Slashdot Mirror
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."
Sure, and just as with smartphones, "All Android Phones" will be bigger in the market than the mere iPhone. But look at any individual manufacturer, and that "All Android Phone" share is sliced into so many tiny pieces that Apple dwarfs them. Same with the iPad - Android tablets together may take over 50% of the market... but no individual Android tablet is going to have more than 5%.
Every time some tech columnist makes some glorious prediction that "[YEAR] Will Be The Year Of [TECH]", I roll my eyes.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
And all sides will fire off patent lawsuits over trivial features like form filling and email forming. The lawyers will get rich the market will be blocked and confused.
All hail patents the great pusher of innovation, NOT.
It that's going to happen it will become the year of the Apple lawsuits.
The article seems to presume that there is a static size for the amount of people who buy tablets. There isn't. As lower-cost entries enter the market, people who previously could not afford one will be able to buy one. So the market will grow, but it's also likely that Apple's overall sales will grow as the market grows. So, sure, Apple's "market share" may shrink, but it's not like Apple's going to make less money than they did before.
Also, there seems to be an assumption that people buy a tablet sorely based on cost. That is certainly part of how people buy something, but there are also metrics of quality, ease of use and also what you've got already. If you already have an iProduct, I'll bet people are a lot more attracted to the idea they can plug it into the iTunes that's already set up and have it work. Learning something new probably isn't a big driver, even if they save a hundred bucks. Apple could also drop prices on the iPad 2 when the 3 comes out, just as they have done with the iPhone when new generations have arrived, in order to compete with the lower end of the market.
I have to agree, especially in this economy, people who need a functional device for 200 or less is a growing barely tapped market. Much like why the netbook market suddenly plummeted when most stores stopped carrying the $200 models and shifted all of their focus onto the $400-500 models. Companies tried to claim this was due to the ipad, but at least from what I saw, the vast majority of people I saw buying netbooks, were people who could not afford a laptop, but wanted something cheap and simple that they could take notes, check e-mail and update facebook on. Now that could be regional, I live in the south where we have far more people who are hesitant on technology then we do people who have tons of money and always want the latest and greatest.
This has been predicted over and over again - pretty much since the launch of the original iPad.
It was always "Oh, the iPad was released for $500 less than everyone was guessing, but it's still way overprice! Just you wait for the cheaper, better, faster Android tablets.... any day now.... next month.... just a few more months! The Xoom is coming and it will destroy the iPad, I mean it will have Flash and an SD card slot, and there's no way it will cost more than an iPad and ship with both of those 'key' features broken... Oh, the iPad 2 is out now... well, what did you expect, honeycomb was never designed for tablets properly, even though we have been crowing about how it was going to be the answer to the 'inferior' iPad... just you wait for Ice Cream Sandwich...."
In short, I've heard it all before. The Eee Pad Transformer is good I guess, and at $400 is cheaper than the iPad but so far not much headway. I really hope there are a few really competitive Android tablets to rival the iPad as there have been handsets to rival the iPhone - the competition is good for everyone. So far though, not seeing it.
that have been saying this kind of stuff for years. iPod is lame. iPhone is a useless device. Nobody in their right mind will buy iPad. iPod's price will drive people to competitors. iPhone's price will make in untenable as a phone. iPad is priced more than a laptop, only idiots will pay for it.
Blah, blah, blah. Once a week someone predicts that Apple has finally reached its apex and it's all downhill from here, as the products lack features, are too expensive, the garden is walled, and new competitors X, Y, and Z have finally figured it out and this will be their week|month|year.
So far, this has always been empirically demonstrated to be so much crap by the time the next week|month|year has arrived. Of course, at some point Apple WILL fail, just like all companies and indeed all things in the universe eventually disintegrate, and because at least once a week someone predicts that this will happen this week, at some point someone will be right.
But when that happens, it won't be because of any insight—just because the pundits have made sure to predict the failure of Apple during EVERY week|month|year cycle. And I seriously doubt this is the time, having just been at the local office supply chain store looking at Android tablets yesterday.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Oh, if I only had mod points ^_^
This was my thought exactly... these 'this is the year of *insert personal preference*' get rather repetitive. People seem obsessed with whatever they like being accepted by the majority as the 'right' solution.. I guess it is an extension of the 'I am smart, there is one ideal, so if other people do not agree with me either I am stupid or they are stupid, so it is important that my choices for my use case are universally correct, otherwise my ego hurts' meme.
