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Google Quits Selling Tablets (techcrunch.com)
Google has quietly crept out of the tablet business, removing the "tablets" heading from its Android page. It was there yesterday, but it's gone today. TechCrunch reports: Google in particular has struggled to make Android a convincing alternative to iOS in the tablet realm, and with this move has clearly indicated its preference for the Chrome OS side of things, where it has inherited the questionable (but lucrative) legacy of netbooks. They've also been working on broadening Android compatibility with that OS. So it shouldn't come as much surprise that the company is bowing out.
Sales have dropped considerably, since few people see any reason to upgrade a device that was originally sold for its simplicity and ease of use, not its specs. Google's exit doesn't mean Android tablets are done for, of course. They'll still get made, primarily by Samsung, Amazon and a couple of others, and there will probably even be some nice ones. But if Google isn't selling them, it probably isn't prioritizing them as far as features and support. Android Police was first to break the news.
Sales have dropped considerably, since few people see any reason to upgrade a device that was originally sold for its simplicity and ease of use, not its specs. Google's exit doesn't mean Android tablets are done for, of course. They'll still get made, primarily by Samsung, Amazon and a couple of others, and there will probably even be some nice ones. But if Google isn't selling them, it probably isn't prioritizing them as far as features and support. Android Police was first to break the news.
I loved my Nexus 7. Google support lasted only a couple of years. I still use SketchUp, which Google sold off several years ago. Google has a long history of creating interesting technology, and then dumping it.
Here's a list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Apple did the iPad pro and its sales of tablets went up. Android tablet sales also far outsell Google Chrome OS devices, and Microsoft has been doing 2 in 1s, which are really just tablets with keyboards and selling well.
So lets be clear here, this is not the market speaking. It isn't that everyone wants Android devices that are 6 inches, but not 8 inches.
The problem here is the head of Chrome OS, was Sundar Pichai, and he became CEO, and he decided that they would make ChromeOS their major OS puch on large devices. Android has been under seige ever since.
So Android is getting worse and worse with each iteration, targetting phone markets that don't exist with 512MB RAM and tiny screens, and the push to bigger tablet devices has been ChromeOS.
ChromeOS gets a sort of hacky Android support, which is supposed to please Android users, but is crap. And Android was supposed to help sell ChromeOS.
You can have a large tablet, it could fit 3 phone apps side by side in landscape.... but Android can't do that and ChromeOS just adds an awful legacy windowing interface, and lots of multitasing problems, to that mess.
What needs to happen here, is someone on Google board, thanks Pichai for his service, and Google needs to get serious about Android.
The same way a fat device with a fan and 3 hours battery life is a tablet I'd guess?
You do understand that people buy tablets specifically because they aren't PCs. They're fast, touch orentied, easy to use, and provide an easy platform to deliver the services they want to use. To most consumers, when it comes to computers, less really is more.
They don't have all of the problems a windows PC has. Driver issues. Bugs with windows updates. Malware.
With a tablet you tap on the app store, tell it what app you want, tap it and you're done. There's no installer. There's no "Oh sorry you need .net framework but the installer shit itself because microsoft changed something"
A surface is not a tablet. It's a thin laptop with a shitty keyboard.
Lenovo, Samsung, and Huawei have several Android tablet products each and keep updating at least one of them every year. Tablet sales are upparently strong enough that these three plus Amazon are staying in the tablet business. The reason tablet sales are falling is because most people who wanted a tablet already got one, and they're keeping them for a long time since the tablet market is not suffering from must-replace-ecery year fad.
Young folk are crossing their eyes inward and squinting their way to near blindness.There's other blindness too, one of the tech articles actually says, "due to lacking developer support and no proper optimizations for the OS on the big screen" Like it's rocket science. To me it's like saying, "Google tried (and failed) to make the Android OS -- which scaled up to read and use comfortably on a tablet, to their great astonishment and horror -- to be as vision-destroying and glare sensitive as smartphones displays riddled with car-key scratches. Which are now the 'gold standard', go figure."
Like bigger type is a bad thing. Weird.
Isn't this ridiculous to say, even to claim when trying to divine some grand corporate purpose? Let's take a real trip back in time, say 600 years to the 'golden age' of illuminated manuscripts, even early moveable type. People were not struggling to make type smaller, they were trying to communicate to a wide audience. This includes people over 30. People over 40 have some other interesting personal habits too that help them to dismiss the 'disadvantages' of tablets... such as women carrying purses and men with briefcases, which they don't lose track of. These weird people would think nothing of toting a piece of electronics around that held as many books as a library, or gave them that actual 'videophone' or even 'speakerphone' and 'electronic book' that was PROMISED decades ago in sci-fi literature.
But instead of just scaling up the smartphone by improving its sound quality (real speaker, low distortion, loud, anyone? Anyone?) and marketing it to the people who don't mind carrying large things around (yes 9" x 12" is large), they reproduced the worst sound the smartphone could make and crippled its cell phone capability, like a mean afterthought. It was a mechanism to force you to consume cell data plans. In order to achieve this we must discourage its ability to conveniently make voice calls.
Which is one of the reasons the elderly are starting prefer basic phones now. They have the smarts to use them but not the vision to see them, and don't need the aggravation and expense. With a direct campaign and decent product that easily and effectively replaces a cell phone they could have been convinced.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Or, Tablets are booming! They are just slightly smaller, have LTE radios now, and can make voice calls.
My 5.9" phone does everything better than the old 7" tablet. I just hold it slightly closer.
I bought a nice little Nexus 7 through the Google online store several years ago. It's been great. It has an HD screen, decent sound, and perfect size for reading the web and carrying around. Maybe the fact it's been this reliable is why they didn't sell more... Either that or few others like these things, but I'm not sure what's not to like.