We're a decade in. I'd go to symbolset's house and find out what that fucker wants 'cuz he's spoiling a lot of shit. I'd find a way to make him play along.
If you want to argue with me on this point then do the math. Look at what the investment was paid in then, and what it would be worth now if Microsoft had held it to the present day. Only then, if your numbers disagree with what I said, call me a liar. Or trust me, you can't do it. I did the math and if your figures disagree, you've read them wrong somehow. That one investment, if held, would now be most of Microsoft's market cap. Microsoft has fared well on their core markets for a long time - but we knew how to do WYSIWYG document editing before they even bought the word processing package we know as Word. And long before then, word processing was a solved problem, much as spreadsheets and presentations were.
What has Microsoft got to give but a halt to progress to preserve their control? Diddly. Is that enough? Maybe, if we're not watching.
Oh, yeah. They should have bought into Plays For Now, or Zune and they didn't. What fools they are! They should have grasped that brass ring when it was before them, and now they could be enjoying the rapture of Windows Phone's one percent market share. after having sold their soul to the devil to get there like Nokia is doing.
Um, no. Not just no, but Fuck no. Are you fucking kidding? I saw this movie and it doesn't end well. It's a sole survivor flick where even the survivor is tortured.
But it's different now because Microsoft has grown warm and fuzzy.
Fuck you. We've had that story a thousand times, and it's a faustian bargain every time. The devil treats only when it's his advantage to do so. Make a deal with him, and he gets your soul. That's how it works.
The T2 is due any day. They've sold out of the T1. That's a good thing. Apple launches a new model without fear the old one will sell out also. Asus must take more care to make that happen, and they do.
OOh. We get eight levels deep in the slashdot where nobody will read it, and now I get the real shizzle. Well thanks for the marginal respect, to let me have this little bit.
You still suck, and you're not going to win. Let me tell you why.
W8 is a year out at best, and two before it peaks - and we know that after is coming versions we have to migrate to and buy again. You'll sell a brazillian copies, just like you did with Vista, but almost nobody will actually use it. That will probably be the last time for that trick.
We like our phones, and our tablets too. And when there's an update, we click update and have the new version automagically. We don't have to buy it. We don't have to swap out our gear. Every supported function is supported until our gear doesn't do the new things other people do. We have to buy new gear when it actually does new stuff, rather than when the buttons on the old stuff are moved around, which is your current plan for selling more units.
You're talking now about stuff that happened way back when Microsoft had a 20% share of mobile, and was fighting for a fraction of a point. Nokia had huge share then, and could have counted coup, but they didn't. Much like Microsoft could have innovated in the space and didn't. A lot of water has gone under that bridge.
Now Nokia seems to be trying to shed points as fast as they can, and Microsoft is looking up at one single point of share as an aspirational goal they hope they might achieve but don't know how to get there.
Nokia though in my mind is totally to blame for being in a position where Microsoft could do what they have done.
I'm going to be a total ass and suggest that this is equivalent to saying "She dressed like a slut, implying she wanted to be raped." It's harsh, but do you see what I'm getting at?
Nokia had some great stuff, some middling stuff, and some bad stuff. It had a heirarchy that didn't know or care which was which as long as it moved units, which worked for longer than it should have. But that day is done. We want new stuff.
"Other than flash" well that deals out something like 90% of web apps. My Android phone doesn't do Silverlight-light, like her phone does, which cuts me out of just about nuthin. Her Windows phone can't even do Zombo.com. And everything is possible at Zombo.com. (Sorry iFans, you don't get zombocom.)
Apparently in iOS and Android a weather widget or flight planner is one app no matter where you might be, but Microsoft is spiffing per app to get their app count up so in Windows phone each of those is thousands of apps depending on where you might be and they have to rate-limit app submissions to hundreds per day per developer.
There are darned few Android apps that can't be had on iOS. Due to the relative market share however, 95% of Android apps can't be had on Windows phone, and the percentage is higher on iOS. But not even 5% of Android apps can be had on Windows Phone, and a lot of those are damned good. iOS has two apps that are awesome that Android can't have: GarageBand and iMovie. That's it.
My wife's a bright girl. 130+ IQ, classically educated with a 4 year degree in programming (best marks), and considerable self-study beyond that. She can discuss at length the moral implications of exobiology, argue both for and against life-extension without emotion, consider the implications of FTL muons with the best of us, and still get the kids to school in relativistic time. If it weren't so I'd find her impossibly boring. She's working on Android apps now as an author. Yes, she knows how to work her phone and find the few apps it does have. She bought it to spite me, and has realized her mistake. It doesn't have the apps my Android phone has, and it's not gonna. She's stubborn, not stupid.
Thanks for playing. If you got paid for that, they didn't get their money's worth.
These things move ahead fast when there's enough community interest - and there sure as hell is in this case.
Yeah, that. Though the thing is damned nice as it comes in the box for folks who don't like to diddle. For the folks who do, it's diddleable in the extreme. The next version with 5x the processor power and much more powerful video due for Christmas even more so. We've really turned the corner on a new dimension in tech, and the old guard with their "cannibalization" concerns aren't coming with us into this new era.
It has Windows Phone 7, the No Donuts revision. Why would I be talking about Windows Mobile 6? Ah- don't answer that. A little Googling shows that folks with WM6.5 LOB apps have found a way to flash their HD7s with that decrepit ware. That's really sad. Kind of indicative of a serious disconnect between the OS vendor and the user base. That's really an odd corner case question. Is there somebody selling the HD7 with 6.5? That might explain why 6.5 is still selling better than 7.*. Forgive me - I was never into the Windows Mobile thing.
The Mango update will come along shortly for us I suppose. Not that it will change anything about my assessment, as it's got nothing to do with the OS. Multitasking, the ability to customize your device, choose backgrounds and ringtones, to do copy and paste, these are all essential features that make up the bare minimum of what a phone must do to even exist now. But even if Windows Phone hits all of our mandatory minimums it still doesn't have the apps we like and it isn't going to because between them iPhones and Android phones sell more units in a week than Windows Phone has ever. Maybe in two or three days even. Developers are not going to be motivated to make apps for this platform if they want to make money or have fame, which are the two primary motivators for app development. We have 10" Android tablets for our app needs now, and that's even better than having an Android phone because of the huge beautiful screens. The problem with our Android tablets is with 3G connectivity when you're away from wifi hotspots because our Android tablets don't have 3G or 4G, and we wouldn't pay the premium for that if it were available. We're not willing to pay an extra wireless contract for that. That's just crazy when you can activate Wifi tethering on a real phone or buy a MiWi and tether all your gear to it - your camera, your phone, your tablet, your laptop, and everybody else at the table too.
We can't even wifi tether to the thing with Mango when we get the update because that feature won't be enabled on legacy Windows Phones in Mango - and that might have extended its useful life. Something about the wifi chipset, or they didn't want to code around it, or maybe their traditional move-along strategy. Otherwise it would make a decent 3G hotspot at least. My Samsung Epic with Android is nearly a year old and it has 4G wifi hotspot tethering, which is nice for me on the odd occasion I'm away from open wifi, but now and again my wife is out & about with her Android tablet away from a hotspot and would like to browse the 'net. Doctor waiting rooms and whatnot. She's got a data-able HD7 WP7 phone, and it can't even give her that little thing. So in that rare corner case she can't browse the Internet except on the tiny phone screen - but she can catch up on her movies and TV episodes, she can move forward on the books she's working on. And at this point she'd rather do that than wrestle with IE over 3G on her HD7 with Windows Phone.
It'll make a nice toy when I put Android on it. Frankly I doubt we'll wait for the contract to expire. My wife's fallen in love with Android now that she's got the tablet and she's likely to go with an Android phone long before the contract expires in 18 months. She's downstairs right now refreshing her ancient Java skills to build Android apps. She doesn't care if the contract is up because it's my job to go get the money and if she wants a new phone she can stress me until I get it for her, even if it's every six months. Maybe I can convince her to let me have a go at Android mods for her HD7 first, if they have the phone part working. I haven't checked that yet. It's not bad hardware, like I said. Even if phone and data is a no-go, it'll make a nice Android test device and maybe I can talk her into a feature phone and a MiWi type thing so she can get her Android tablet online when she's out and about.
We're an odd bunch. We do tech from WAY back. Our kids get their own PC on their first birthday, and build their own in second grade, and we start coding in third. Their kindergarden teachers are surprised to get kids who know their alphabet. They don't know what to do with kids who can type short stories.
They have ARM Ubuntu and Debian now, and some people are dual-booting their Transformers. You can Google it. It's not for me. There are lots of apps for it though. I always have Debian or Ubuntu handy, at least as a pendrive boot or VM so don't need this from my tablet.
Get the double battery widget. It's a neat desktop widget that shows both batteries independently.
Gotta give you that one. The changes Jobs has wrought are disruptively innovative and I think that's a good thing. I might take exception to "not 'more'" as flash and sideloading and alternate marketplaces are quite a lot "more" to me.
One day the progression from iTunes to iPod to iPhone to iPad to whatever comes next is going to seem like a grand vision with just the right application of leverage at just the right time - a thing only Apple could have gotten away with that brought about a reorientation of our technology's focus from incremental gadgetry to human wants and needs. Brilliance.
It comes with a gilded cage though, and that's not for me. Glad to see an alternative path.
Well I've got one - my wife's. A top-o-the line HTC HD7 she bought without talking it over with me. Every time I show her an app on my SGS Epic she wants that on her phone, and it just won't do that. I had to buy her an Android tablet to make her happy, and now she only uses the phone for talk-n-text like it was a feature phone. When the contract is up I'll put an Android on it and give it to the kids as a toy for playing music and games and movies and that will be that. It's her last Windows Phone ever. The hardware's not bad - but the apps are lacking and that's not going to get better any time before it's obsolete. See, the utility in the thing isn't in the package at all - it's in the app ecosystem and that's why Windows Phone is having such an uphill battle. It's too little, too late.
I have both of them, as I said. They are not just a little different, they're a lot different. The iPad concept is a Cathedral. The Transformer concept is a Bazaar. They're both "insanely great" products and they have some commonalities. But they are not the same thing at all.
Ubuntu and Debian. Google it. It's not for me, but some people claim good results with a dual-boot of Ubuntu and Android. I like mine just the way it came out of the box. I have an Ubuntu laptop for when I want to do laptop stuff, and my problem with desktop Linux on this thing is the same problem as desktop Windows. They're not designed for each other, it's not what the thing is about. Horses for courses. But knock yourself out. Maybe what you want is different from what I want.
This stuff just doesn't matter. You guys are always here, bringing up this stuff that doesn't matter. What's up with that? You would think by now you would be willing to admit the thing has been rejected by the market and move on. What is wrong with you people? Is it that this is all you've got, the slim thread you're clinging to until Windows 8 brings mobile salvation?
Bad news: W8 hasn't got it either. Now what? Why don't you guys go do something useful with your lives? That would be nice.
Nice trying to shift the blame, but they took the Manchurian CEO and he's quite quickly doing them in. In Europe they just ditched their established disty partners, burning their bridge to retail outlets that give them any sort of hope. That bridge is going to take a year to rebuild that they just don't have, and Europe was their only market with margins in it.
This one was over the day American investors called up the Chairman of Nokia and told him to take Elop or be fired and Elop would take over anyway. It's an inside job, the deliberate burning down of an established company. And it's an evil thing to do. It's crushing the economy of Finland, many retirement funds are going bust. Competent engineers with families thrown out of work. And the goal seems to be to get Nokia down to a size Microsoft can swallow, for the patents.
After he's done, where is Elop going to go? Where else? He'll come back to Redmond dragging the corpse of Nokia behind him, and it'll be stored in a filing cabinet next to Sendo's IP - and that will be the end of it.
Now who were those American investors? We don't know yet, but I bet it will come out one day in the shareholder lawsuit.
If I want a Windows netbook my wife has an Acer Aspire One, so for my household I guess it wasn't an either/or thing. I agree that the new Brazos netbooks are pretty slick. But I have no use for a netbook. I've got several laptops, and around a dozen PCs set up around the house, servers in a closet and the garage. The whole house has wifi coverage, gigabit Ethernet to every room and a 50mbps cable Ethernet Internet uplink. There's no shortage of PCs here - I'm in the business, have to carry at least one laptop with me everywhere I go even when I'm nominally off work. But the tablet, it was for me - not for family or work - it was to be all mine.