This is why developers flock to Apple. Apple has done the hard work of gathering the suckers of the world together so they can be quickly separated from their money.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Desiring your prefered platform to "win" is not about wanting to feel superior. It is about wanting your platform to gain enough market share that vendors produce products for that platform.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
There was a period where Mac's market share fell to around 2%. But it was always a premium 2%. The 2% that were most interested in quality and willing to pay. That's why Mac when it was around 6-7% market share represented something like 50% of all the profits. Mac users, spend much more on hardware and software.
And that carries over. For example the iOS market place is 7x the size in dollar terms of the Android, Blackberry and Nokia marketplace combined.
The problem for the Linux market on the desktop is not just the lack of share but the lack of a market. Linux wants the low end. Microsoft however, unlike the server market, is willing to price themselves down far enough to compete for the low end. In the server market Microsoft (like Apple) choose margin over marketshare, on the desktop they choose the reverse.
I think it's like this: 2012 is the year of phone ensmartening - which is to say, a big proportion of the world's people will upgrade from a dumbphone to a smaprtphone. Many of them will do it with the attitude "I don't need a damn smartphone anyway, but if it's easier to text with that on-screen keyboard thingie, and my carrier will basically cover the costs, I might as well. So what's my carrier offering me for real cheap?" And you know very well that it will be some crappy Android handset. So yes, I see Android making much bigger gains in 2012 just because it's the default upgrade for billions. The iPhone simply isn't. You have to want one, you don't "get upgraded" to one.
As somebody who has both a HoneyComb tablet/Samsung 7" tablet and an iPad (original and 2) I have to say I am really really disappointed with Android. Android has four flaws:
I have an ASUS Transformer and was lent an iPad 2 by a friend. Let's compare!
1) Hardware update support SUCKS!
Same thing here, my Galaxy S and Transformer both get fairly timely updates, but my friend's iPhones are blocked from getting new features like Siri even though the hardware is perfectly capable. Updates for Android make noticeable improvements where as most of the stuff in iOS updates just seems to be ways for Apple to wring more money out of you.
2) The apps are lacking on Android
There is a real lack of apps for iOS because so much is blocked from the App Store. Casual developers and open source projects won't pay the high fees and it also means apps tend to more more expensive and there are fewer free ones. Apple's ridiculous requirements mean you can't get lots of useful apps because they do things like allow you to execute scripts or load ROMs. There is also only one app store and you can't just buy apps via web sites, or back them up to SD card (or even use an SD card), or email them to another phone etc. I have a few apps that are non-market ones.
Also lots of iOS apps just seem to be flashy graphics that slide and zoom nicely but the actual functionally it lacking. In particular there are no good backup apps like Titanium Backup for Android, or BitTorrent, or Tor, or emulators etc.
3) Hardware software compatibility.
The dock connector really sucks. What is wrong with USB? I have to carry a special charging/sync cable, and I have to use the shitty iTunes software just to copy some files off the damn thing. My Android phone has basically replaced the USB flash drive I used to carry. Apple also loves to break the peripherals from the last generation, especially 3rd party ones. The guy who lent me the iPad has some speakers that work perfectly with his iPod Classic but inexplicably don't work at all with his iPhone, even though the connector is the same and there doesn't seem to be any technical reason for it.
Media support on the iPad is terrible too. Everything has to be converted by iTunes which takes ages and there is no Flash for video.
4) The hardware is sub-standard by most, not all vendors in comparison to Apple.
I'd say it's much better generally, at least on comparably priced devices.
Now, a few points of my own:
5) No user changeable battery. I push my phone quite hard and although battery life is better than what my friend's iPhone seems to get eventually that battery will wear out, and I want to be able to change it.
6) No SD card, and I need iTunes just to access the damn thing. The amount Apple charges for an extra 16GB is outrageous, more than I can get a 64GB SD card for.
7) No USB host support, I can plug any random USB gamepad into the Transformer and it just works.
8) Lack of multitasking. I often want to copy/paste from the browser to Colornote or an email but on iOS you have to close each app before going to the other one. There are no background apps either, for instance I use a GPS logger while I am taking photos on my DSLR so I can geotag them later and it does it quietly while I can look at maps etc. without closing it.
9) Poor screen. The iPad 2 screen is only 1024x768, too small for web browsing IMHO. I upgraded my old Thinkpad laptop because the screen was only 1024 pixels wide and would never want to go back to anything under 1280 now. My 12.5" Let's Note is 1400 pixels which seems to be about the right DPI.
10) Expensive accessories and peripherals. Apple charges silly money and seem to be keeping official 3rd party prices high too. You can get knock-off stuff but it tends to be crap, where as on Android I can use generic but good quality peripherals costin
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC