Lenovo definitively has an interest in this going out, as do most Android manufacturers. Some may fear the information coming out may hurt overall Android Tablet popularity, but truth is, if the public thinks only Samsung is able to "ship" large numbers of tablets and "sell them", that then perhaps only Samsung Tablets are worthwhile, hurting drastically any competing Android Tablet manufacturer.
Another point of issue is the stores themselves may stop accepting more than a couple units of any other brand due to the horribly low Galaxy Tab sell through.
No matter if the practice is good or bad for Samsung, it is overall for anyone else trying to sell Android Tablets, and perhaps any non Apple Tablet.
Added bonus: taking this out hurts a competitors stance among it's investors. If this is proven true, many investors may feel lied to in the quarterly report meetings. 2% sell through would not be considered "quite smooth" under any sane metric.
BestBuy got 250,000 units and reported to only sell 25,000. That was just BestBuy. Those sales alone made them have a higher final sales count. Add whatever Staples and other chains sold and you would have the TouchPad performing perhaps at least 50% better than the GalaxyTap
How much did a BlueRay cost at the time, though? I myself still don't own that because I do agree: the price was insane. But had I cared at all about BlueRay, I would had considered it to be a darn good deal.
For a lot of people, the PS2 was their first DVD player. Sony thought the same would hold true for the PS3 and BlueRay. The only thing they overestimated was the population's interest in BlueRay technology. Very few actually care for it.
A good businessman should be able to spot where the error was, in retrospect. Without time travel technology, though, no one at the time would had been able to foresee how weak the BlueRay demand was.
Thats just one tier. Book publishers also work closely with the chains (at least the large ones) to liquidate those hardcovers at extremely low prices before they resort to destroying them.
If you walk into a bookstore, you will notice that is very common.
In Sony's defense, they truthfully expected the launch to have much higher demand, and the supplies to not meet said demand. They seriously overestimated the sales of the device and I cant blame them. Historically, popular consoles suffer scarcity at launch, the PS1 and PS2 included. Add to it a heavily undercut BlueRay pricing for the time and they had all the reasons.
No businessman would ever blame them, since based of research and precedents, feature sets and "packed value", they had all the reasons in the world to ship that much.
They DID lie afterwards, constantly claiming the unit was hard to find ween stores were trying to get rid of the inventory they had, but thats a different story.
Unless you expected them to code in-house apps in old fashion assembly, they needed an SDK from the start to make their apps. That does not mean they ever planned to make the SDK public.
There is no direct evidence of either fact (it being planned or it never crossing his mind) but we can actually look at Apple's behavioral approach to iDevices. The iPod Nano and Video had been running some apps for years, and Apple never made this SDK widely available (they did allow certain entities like Square Enix to make some apps, like the original iPod Video's Song Summoner game.) Despite these few direct partnerships, Apple never before gave any weight to opening up their SDKs.
The only other piece of information we can look at is public statements themselves, but many don't want to believe them just because:
A) Its fun to think of conspiracy theories and misdirection B) Accepting Jobs meant "Web is the development platform" kills the current wave of opinions that say web standards are being used to stick it to Apple's walled garden.
I personally don't care since its pretty much irrelevant what the original intent was (unless you want to argue about that whole "web standards" killing the walled garden topic.)
They are just trying to distract their investors a while longer, while they attempt to save their rears.
Every quarter Apple is selling more and more iPads, I don't think this guy has any evidence to prove the "cooling down" of tablet demand, unless he plans to use the TouchPad failure as "evidence."
From what I seen, Samsung's tablet success is heavily overstated.
According to Google's own numbers, only 1.2% of the 130 million activated Android devices are tablets (large screen devices, forget if we talking Honeycomb or not.) Thats just 1.56 million, less than the initial batch of Galaxy Tab tables sent to retailers.
In my experience, I love buying from BestBuy. I have seen situations where the computers are opened with the mentioned seals, at least in the cases I have gone through, it tends to happen with very cheap, horrible quality machines that are returned way too often. Don't work there to know for sure, but if I was manager I'd tell my employees to go through all of them and make sure they are in working order before they leave the store.
That aside, BestBuy has some darn good service (again, in my experience, there is only ONE BestBuy I actively avoid as it seems to only employ retarded idiots that rather spend 1 hour talking and keep you waiting than bringing you the 1500 computer you said you WILL buy...) *ghem* sorry, derail... but anyways other than one isolated store, they have always given me great service. I had them even change me a computer once even if it was a few days out of warranty, something I had trouble doing even inside warranty windows with the rightfully defunct CompUSA and Circuit City.
Their return policy is great, they ask almost no questions and I can even just say "because it was a piece of crap" and they will take it back! Sure, I do pay a bit of a premium there, sure they try to sell me their "decrapification" services to uninstall bloatware, but its not that hard to say "no thank you, I'll do it myself." Sure, I can get cheaper stuff online (I always get my pc build parts online) but try to return stuff because its functional but crap anywhere else.
And thats just with hardware! If i want games, I know I can go there, grab a new copy (that they carry in plenty amounts) and pay for it and walk out, unlike famous game dedicated chains that try to push up my rear used versions of games that came out yesterday and seem to carry barely enough copies to cover pre-orders. They are also always spacious, organized and clean. In the last years, BestBuy has become THE Brick Geek Shop for all my geeky needs.
As fun as that would be, unfortunately it wont be over this. They announced they will return the money to anyone that has a valid receipt and feels wronged over this.
The fact that you jump to conclusions like that tell me you are clueless about technology.
For one, their service performance can be heavily affected by your geographical location and your ISP.
Also, you can access it from computers where you use it with the keyboard, not "a single controller".
Also would be usefull to know when you tested it. Before release in a qiosq with their setup box and controller? At your home 2 months after release? Last week?
What games did you test?
I think it goes without saying if the service was as bad for everyone as you describe, they would had gone bankrupt already.
Hmmm, if having the 2 top selling phones in the US is considered having their "clocked cleaned"....
I have a better theory, look at the number 3 phone sold in the US and you will notice its the Evo 4G, a Sprint phone. The clue there? Sprint users have no access to the iPhone. It seems they will this October, though.
Problem is, that good $500 laptop may be made by HP, and they are going to stop making laptops!
The ultra-cheap laptop is something we gotten used to, but truth be told: most of these are made like throw away toys and sold at extremely low profit margins hoping to sell so high volumes that it is worth your time. The introduction of the iPad has made too many stop buying laptops, enough to mess up with the low-profit-margin models and to force HP out of the race.
HP's exit MAY leave room for other companies to breath, but its only buying time, specially if some one ends up buying and carrying the HP hardware business. Higher profit margins will need to be pursued, hopefully accompanied with higher quality models. Other than netbooks (and after owning two, i dont want to see another netbook in my life) the days of the $500 laptop are numbered.
A: class action lawsuit. B: If the game includes a game key to install, OnLive will work with SquareEnix to recognize that number as a valid cupon number.
Hopefully they approach option B. I rather users actually get what they paid for than lawyers dip in a huge percentage of a class action suit's settlement.
I have to say, I have test-played OnLive, and the system is amazing. Only reason I have not bought a single game from them is I like to own a copy I can play offline. If they started offering a steam-like distribution, where I can download a copy on top of the one I stream, or include coupons like these in game boxes, I'd jump all over their service in a heartbeat.
The saddest thing is GameStop's actions have resulted in increased promotion to the coupon. I had no clue about this and likely would had never found out without this coverage. Now I do plan to go buy the game (that i was not going to buy due to my PC not being able to run it smoothly) at BestBuy and activate that coupon to play from my underpowered PC:D
Although I know you are just complaining about Apple's Walled Garden's policies, it is good to know a bit more about how they actually work.
For instance, corporations just have to register for an Apple Corporate Development program to be able to do anything they want with their iPads without jail-breaking. They can even wirelessly distribute apps to all the devices they have approved and create apps that don't need to conform with Apple's infamous approval rules. They don't have to worry about undocumented or proprietary APIs, and should they choose to, they can keep their pilots stocked with brand new pornography for every single flight!:)
My guess is that it takes less gallons of fuel a y ear to bring those 11 iPads than it takes to cut down the trees that are then processed into paper, and produce the ink that is used to print said books, and then ship those books to the airports.
If you going to nitpick, you have to nitpick all the way, in all directions.
I don't think thats unusual. How many pro-wrestlers do you know? Or hollywood superstars? Or Patent lawyers? It all depends on what circles you walk, and sometimes is just pure random luck (or lack of it.) If it was not for this specific guy and connections associated with him, I would not know any one that opposed all forms of stem cell research either (outside of TV.)
I actually do. Quite a few. And you would be shocked but the one I know the best is a preacher, who is also a computer programmer and huge scifi geek (but he has a grudge against anything magic related, like Lord of The Rings) that feels that way. It is indeed ignorance, but its an ignorance due to a religious barricade. Not only will he refuse to talk to you off the topic or allow you to tell him about the many forms of stem cell research, but he will go and preach about it at his church every time the topic is in the news, and his "flock" will take his word as the word of the lord and argue with anyone that opposes what he says.
Yes, it all goes down to ignorance, but not in a way where educating them will do any good because they just cover their ears and go "nya nya I dont hear ya."
Slashdot Mirror
Lenovo definitively has an interest in this going out, as do most Android manufacturers. Some may fear the information coming out may hurt overall Android Tablet popularity, but truth is, if the public thinks only Samsung is able to "ship" large numbers of tablets and "sell them", that then perhaps only Samsung Tablets are worthwhile, hurting drastically any competing Android Tablet manufacturer.
Another point of issue is the stores themselves may stop accepting more than a couple units of any other brand due to the horribly low Galaxy Tab sell through.
No matter if the practice is good or bad for Samsung, it is overall for anyone else trying to sell Android Tablets, and perhaps any non Apple Tablet.
Added bonus: taking this out hurts a competitors stance among it's investors. If this is proven true, many investors may feel lied to in the quarterly report meetings. 2% sell through would not be considered "quite smooth" under any sane metric.
BestBuy got 250,000 units and reported to only sell 25,000. That was just BestBuy. Those sales alone made them have a higher final sales count. Add whatever Staples and other chains sold and you would have the TouchPad performing perhaps at least 50% better than the GalaxyTap
Remember those "high return rates" rumors Samsung denied?
How much did a BlueRay cost at the time, though? I myself still don't own that because I do agree: the price was insane. But had I cared at all about BlueRay, I would had considered it to be a darn good deal.
For a lot of people, the PS2 was their first DVD player. Sony thought the same would hold true for the PS3 and BlueRay. The only thing they overestimated was the population's interest in BlueRay technology. Very few actually care for it.
A good businessman should be able to spot where the error was, in retrospect. Without time travel technology, though, no one at the time would had been able to foresee how weak the BlueRay demand was.
Thats just one tier. Book publishers also work closely with the chains (at least the large ones) to liquidate those hardcovers at extremely low prices before they resort to destroying them.
If you walk into a bookstore, you will notice that is very common.
In Sony's defense, they truthfully expected the launch to have much higher demand, and the supplies to not meet said demand. They seriously overestimated the sales of the device and I cant blame them. Historically, popular consoles suffer scarcity at launch, the PS1 and PS2 included. Add to it a heavily undercut BlueRay pricing for the time and they had all the reasons.
No businessman would ever blame them, since based of research and precedents, feature sets and "packed value", they had all the reasons in the world to ship that much.
They DID lie afterwards, constantly claiming the unit was hard to find ween stores were trying to get rid of the inventory they had, but thats a different story.
Unless you expected them to code in-house apps in old fashion assembly, they needed an SDK from the start to make their apps. That does not mean they ever planned to make the SDK public.
There is no direct evidence of either fact (it being planned or it never crossing his mind) but we can actually look at Apple's behavioral approach to iDevices. The iPod Nano and Video had been running some apps for years, and Apple never made this SDK widely available (they did allow certain entities like Square Enix to make some apps, like the original iPod Video's Song Summoner game.) Despite these few direct partnerships, Apple never before gave any weight to opening up their SDKs.
The only other piece of information we can look at is public statements themselves, but many don't want to believe them just because:
A) Its fun to think of conspiracy theories and misdirection
B) Accepting Jobs meant "Web is the development platform" kills the current wave of opinions that say web standards are being used to stick it to Apple's walled garden.
I personally don't care since its pretty much irrelevant what the original intent was (unless you want to argue about that whole "web standards" killing the walled garden topic.)
After all, the iPad can also be cracked to be as open as you want.
They are just trying to distract their investors a while longer, while they attempt to save their rears.
Every quarter Apple is selling more and more iPads, I don't think this guy has any evidence to prove the "cooling down" of tablet demand, unless he plans to use the TouchPad failure as "evidence."
From what I seen, Samsung's tablet success is heavily overstated.
According to Google's own numbers, only 1.2% of the 130 million activated Android devices are tablets (large screen devices, forget if we talking Honeycomb or not.) Thats just 1.56 million, less than the initial batch of Galaxy Tab tables sent to retailers.
In my experience, I love buying from BestBuy. I have seen situations where the computers are opened with the mentioned seals, at least in the cases I have gone through, it tends to happen with very cheap, horrible quality machines that are returned way too often. Don't work there to know for sure, but if I was manager I'd tell my employees to go through all of them and make sure they are in working order before they leave the store.
That aside, BestBuy has some darn good service (again, in my experience, there is only ONE BestBuy I actively avoid as it seems to only employ retarded idiots that rather spend 1 hour talking and keep you waiting than bringing you the 1500 computer you said you WILL buy...) *ghem* sorry, derail... but anyways other than one isolated store, they have always given me great service. I had them even change me a computer once even if it was a few days out of warranty, something I had trouble doing even inside warranty windows with the rightfully defunct CompUSA and Circuit City.
Their return policy is great, they ask almost no questions and I can even just say "because it was a piece of crap" and they will take it back! Sure, I do pay a bit of a premium there, sure they try to sell me their "decrapification" services to uninstall bloatware, but its not that hard to say "no thank you, I'll do it myself." Sure, I can get cheaper stuff online (I always get my pc build parts online) but try to return stuff because its functional but crap anywhere else.
And thats just with hardware! If i want games, I know I can go there, grab a new copy (that they carry in plenty amounts) and pay for it and walk out, unlike famous game dedicated chains that try to push up my rear used versions of games that came out yesterday and seem to carry barely enough copies to cover pre-orders. They are also always spacious, organized and clean. In the last years, BestBuy has become THE Brick Geek Shop for all my geeky needs.
As fun as that would be, unfortunately it wont be over this. They announced they will return the money to anyone that has a valid receipt and feels wronged over this.
The fact that you jump to conclusions like that tell me you are clueless about technology.
For one, their service performance can be heavily affected by your geographical location and your ISP.
Also, you can access it from computers where you use it with the keyboard, not "a single controller".
Also would be usefull to know when you tested it. Before release in a qiosq with their setup box and controller? At your home 2 months after release? Last week?
What games did you test?
I think it goes without saying if the service was as bad for everyone as you describe, they would had gone bankrupt already.
What do Steve Jobs and Earthquakes have in common?
Hmmm, if having the 2 top selling phones in the US is considered having their "clocked cleaned"....
I have a better theory, look at the number 3 phone sold in the US and you will notice its the Evo 4G, a Sprint phone. The clue there? Sprint users have no access to the iPhone. It seems they will this October, though.
Problem is, that good $500 laptop may be made by HP, and they are going to stop making laptops!
The ultra-cheap laptop is something we gotten used to, but truth be told: most of these are made like throw away toys and sold at extremely low profit margins hoping to sell so high volumes that it is worth your time. The introduction of the iPad has made too many stop buying laptops, enough to mess up with the low-profit-margin models and to force HP out of the race.
HP's exit MAY leave room for other companies to breath, but its only buying time, specially if some one ends up buying and carrying the HP hardware business. Higher profit margins will need to be pursued, hopefully accompanied with higher quality models. Other than netbooks (and after owning two, i dont want to see another netbook in my life) the days of the $500 laptop are numbered.
Indeed. There are two potential outcomes of this.
A: class action lawsuit.
B: If the game includes a game key to install, OnLive will work with SquareEnix to recognize that number as a valid cupon number.
Hopefully they approach option B. I rather users actually get what they paid for than lawyers dip in a huge percentage of a class action suit's settlement.
I have to say, I have test-played OnLive, and the system is amazing. Only reason I have not bought a single game from them is I like to own a copy I can play offline. If they started offering a steam-like distribution, where I can download a copy on top of the one I stream, or include coupons like these in game boxes, I'd jump all over their service in a heartbeat.
The saddest thing is GameStop's actions have resulted in increased promotion to the coupon. I had no clue about this and likely would had never found out without this coverage. Now I do plan to go buy the game (that i was not going to buy due to my PC not being able to run it smoothly) at BestBuy and activate that coupon to play from my underpowered PC :D
Although I know you are just complaining about Apple's Walled Garden's policies, it is good to know a bit more about how they actually work.
For instance, corporations just have to register for an Apple Corporate Development program to be able to do anything they want with their iPads without jail-breaking. They can even wirelessly distribute apps to all the devices they have approved and create apps that don't need to conform with Apple's infamous approval rules. They don't have to worry about undocumented or proprietary APIs, and should they choose to, they can keep their pilots stocked with brand new pornography for every single flight! :)
My guess is that it takes less gallons of fuel a y ear to bring those 11 iPads than it takes to cut down the trees that are then processed into paper, and produce the ink that is used to print said books, and then ship those books to the airports.
If you going to nitpick, you have to nitpick all the way, in all directions.
...
Chick full of fashion and modeling companies....
Its not the first time y our desk moves under your feet....
Hmmm... sounds like you are a lucky man!
Maybe we are confusing earthquake reports? There was another earthquake in the area about a year ago...
As I have stated in slashdot in the past: its easier to clean the glossy touchscreen than a laptop's keyboard!
If you buy the CanOBeans upgrade you get to use it 3 times per day.
I don't think thats unusual. How many pro-wrestlers do you know? Or hollywood superstars? Or Patent lawyers? It all depends on what circles you walk, and sometimes is just pure random luck (or lack of it.) If it was not for this specific guy and connections associated with him, I would not know any one that opposed all forms of stem cell research either (outside of TV.)
I actually do. Quite a few. And you would be shocked but the one I know the best is a preacher, who is also a computer programmer and huge scifi geek (but he has a grudge against anything magic related, like Lord of The Rings) that feels that way. It is indeed ignorance, but its an ignorance due to a religious barricade. Not only will he refuse to talk to you off the topic or allow you to tell him about the many forms of stem cell research, but he will go and preach about it at his church every time the topic is in the news, and his "flock" will take his word as the word of the lord and argue with anyone that opposes what he says.
Yes, it all goes down to ignorance, but not in a way where educating them will do any good because they just cover their ears and go "nya nya I dont hear ya."