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Why 2012 Will Be the Year of the Android Tablet
lseltzer writes "The iPad has dominated the high-end tablet market so far, but that is about to change. At CES in Las Vegas in a couple weeks you will see tablets running Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) everywhere and at prices that will make an iPad a lot harder to justify. The competition from the OEM model in the Android markets will massively shift market share away from Apple, just as it has done in the smart phone market."
Or you do what's called beta test and let other people test it for you on their tablet. Bring your thinking into the 21st century, all the big kids (read: video game companies and calling 'beta' a gold release) are doing it!
I agree "Innovative" was the wrong word for the Transformer. "Awesome" would, however, be more the right nuance.
I bought the first netbook (also ASUS, of course, the Eee PC) because the form factor worked for me as something you didn't hesitate to carry everywhere - and lightened the load on vacation while still being able to keep up with E-mail and handle all my photo review / tossing-out / rotating / cropping / blogging.
I love the "pad" style touch interface (I'm having to hold back from touching other screens now), but I'm just not terse enough to do E-mail with a screen keypad. Only useful for typing in passwords and short URLs. No E-mail, no-take-on-vacation. End of story.
An iPad with a keyboard accessory could cure that, but the Transformer is much more - doubling the battery life (and the way it does it is very clever: plug a depleted pad into the keyboard and it will actually charge it up until the keyboard is nearly depleted, so a mid-day session of catching up E-mail can have you ready to go back out to the field again; I never bring the charger to work), and providing an SD port and two USB ports. That's "killer app" compared to an iPad right there. (Oh, and Transformers have a micro-SD slot right on the Pad, so you can either increase your storage with it, or even use one in your camera and be able to review photos on a 10" screen...)
YMMV, but in my location, the price of the Transformer with keyboard and 32GB was the same as the iPad2 with 32GB and no keyboard. Case closed.
Funnily enough, no it doesn't. Only part of Android is open source, the rest is closed source and needs to be licensed from Google. And if the manufacturer doesn't license the closed source parts, they can't call it Android as Android is a trademark of Google.
Kindle Fire doesn't license those parts, and thus doesn't have the full Android functionality, can't call it's software Android, and doesn't have access to the Android Marketplace.
It's related to Android, but it isn't Android.