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."
And this is why Slashdot will never get it. You don't understand what tablets represent. Normal people don't want to dock a tablet with a keyboard and USB ports an turn it into a netbook--only people on tech forums that's a cool thing to do.
Tablets represent the culmination of appliance computing. It's the inevitable reinvention of the personal computer and the shedding of previous paradigms. The industry is no longer geek-driven; those days are over. People don't want to plug things into other things, dock this into that, mess with device drivers, etc. They don't even want to use USB cables anymore; they want it wireless.
As for the convergence of ICS, the Android platform is so fragmented, and so many devices are incompatible with other devices, that there's hardly a convergence at all, because Android has become simply a foundation for hardware manufacturers to bundle their own operating systems (e.g., the Kindle Fire). We all used to think Windows OEM junkware was bad, but at least Microsoft had enough to control to guarantee that there was still a compatible version of Windows underneath it all. Anything goes in the world of Android. Samsung just announced today that the Galaxy S and Galaxy Tab won't even be getting ICS. Why? Because there's not enough room to run both Android 4.0 and Samsung's custom crapware.
The impasse is between techies and everyone else. Techies think the Wild West is great, because their hobby is tweaking computers. But people don't want to do that anymore. We're past the 1990s and into the era of appliance computing, where you don't even have to install antivirus software anymore (if you're running iOS, that is--okay, cheap shot). That's why claiming that 2012 will be the year of the Android tablet is hilarious. There may very well be a lot more total Android tablets out there, but the iPad will still be the #1 tablet.