's $110, right there. add on about another $15 (which is very generous), you come to $125. add on a build cost, add on a profit margin, you see how you get to $150 and not *more* than $150.
this same cost of components applies equally to all the other tablets out there. so why in god's name are these manufacturers trying to sell these devices at a 300% markup? i don't understand.
All we have to go on is one analyst's guess at component cost, and that guess is 5% more than price. I've been involved with projects of significant scale and without being a party to the whole situation, you cannot accurately assess the negotiated prices of all the components. The figure I saw quoted was 209.63, and I would not be surprised to find that Amazon had shaved 5% to sell at cost and make profit off the advertising (199 is the ad-subsidized price).
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Okay, so you(and [some of] your antecedents in this thread) admit that people want to be like other people. So I fail to see how an Apple product being popular is a bad thing in this scenario. What I see as the problem is a corporate mentality that thinks building a better widget is going to sell more than building a popular widget.
Conversely, I'm skeptical on 10" tablets (actually, I'm skeptical about the whole market, but 10" in particular). After using an iPad2, that thing is monstrously heavy, and I could find no comfortable way to hold it. Sure, you can put it up on a stand, but once it's that awkward, a laptop would serve just as well. I could imagine 7" being a bit more manageable.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
The alleged Android numbers are based on the combination of all the SHIPPED devices (multiple models from multiple vendors) which are MOSTLY CRAPWARE.
The iPhone 4S is a SINGLE model that is OUTSELLING (not out-shipping) all of them on the 1st day of pre-order ... and it is not even out yet.
Are you going to talk about `post pc` now, or how the iPad will make PCs redundant?
Statisically, no-one uses tablets - more PCs are sold every minute than tablets sell in a month. Tablets are this year's netbook.
I agree the reality is the 4S *shouldn't* be doing well, but rabid fans have already bought them all out. The iPhone user at work openly mocks the rest of us for buying non-apple, even though my device has better * everything* than his iPhone4 which cost him more. Higher resolution, ,higher bandwidth, faster processors, more ram, more storage, microSD slot, all the apps I could ever want, but somehow I'm stupid for having a phone that doesn't 'just work' somehow. He assures me one day my phone won't work and I'll have to root it to get some weird debug interface to repair it, and his iPhone will never need that. This is what many Apple users actually believe. Inicdentally, if I *had* shown him a root shell whether I 'needed' it or not, he actually considers having that capability a weakness and proof that a platform doesn't "just work" becuase that entails never needing a shell prompt.
They aren't buying it as competition for other non-Apple devices, they are so brand-loyal that they think any non-Apple devices will kill their family and so they only compare specs within Apple's own line.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Seriously? The iPhone 4S has presold better than any iPhone before it
And so what ? Selling to same people (that are already apple users) over and over again is easy. Especially if you just wave the shiny apple in front of them. Whats difficult is to increase market share gain new users, and guess what Android is stomping all over the iphone on a world wide basis.
I specifically LOVE Starbuck coffee. I prefer a French roast, or cappuchino/espresso roast.
There are people who think Dunkin Donuts' coffee is great. I haven't been one of them for about 16 years. Maybe you prefer DD, eh?
ps - you're a coffee snob. How big is a standard cup of coffee?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
There is no universe in which Starbucks, the coffee of choice for soccer moms and middle-aged former yuppies, makes anyone look cool, or in which anyone actually imagines that starbucks makes them look cool.
The reason sbux succeeds despite having mediocre coffee is roughly the same as the reason mcdonalds succeeds: they're "good enough," "quick enough," "convenient enough" and "consistent enough."
Maybe when sbux first began showing up there was some small amount of cachet, but they're just another brand right now.
A much, much better example of marketing that succeeded at making doofuses feel cool would be American Apparel. The clothing that company offered was fantastically ugly, looked good on no one, and was ridiculously expensive. Yet the marketing played it up as so cool it doesn't even know it's cool/only for the super-sexy people, and a certain segment bought into it hardcore.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
I don't care if you like apple or not, is it too much to ask to keep it from becoming a personal slug-fest wit a bunch of derogatory remarks?
How about we stick to technology, or is that too difficult for you people now?
What the hell has happened to Slashdot?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Or they could just release a good product so that cool people would use it on screen on their own. Apple has never done "product placement".
Your post makes no sense in relation to what I said.
Android has already won. It's pretty much got the *rest* of the smartphone market, which is nontrivial.
I met the owner of a toothpaste company (there aren't many, so go and guess who) a ling time ago, and he shared with me that getting 2% of the toothpaste market in the U.S made for a good living. He didn't really need 5% to do well. Android doesn't really need 90% of the market, the Android device makers seem to be pretty happy with what they have. And remember, Android has generated a viable competitor to iOS. What was the competitor before Android?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
No ... other vendors push out product that doesn't have the ecology and content. iTunes adds real value to the iPad for 99% of non-geeky players. You get apps (400 odd thousand of them), you get music, you get movies, you get books, you get pretty well everything you need to download and process the information that wets your frickin whistle, and you get to do it so bloody easily.
IOS is part of the story, but so is the damn Apple ecology that makes things so damn easy for newbie punters. Hell, they don't even have to think about it. I've seen two and three year olds messing with an iPad ... and having no problems at all. All my non-geek friends swear by them
Amazon could probably compete with Apple if it UpScaled the Kindle and provided something like iTunes for app, music, movies and books (I mean the latest Kindle ... basically still a dedicated bookreader ... can load less that 10% of the books you could install on an iPad) It needs to be much more adaptable, much more open to different functions, much more programmable ... but with the right hardware, Amazon already has an awesome distribution network that could really compete with Apple.
Android? It's an OK OS ... but without the seamless ecology, ease of use, and content and software distribution capabilities of Apple or Amazon it's not gonna be a player. A new Napster for Android, anyone?
That's fantastic, given that the iPad doesn't have one. Do Androids have it - the Xoom, the Thrive,...
Not to defend fanbois but a phone is more than the raw specifications. Apple have created a family of products that work well together. Android has the same thing but, frankly, the family is not as consistent. It does take away from the end user experience and for all the more Apple products cost it is worth it for some people.
Take whatever you want but you're a rabid fanboi too, you're just not as honest as some others are.
You misunderstand how much more portable a tablet is compared to any traditional laptop, regardless of the format. The iPad goes from off to on in a few seconds. You can run presentations off of it for hours without a power source. For pure consumption of media or as a fancy drive that plugs into the projector, nothing beats the iPad. Nothing. And that's why businesses are adopting the iPad far faster than any iPhone.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
I got a blackberry playbook a couple weeks back (a present, or I wouldn't have it). I have to say, I'm underwhelmed with the 3rd party applications. It could just be the playbook and maybe an Android tablet would have programs that are more mature, but I doubt it. The stuff I see on my playbook feels like throw backs to the old applications you could get for PDAs (remember those?) Yes, there's a way to do whatever you want to do on it, but you've got to 'manage expectations'...
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
Ya think?
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Now they just seriously fumbled the iPhone ball by ...
... selling out the complete stock of the new device in only a couple days?
That's not fair. The iPhone 4GS screen is so small compared to "modern" Android phones that every Apple fanboi has to buy 2 to keep up!!
Many readers have submitted stories about a new $35 tablet computer released today in India. The Aakash (meaning sky) has been handed out to 500 students for an initial trial run
India has been trying to make this idea work for the past decade at least --- and nothing much ever seems to come of it. Simputer
I can support my laptop with my right arm from the front right to left back corners and type with my left hand. It is somewhat awkward, but doable.
I agree with your points but add that you can't run your own apps on the iPad without paying the $99 a year developer fee.
You can if you jailbreak. And you can still use the Apple tools for development.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
My laptop goes from sleep mode to on in a few seconds, and it uses only ~3% of its power in an hour of sleep.
Are you going to talk about `post pc` now, or how the iPad will make PCs redundant?
"Post PC" was never about the PC being redundant. Only that other platforms were equal to it, that the PC was no longer necessarily a primary device.
For some people, yes an iPad does replace a PC. For some uses (like travel) an iPad can replace a PC for quite a lot of people.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It is somewhat awkward
And that's why people buy an iPad.
http://www.asymco.com/2011/07/29/apple-captured-two-thirds-of-available-mobile-phone-profits-in-q2/
"Winning" in business is making a profit. Apple + RIM makes 77% of all mobile profit.
Motorola -- loss money
LG - loss money
Sony Ericson -- loss money
HTC -- made about $565 million (not great)
Samsung -- who knows but some of their profit is coming from bada and dumb phones,,
You know, you really could do some curls and work out with those little 1 pound, pink plastic weights that you see little girls using.
I have this gigantic, heavy, clunky iPad (1st gen) and if you can't smell my sarcasm and yes, disdain for your puny weak arms and hands from here you need to get your nose checked, as well as have your muscles looked at for signs of atrophy.
If you are severely handicapped, please forgive my rudeness. If not, you really, REALLY need to go outside and do some exercise.
How can anyone not do well when their product has pretty much been the only one around so far?
Why not ask Microsoft and the UMPC vendors?
Seems as though they have the answer down cold.
The iPad has already seen a LOT of competition. And it has seen a lot of competition die off...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Except that an ereader had better use eink and if you want to view movies an ereader is the wrong device.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
No, iPads are finding a place in business. You can wave your arms around in the air all you wish, and talk about a "tablet" market, but it's really just the iPad market.
Until somebody can come up with something that is both nicer than the iPad, and substantially cheaper, there is no tablet market. There's an iPad market and then there's iPad knockoffs (go ahead, take a fucking look at them!) which are either more expensive, or a total joke, or usually both.
Aside from the iPad, other tablets are selling at about the same rate they were 5, 10, and 15 years ago.
And so what ? Selling to same people (that are already apple users) over and over again is easy
They aren't, statistically around 50% of iPhone buyers of any vintage have been new to the platform.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I do like asking them questions about their computer, because the answers they give are awesome. I've found that many of the ones who claim to be power users don't even know what duel booting is, or even how to access their command line.
While I'm sure you can find such users on any platform, At this point it would seem the majority of technical users have switched to using Apple gear. Just look around ANY technical conference at the mix of laptops there... I personally come from many years of using UNIX and switched as soon as Apple produced OSX. I was just tired of trying to get Cygwin to work well in Windows and that was after a number of years of using Linux, but getting tired of administering my own system...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The iPhone user at work openly mocks the rest of us for buying non-apple, even though my device has better * everything* than his iPhone4 which cost him more. Higher resolution, ,higher bandwidth, faster processors, more ram, more storage, microSD slot, all the apps I could ever want, but somehow I'm stupid for having a phone that doesn't 'just work' somehow. He assures me one day my phone won't work and I'll have to root it to get some weird debug interface to repair it, and his iPhone will never need that. This is what many Apple users actually believe. Inicdentally, if I *had* shown him a root shell whether I 'needed' it or not, he actually considers having that capability a weakness and proof that a platform doesn't "just work" becuase that entails never needing a shell prompt.
They aren't buying it as competition for other non-Apple devices, they are so brand-loyal that they think any non-Apple devices will kill their family and so they only compare specs within Apple's own line.
Yeah my bullshit meter is reading a 9. Just like how my Grandpa knows 'several' liberals that claim Obama was going to pay their mortgages.
Apple doesn't have an enforced monopoly on tablets. It's just that nobody in their right mind would buy anything but an iPad now, unless you work at HP or Microsoft or Google and have to eat your own dog food, or you are Richard Stallman.
Most of the iPad knockoffs have been produces in small batches, 50K, 100K, 250K, and they are literally rotting away on the shelves at best buy until the manufacturer gets desperate and lets them go for a hundred bucks or so. Apple is selling every iPad they can make, and they are making millions a month. They'd make more, but they literally bought up the entire capacity of a good subset of the world electronics industry, to get parts, and they are partnering with several firms in order to bring more factories online for producing basic electronics components, just so they can produce enough iPads to meet demand.
I mean, are you living in a cave, on Mars, with your eyes shut and your fingers in your ears? HP, the various Android tablets, Palm, RIM, they are not even playing the same game as Apple, let alone playing in the same league. They are all off playing kickball down at the city park, training for the Special Olympics, while Apple is playing in the Superbowl and the World Series and the World Cup and the Olympics and winning every one without even breaking a sweat.
At some point in the future, there probably will be a point where there are more non-Apple tablets sold per month than iPads, when taken in aggregate, but rather than making $150-300 per unit like Apple does on the iPad (and iPhone), it will again mirror the current situation where Samsung is bringing in like $4.50 per unit.
True enough. The Apple's market has a large chunk of people who will buy anything that Apple makes, no matter what it is. The other tablet makers don't have this sort of customer base shouting "let us give you more money!" instead they tend to want to analyze the product first before buying.
After using an iPad2, that thing is monstrously heavy, and I could find no comfortable way to hold it.
What? It weighs much less than Hardcover Harry Potter books that I saw ten year old girls lugging around, when they just came out.
Are you weaker than a 10 year old girl?
They are required by law to not misrepresent facts in quarterly disclosures.
I don't understand why you so desperately need to believe that Apple loses money on hardware and makes it back on iTunes; just look at the total number of Apps/music sold on iTunes, multiply that by their percentage and if even they had absolutely no overhead costs at all to run the store (like, say, their gigantic data centers) then it still wouldn't come anywhere close to justifying why they have $70 Billion in cash *right now*.
and I own an iPad.
Your move, Einstein.
kinda like how everyone else has a girlfriend or doesn't live in their Mom's basement--people are different.
If you actually talk to people that have owned 7" tablets, you might have a different feeling.
10" tablets are like netbooks. They're inconvenient to carry around, and they're inconvenient to pull out on the go.
7" tablets slip easily into and out of a bag, or even a coat pocket.
Tellingly, review sites like Engadget that have access to every tablet under the sun are huge proponents of the 7" form factor. Engadget is always talking about what a great compromise it is beyond size and portability.
I think Amazon is going to blow this market wide open.
Love your sig. Does that work on Honeycomb? Thought not.
It's funny how you often see Apple fans saying this. But then when someone suggests that Apple should be regulated as a monopoly for its abusive practices surrounding its walled-garden, the fans' tunes immediately change (and I'm not addressing you in particular), and they say nooo there's a thriving ecosystem full of competition.
Though frankly, I think that the latter might be true. A year ago, people were saying that there is no tablet market, only an iPad market, and Apple's market share was hovering around 95% in tablets. At the last keynote, Apple was trumpeting that they control 75% of the market share in tablets. Losing 20% market share in a single year is actually pretty startling.
Now of course they had nowhere to go but down from 95%, but at 75% I think there actually is a tablet market, and not an iPad market, and any heavy-handed government regulation is probably uncalled for.
So what you are saying is that Apple creates demand where there wasn't any before.
Why should they? That's a serious question, I'm not trying to troll here or be flamebait.
...
Just because the iPad doesn't fit your use case doesn't mean that anyone who doesn't want to do the things you do with computing equipment is somehow wrong, or that they should care about what you care about.
Well, this question is really the key question that cuts to the heart of a lot of problems with the human condition.
Why should people care about long-term benefit for mankind versus their own short-term desires? And the answer is rationally they shouldn't. Which is pretty much why the world is a crappy place in so many ways.
Why shouldn't I buy from Corporation X that outsources to sweatshops and is slowly sapping away the ability of America to compete in the future? I don't care about that issue because I'm not in a 3rd world country.
Why shouldn't I buy from Corporation Y that destroys the environment in a way that doesn't affect me? I don't care about the issue of the environment over there because it's far away from my house.
Why should I care about supporting an open ecosystem with fair intellectual property rights that guarantees innovation can't be choked by a single greedy corporation? I don't care about the issues of open ecosystems or fair IP, because I'm not a nerd and I only care about things right here and now.
You're right, they shouldn't care about those issues, rationally. However, these selfishnesses large and small are all morally wrong, and are at the root of much of shittiness of the human condition.
Let's see -- I bought a 12" tablet PC and a 4" internet tablet, both in 2008. I bought another couple 4" internet tablets over the next couple years, a 5.6" tablet PC in 2010 and a 9" Android tablet in 2010, and a 7" e-ink/lcd (two screens) tablet and a 10" tablet (HP touchpad, though I can't say for sure I'd have bought it without the below-cost firesale) in 2011. And I'm watching for the Transformer 2 to come out, will almost certainly buy one.
So that's 7 ordinary, in-the-bag, retail tablet sales, 1 firesale sale (I'd have gotten some tablet anyway, but possibly not the HP), and 1 future sale by the end of this year.
You say there's no market -- I say there's a small market, but since it consists of gadget freaks who buy more tablets than most people, it's not neglible.
If you're that clever, it wasn't meant for you.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Seriously. While I've seen some specialist uses suggested for tablets, they are all in areas where $500 is fine. For 99.99% of home users tablets are useless. They don't do anything a desktop, laptop, or smartphone doesn't already do as well or better which the people who buy them invariably own. As such they are nothing more than toys. People get them because they want the toy, not for any real reason. That's fine, toys are great, but that also means that they'll get the one they want, particularly the iPad. It is the fashionable toy to have so it is what people want.
Until someone rolls out a tablet that has a good reason to own it, that is more than a toy, that won't change. The Kindle Fire might end up being such a device, but I'll have to see it happen before I believe it.
Are you also upset that iPads don't come with a mouse?
Say hello to 1998 for me.
Clever has nothing to do with it. It's just propaganda from the fools who still believe Google and Android are open source. A bit hard to admit you got snookered, eh?
So, we are to determine that the other tab manufactures are turning out shit since few are buying them. Please let us know when the situation changes, I'd hate to miss the wave.
For pure consumption of media or as a fancy drive that plugs into the projector, nothing beats the iPad.
Except the playbook. While giving that same presentation, I can be doing other things on the tablet -- like checking my presentation notes or finding a video clip to reinforce a point. Oh, and I don't need an adapter, just an HDMI cable.
For watching HD video, the aspect ratio is actually correct, and it has a higher ppi, making the experience much better.
And that's why businesses are adopting the iPad far faster than any iPhone.
Presentations I can see, but media consumption? If you already have Blackberry's deployed, Nothing is simpler to deploy than the Playbook. Nothing.
Once bridged (takes just a couple seconds) their email, contacts, calendar, documents, etc. are all instantly available on the tablet. Oh, and no need to purchase a data plan for them -- just bridge to the phone (less power, and MUCH more secure than wifi). The playbook can also act as a shared resource -- whatever employee needs one can just take one off the stack and have instant access to all their resources.
Deployment is as simple as opening the box. No other tablet comes close.
Required reading for internet skeptics
The tablet market is growing and changing faster than any I can ever remember. Almost every *day* there's an important announcement. It seems way faster than PCs in the 1970s-80s, for sure.
Because Apple has such a lead with the iPad, which is selling at such huge volumes for such a new device, the price to stay in this game has gone WAY up. Yet it's hard to understand how a company like HP could just give up on tablets - if they have. Can't help wondering if that decision will be reversed.
To compete, makers will have to produce huge volumes to get unit prices down enough to reach competitive price points, and STILL be willing to take a loss for an extended period. Since HP is so big, and tablets are such an important growth market, it seems like a reasonable bet for them, especially considering that WebOS is potentially a strong contender.
Jeff Bezos has obviously placed HIS bet with the Kindle Fire, and its successor, whatever that will be. It will be interesting to see who else stays in this business after this Christmas, and what acquisitions take place.
For fifteen years OEMs have been trying to stuff a Windows tablet into it, and it just wouldn't go. Some of the Android tablets will go in that market, but it took Apple's iPad to show the way.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Absolutely bollocs. Look up "crunchpad", please. There WAS a market for this. People absolutely wanted Michael Arrington's stuff. It's a pity the execution was crap. The idea was an iPad, only without the walled garden.
And millions of people are buying Android tablets right now. Many, many people do not give a shit if you think something is second or third class, or whatever, as long as it gets the job done and the price is right.
Better sort out your priorities, son.
Try putting it on your lap, professor. If you are having trouble find a way to hold an iPad, or find it monstrously heavy, perhaps you should just keep playing with your barbie dolls.
Sorry, not quite. I can afford it and chose differently. My Asus T101 Transformer is a better device. I have an iPad2 at work, but I chose the Transformer when spending my own money and am happier with it than the iPad.
The ability to drop it into the keyboard and have the USB ports, full SDHC slot and extra battery is fantastic. I can actually type when I want to type. Then I can just pull it out and take the tablet with me when I head out. That is a major plus that a BlueTooth keyboard just doesn't match.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Some of the Android tablets are quite nice. Particularly the Asus Transformer, the Acer Iconia Tab, the Samsung Galaxy Tab. Any day now the Tegra 3 models will be out and they promise to be astounding. For myself I prefer the widescreen layout.
Yes, the iPad is doing very well. That doesn't mean there's no hope for others. Agree about HP, RIM, Cisco and some of the others looking to put their own proprietary spin on things.
There's also huge demand for the lower-end Android tablet in places where money is harder to get. There are places in this world where the $500 entry price for an iPad is just too much money. It's easy enough to say that if you can't get the good one, do without - but the lesser things can still be darned useful. It's nice that there are hundreds of alternatives for those folks to use.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I'm with you on that. I got to play around a bit with one of the color ebook readers in a store for a bit, and it seemed to me that anything I could run on a 10" screen but not a 7" screen is something I'd rather be doing on a laptop, desktop, or TV.
Granted, I have no smartphone and all the places I'd generally want to do 7" things that need internet do already have wifi. So a dumb/feature phone, 7" reader, and latptop cover all my bases without being too redundant or too expensive (since the 7" reader-tablets of late are down in the $200-$300 range).
Jailbreaking just forces you to violate the EULA, and you simply encourage Apple's behavior.
How much does it use for an hour awake?
I'll meet you at the intersection of "Should be" and "Reality"
I was objecting to the idea that there's a "tablet market" when there really isn't. You could add up the yearly sales of all the other tablets in the world, and they wouldn't equal the weekly sales of the iPad.
Yes, I understand the demand for a tablet that can be handed out to children and others in third world countries, and I understand that the iPad just won't cut the mustard there when it represents several months or even over a year's income.
But the Android iPad clones I have played with, they feel cheap. They are plasticy, they are too bendy (yeah try to bend the iPad, that thing could double as a martial arts weapon) and they are generally pretty thick and clunky. Even many of the 7" models are greater in volume than the iPad 1, let alone the iPad 2.
I would like to see something come out that blew the iPad away, if only to force Apple to innovate even more and drop the price as well. However, there is no pretending that this is anybody's game right now. Apple owns it.
what you do if you boot your computer with a rapier.
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I think that's the one thing I don't like about the iPhone, they need a screen for us old farts. I can't see shit on a screen smaller that 4 inches.
Roughly 35%. But if I use it that much, I have an outlet.
The same thing will happen to the iPad that happened with the mac and is currently happening with the iPhone: Apple pioneers an electronic device that is simple to use, but is far too locked down and far too expensive for what it does. The Apple pioneer device starts out way ahead of the competition as other companies scramble to produce a similar product for the same cost. Over time marketshare in the Apple device steadily erodes as the competition produce similar devices that are far less locked down and offer more functionality at a cheaper cost. Eventually the competition completely drawfs the Apple product in terms of marketshare, functionality and price, yet there are always a small minority of people who continue to clutch onto their beloved locked-down expensive Apple device. It's like a broken record.
Cue the Apple evangelist group members claiming that it will be different this time ...
I don't disagree with your points, but part of the challenge Android makers have is consumer attention. "Hundreds of alternatives" can be good for consumers but bad for manufacturers... I follow tech closely, and I'd only heard of one of the three Android tablets you mentioned.
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
I just bought an asus transformer with keyboard for my partner. she thinks it's great, compared to the ipad we borrowed for a couple of weeks. It's flexible enough to use as a laptop, while still feeling minimally like a fully featured laptop, which the ipad did not. Then when we get in the car the screen pops off and we can give it to our kid to watch an episode of Thomas the Tank Engine.
The android marketplace is a bit crap compared the the apple store, but the hardware is better.
The iPad is moving about 2 million units a month, or 500,000 units a week roughly. The Asus Transformer is moving, by itself, 400,000 units a month. It's very nice - you should check it out. I have one, and prefer it to the iPad 2. But it's not an iPad clone, it's an Android tablet.
The iPad is doing well, but it's not doing "more in a week than all the others in a year" type well.
But my point was very much the use case of the third world. Price is an important feature. There's also the other use cases that are served by different features the iPad doesn't and won't ever offer. This game appears to be playing out the same way as the iPhone/Android phone thing - as I said it would here when it was launched. The iPad is very nice. But there's only one.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Awkward to write a book on a tablet too. 'Real work' vs 'consuming content'. If you're a 'content maker' then you use a laptop or (hard-core) a desktop. If you just watch tv shows or read a book, then certainly a tablet is less awkward. I like to type fast on a real keyboard and not have to prop up my monitor/lcd screen.
As someone who is typing this on a Mac, I can tell you that it isn't always because people want one. Technical people generally have to support multiple platforms. A Mac is the only thing that will run OS X in addition to Linux and Windows with no fuss.
It isn't that OS X or the specific hardware is any sort of marvel. I mean it's fine; I'm pretty agnostic as to whether I use it or Linux. (I'll admit it's better than Windows.) But if I could buy a license to run OS X in a VM on a Dell with Linux as the host OS, that's probably what I would be doing.
I'm skeptical across the board...
The web browser on those tablets isn't any better than the web browser on your smart phone... Meaning a LOT of pages won't render correctly, you don't have the Add-Ons you have on the desktop, many files won't download, you don't have the plugins to view, well, just about anything, and the touch-screen model still breaks the semantics of many javascript, CSS, and Flash powered web sites.
What's more, whether 10" or 7", tablets are far, far too big to comfortably hold and use with one-hand, and sliding your finger across a 10" screen is extremely tiresome quite quickly, making current tablets across the board a DOWNGRADE from simple ($150) top-tier smart phones. This sentiment was echoed by many reviews of Dell's 5" tablet, which had the advantage of nice big screen, but was still small and light enough to be operated one-handed.
In addition, I'd throw in input. Plenty of Android smart phones have slide-out qwerty keyboards, allowing halfway decent input (I type-up many a /. post on one) but tablets never do, and a bluetooth or detachable (transformer) keyboard is an extra item to be lugged around.
And with all of these issues, I've only just started covering the downside of web browsing with a tablet. The more I think about and try to use them for even basic tasks, the less desirable they become.
I would be happy with an Android tablet as a mere thin client, but alas, that's not even workable. While the SSH apps (and many apps, for that matter) are passable for brief usage, their feature-bareness really comes out quickly when you try to really use it. The same is true for RDP and VNC apps, and the utter lack of an NX app for either Android or iOS.
Considering just these issues, it very, VERY quickly becomes clear that a cheap Linux Netbook (ala, EEE) is a vastly superior choice for just about any usage case you can come up with (that doesn't involve Angry Birds). And even if you find a need for a few mobile apps, Android emulators run on Linux just fine, and Canonical has been working to integrate them even more.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
What I see as the problem is a corporate mentality that thinks building a better widget is going to sell more than building a popular widget.
Obviously you don't mean popular because that's not saying anything, it's just a tautology. Popular means more people want/buy it. And if you mean better marketed then you're in a different place: It's possible that a worse product with better marketing will do better in the market, but unless you have some kind of significant lock-in that keeps people buying from you a second time once they realize what a shit sandwich you sold them the first time, it only works once before your brand is ruined and you can't make any future sales.
Jailbreaking just forces you to violate the EULA
Nope, it was found to be perfectly legal. *IF* Apple support would hassle you about it (they do not always) then you can simply restore to factory default non-jailbroken state.
You simply encourage Apple's behavior.
Encouraging companies to make excellent hardware and software is rather something I LIKE to encourage in the computer industry.
Why do you buy substandard hardware and allow companies to get away with shoddy design? That seems to me to be a far worse sin in the long run.
The Amazon tablet is the first non-Apple tablet I'll be purchasing as a result of this philosophy. At least they are TRYING.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I hold and type on my laptop all the time the same way, and even though I have a tablet, I still prefer setting my laptop on my lap, and not having to hold anything! Especially in bed, or anywhere lying down!
I've been waiting for the tablet sider with built-in keyboard...
Pretty much, yes. They made a product good enough to create its own demand. They could do it because very specific circumstances. The other vendors don't have those circumstances.
A while ago, I might have agreed with this sentiment, but I really don't think it's true anymore. Take a look at some of the new Android 3 tablets - I recently bought an Acer Iconia... and not because it "was anything but an iPad", but because it was a better product for considerably cheaper. I've got better screen resolution, better cameras, aluminium back (tougher to abuse than plastic), USB ports, HDMI out, 64GB of memory etc etc. I can plug in any random USB keyboard and mouse, and use the HDMI to connect it to a regular monitor to convert it into a really useful mobile desktop.... the UI is smooth and responsive... the "real" apps (ie excluding the stupid apps like virtual lighters and fart machines which you also find on iPad) are roughly equivalent to what you get from the iTunes store.... I've got a lot more control over what the tablet can do... Basically,when I compared side by side, the iPad came up short on almost every selling point.
So long story short... second class tablets are NOT the only other choice to iPad.
I know I should excercise and get out more, but you're right about the weight... it gets annoying after hours of being in one position. But iPad still is far and away more nimble and easier to take around than a laptop... just need the right case for your hands and fingers, that depends on how you prefer to grip.
I don't think its a bad idea to split hairs about netbooks and the MacBook Air. They very well could be in the category of just as easy to drag around as a tablet... or at least in the ballpark. Larger laptops, which seem to be very common now, are not exactly miraculous and fun like iPad.
If your thing is content delivery, and not some mixture of heavy complex computer related tasks, tablets are the way to go. Apple makes a nice tablet. It's actually kind of fun figuring out how to do something that shouldn't be possible. The looming iCloud thing bothers me though.
Some words I have to look up over and over again, like tautology. You are correct though. my statements where circular on the face. Companies seem to me to be saying(advertising), "Ours is the best!" Then they seem to build the worst experience instead.
I will assume your use of, "lock-in," in your response is a allusion to any of, iTunes, iTunes Music Store, iOS App store, or any number of other products created by Apple(maybe you aren't even being that specific, maybe you really meant in general). This is not an inaccurate assessment of these products, but lock-in implies that they are there to prevent a cutomer from switching away from the crappy service or product they already own, such as a low-interest/high-fee bank account, or an ETF for shitty wireless service. In the case of Apple, the services I mention above seem to create the very reason why going with Apple products and services are a good thing. Leave aside your hang-ups about not being able to run any app you want or loading your own OS on the iOS hardware(I would wager that less than 1% of people who own or can afford to own the devices care about the standard slashdot arguments against iOS devices). The fact is that the hardware is well made and backed by a warranty that is reported to be fairly well executed. Even if you do have objections about the hardware, too slow, not as many cores as you would like, not enough ram, camera or whatever else. All of the tablets on the market today have roughly similar hardware specs. The thing that differentiates each companiys' offerings is the software behind it and, as many have aregued here, the advertising.
So what I was saying is that companies see Apple produce a $600 tablet and say, "Hey, we can do that." So they make $600 of hardware and ship it to Best Buy and then wonder why it doesn't sell. Which is your point. What I was saying is that a company has to do every aspect of creating a tablet well-enough. They cannot just make the best hardware. If we say that Apple makes middling Hardware and software, and advertises reasonably well. Then a competitor cannot make amazing hardware and shit software with crappy advertising and expect to do better. They must do as well as Apple in all categories and better in at least one.
Anyway, I don't think that Apple's products and services are lock-in for the sake of keeping customers so much as a set of things that are worth more together than the sum of their individual parts(but let us not trot THAT word out).
Except that an ereader had better use eink and if you want to view movies an ereader is the wrong device.
You know, now I really, really want to watch a movie on my kindle. At a refresh rate of about 1Hz, you'd get full value for your buck, and the slow-mo would be great for those naked bits ...
Tablets are this year's netbook.
Hey, don't knock netbooks -- they're are awesome things to travel with, small and lightand cheaper than a tablet to boot. Even better, they can run a real OS and you can actually do work on them, with nary an angry bird in sight. I managed to write a couple of academic papers (complete with complicated figures) on my netbook whilst backpacking around the world for five months.
Much, much more useful than a tablet!
I could afford a $500 tablet but I'm still tempted by the cheaper ones. ~$150 for an Android tablet that lets me browse and do email, run a few apps etc. looks like a very good deal.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
You misunderstand how much more portable a tablet is compared to any traditional laptop, regardless of the format. The iPad goes from off to on in a few seconds. You can run presentations off of it for hours without a power source. For pure consumption of media or as a fancy drive that plugs into the projector, nothing beats the iPad. Nothing. And that's why businesses are adopting the iPad far faster than any iPhone.
Hmmm ... my netbook wakes from sleep in two seconds; I can leave it sleeping for days without draining the battery; and I get six hours of battery life from it. It's great for watching films on when traveling, and it even stands up by itself on a table. It's light enough to use one-handed.
Not quite as convenient as an iPad, perhaps, and a touchscreen would be useful at times ... but on the other hand, it's got a real keyboard, runs linux and all my work software, has a huge HDD and was cheaper to buy. Oh, and I can run Powerpoint presentations from it too, of course.
I suppose the best all in one solution would be a convertible laptop. There are some pretty nice ones around.
With my EeePC I could hold the laptop comfortably with my left hand and type with my right hand. The keyboard was to small for two hands so one hand typing was my standard for it (untill I crashed it by shorting a 5V line when attempting to increase the hdd space with a 64G USB stick internally. The stick didn't survive either.)
I assume the MBA is usable with one hand (given sufficiently large hands).
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
I'm skeptical across the board...
The web browser on those tablets isn't any better than the web browser on your smart phone... Meaning a LOT of pages won't render correctly,
The Opera browser on the Android Tablets is excellent. Everything works fine. Dolphin is also excellent. Pages render just fine, unless some idiot website designer has decided to force "mobile" mode on you.. and even that is almost always fixable by setting the browser to "Desktop" mode.
I use both quite frequently, and no, they don't work remotely as well as a desktop browser, and mobile pages have nothing to do with it (setting the user agent equivalent to a desktop is easy enough). It's impressive for tiny embedded browsers that they handle as many sites as well as they do, but there's endless cases where you still have to resort to walking over and using a real computer, which I run into all the damn time. In fact the reason I have 3 different browsers installed is on the off chance one of the 3 will work a bit better on a given page, but they rarely ever do.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I find an ipad very difficult to comfortably use because of the size and weight. The ipad2 is what I have, and I've held the original ipad and it's much worse. I can use a laptop for several hours but that's simply not possible with the ipad. I really don't see how anyone can argue that a tablet is ergonomically superior to the traditional input methods.
I can deadlift 275 lbs and clean & jerk 150 lbs, so I don't think it's a strength issue.
The same thing will happen to the iPad that happened with the mac and is currently happening with the iPhone: Apple pioneers an electronic device that is simple to use, but is far too locked down and far too expensive for what it does.
I agree with your main point, but the Mac wasn't "pioneering" the PC, the iPhone wasn't "pioneering" the smartphone, and the iPad wasn't "pioneering" the tablet. In each case, Apple's role was blowing an established market wider open with mass-appeal marketing, making people who had ignored the previous offerings want an Apple product (but they may consider competitors later, once they're already in the market).
Dunkin' Donuts coffee is fairly good. They occasionally will have a 'special' coffee for about a month. A while back they had a very good Kona.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
These companies trying to compete with Apple just don't get it. They don't fully understand what people really want! Why on earth would I pay $500 for a 7 inch tablet when I can buy a 10 inch for the same price? Has Apple made a 7" tablet? No! Because they know it's pointless. These companies need to stop thinking about making quick profits and think long term! Make a decent tablet for cheap and reap the benefits later!
As an owner of the Acer Iconia A100, I can say safely that this is a good contender for a 7" tablet. It's Tegra 2 dual core with 1gb of DDR2. It screams with android. One of the problems I've had with the knock-off tablets is that nothing was as responsive as the touchscreen on ipads. The Iconia definitely fixes this. The transformer and the new transformer due out soon look really interesting, but they've priced themselves out of the market in my opinion.
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
Amazon is selling a vendor-locked ebook reader. No camera, no bluetooth, no sim slot, no GPS, no ability to read ePub, no google apps, no google android market, and so on.
The A1 is already on sale, and has all that stuff that the Fire lacks.
http://www.lenovo.com/products/us/tablet/ideapad/a1?AID=10383968&PID=4485850&SID=u0t3389034f9fp0dd0c0s590&CJURL=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.lenovo.com%2Fproducts%2Fus%2Ftablet%2Fideapad%2Fa1
Monstrously heavy? Please tell me you're joking. My 8-year-old daughter has been using one for at least 2 years, and she prefers to hold it / use it while she stands or walks around.
I'm right there with you, and I would add that typing on an actual keyboard is infinitely easier than trying to type on a touchscreen that is constantly second-guessing my intent and requires me to choose several keyboard modifiers to achieve any non-alphanumeric character.
I own an iPad for one purpose - development. Many of my clients demand that the sites I build will look good on an iPad and the only way to reliably test it is to have an iPad.
Personally, I hate the thing. I would much rather use a laptop.
"Lame" - Galaxar
Awkward to write a book on a tablet too. 'Real work' vs 'consuming content'. If you're a 'content maker' then you use a laptop or (hard-core) a desktop. If you just watch tv shows or read a book, then certainly a tablet is less awkward. I like to type fast on a real keyboard and not have to prop up my monitor/lcd screen.
Why is it that there are only TWO general use-cases that tablet-haters seem to recognize?
1. Writing War and Peace or the Linux Kernel from scratch.
2. Watching a movie or playing Angry Birds.
Nothing else seems to count. Why?
You DO realize, of course, that there are a whole bevy of use-cases for an information appliance like the iPad that don't fall into those two categories, e.g., Review and approval of documents, form-completion, correspondence review and creation, process monitoring/control, media creation and editing, etc.
Yes, you CAN do those with a laptop, but for some, the concept of an "electronic clipboard", that can be interacted with directly, rather than through the actions of mouse and keyboard, is an appealing one.
Roughly 35%. But if I use it that much, I have an outlet.
Wow. Shitty battery life. Sucks to be you, I guess.
Of course, the iPad can be used for about 10 hours without an outlet; and while YOU may have an outlet [nearby], not everyone likes having to turn their laptop into a desktop (by tying it to an AC outlet) all the time.
WTF good in REAL life is a "portable" computing device that you can only use for a few hours before it MUST have an AC outlet, or else?
No question the Fire is a little more friendly as an e-reader than the iPad. It would be interesting to see a well done poll that revealed the competitive overlap between smartphones, 7" functionally limited tablets, more capable 7" tablets (full normal android), and capable 10" tablets.
I know a couple people with ipads who will probably also buy Fires. I know some people who have ipads and won't buy Fires or Nooks, some who don't have ipads and have Nooks or will buy Fires. So far, don't know anyone with a non-nook non-ipad tablet.
So there is no question there is some competition for users between these things. But probably we won't see meaningful numbers on that until surveys in a year or so.
Too expensive for the dock. I was somewhat interested in that tablet until I saw you had to buy the dock separately for $150 (really guys?). So their stand-out feature for the tablet is obnoxiously expensive and that pretty much makes me not interested. I'm not made of money. Quite frankly I hate Apple but if I was going to spend $500 or so, I'd probably just get a damn iPad. Right now I'm looking at the Samsung Thrive. 16gb version is ~$400 and I can definitely get on board with that with a full sized USB and SDXC port. I'm really hoping they go on sale for Black Friday...that would make me very happy. Might even get me out of the house with all those crazy fucks...but I'm not sure. I don't think any deal is worth standing in line waiting for a store to open for like an hour or more. :p
"Those who would sacrifice essential liberties for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - BenF
That's why tablet makers will NEVER beat out the iPad because they are focusing on the wrong thing. Instead of making their tablet better, they try to make it cheaper. Why do you think Apple can sell their iPad at $500?? Because they are selling an "experience".
So compare the Samsung Thrive ($399 for 16 Gb) and the Asus Transformer ($399 for 16 Gb) and go from there. You can always buy the dock later, if you think you want it. With the Samsung, you don't have that option.
As a plain tablet the Transformer is as good as they get, quality-wise, for Android tablets. I don't know about the Samsung, not having held it in my hand.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Why on earth would I pay $500 for a 7 inch tablet when I can buy a 10 inch for the same price?
Because you don't have pockets made for smuggling small children, perhaps?
I have not seen a 10" tablet that fits in my jacket pocket, though a 16:9 display with very slim bezels could theoretically make it. I have not seen a 7" tablet that doesn't fit the same damn pocket.
It's a tablet, not a penis; bigger is not necessarily better.
And how is interacting directly with a tablet more appealing than using a mouse and keyboard? I'm not writing War and Peace, but I do type stuff. How is review and approval of documents easier on a tablet? How is corresponce review and creation easier on a tablet? What kinds of media are easier to deal with on a tablet?
It has enough battery life to take to work, or to a wifi cafe. I live in a city, so I don't have to worry that much about an AC outlet. WTF good to me is a tablet that makes it difficult to type?
Apparently there's a reason for our reputation for being atrophied basement dwellers.
I didn't mean to imply that you didn't exist as a person - but as a market. People in your circumstances are too few to be considered a market.
I've got a Kindle, and I like it for reading, though unlike paperback books, I'm not going to read it it in the bathtub. It's light-weight, thin, arguably pocket-sized (depending on what shirt I'm wearing), ergonomics are really good for most things. For reading while travelling, it's stunningly nice.
But it's not big enough for web browsing; my 1280x1024 19" screen is just barely big enough for that. For a 7" screen to be useful, I'd need more pixels and stronger reading glasses, especially since I'd probably be wasting part of the screen space on a keypad (either physical or touchscreen.)
Bill Stewart
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