From the first moment I unboxed the original iPad (only days after launch) I knew that this was almost what I wanted, but not quite. Slim, beautiful display, an interface so intuitive my toddler could use it after finding it on the couch, all-day battery life. So sexy people would come up and want to fondle it. But with that iTunes chain you just can't get away from, choices like "no flash" - not that I'm fond of flash really, but when I'm buying gear I expect to be the master of it and for it to obey only me. I knew I wanted an Android tablet because I had an Android phone, but it couldn't be just any Android tablet.
It had to be priced better than the iPad, with a frontside camera for video chat, competitive CPU specs, and the glorious IPS display but in widescreen because I prefer the widescreen movie experience and having seen what that looks like on iPad's 1024 wide 4:3 display I knew it was unsat - it would be fine if I was into standard def TV, but I haven't been for many years. It had to have a nice supply of ports and all-day battery life. It needed the capacitive multitouch screen. I actually wrote about it here at the time the iPad first came out. It had to have the full Google experience because the Android Market with 200K apps was something I was used to on my phone and anything less would be unsat. They say the apps aren't optimized for tablets, but that's not my experience - Android scales well.
So when the Transformer launched I knew "this is it!" and drove all over town trying to get one on launch weekend. After 100 miles and six places I almost gave up and settled for an iPad or Acer Iconia. But I finally found it at Fry's, and they didn't even know they had it - I had to wait half an hour while they dug it out of the warehouse and they only had four. I think the techs in the electronics department got the other three. I didn't get the keyboard at first, and I don't use it much, but it's nice to have. I hadn't thought about the mini-HDMI, or that I would use it, but now the kids love browsing YouTube on the bigscreen and that's a fun activity we can do together.
I bought the Gtablet afterward, mostly to get the rest of the family to leave my Transformer alone.
As for why you would want one rather than a netbook, maybe you wouldn't. You certainly wouldn't like one of the Windows tablets. The tablet form factor has some advantages that I admittedly didn't think were important until I'd used an iPad. But they're hard to enumerate and they don't translate to Windows. It's a convenience thing. Once you get used to one the idea of giving it up is horrible. And it's not $250 more - the Transformer is only $400, or $100 more. In my mind the question isn't whether one or the other is the better value for money or even the better price - it's just whether it's the thing I want. The Transformer is, the iPad and the Windows netbook aren't.
If you don't want to give up your Windows experience, tablets are not for you. And that's ok. We all have comfort levels, and these Android tablets are definitely different. They will not run your old Quicken. But at what they do do, they are frankly amazing. If you read the reviews you'll get a sense of the awe people have about this thing: it's transformative, magical. That it doesn't run Far Cry is irrelevant - your toaster doesn't run Far Cry either and that doesn't diminish its value to you. That's not what it's for.
Acer, Asus, Samsung and Moto seem to be making a go of it on some models and are strong companies with huge economies of scale. Hundreds of companies large and small in China are running off small lots of low-end no-name tablets that are doing well in BRIC and on eBay and Amazon. Amazon just launched their own tablet and 90K units presold to end-users on day one isn't too bad a launch for a new product line sight unseen - it's not Apple numbers, but it will do. We see different things I guess.
Some companies, for one reason or another, threw their tablet under the bus. There was RIM, who wanted to go proprietary and then delivered an unsat tablet. There's Toshiba, Dell and HP and all the other Windows tablet OEMs who are just plain retarded, launching a new product into a category that's failed for fifteen consecutive years. Some like Moto and Samsung targeted for an unrealistic bottom price point and were uncompetitive but have learned.
In all it's working like it's supposed to work. The cream rises to the top.
I did mention the user reviews in that post, and down below I rate it "Toddler tested, toddler approved." It runs all the Android apps from my phone - full screen and beautiful detail, and I don't have to buy them again. All my content is "just there". This is slashdot, and specs are appreciated. I know calling out specs isn't the Apple way: it's gauche. But here it matters, and this isn't an iPad.
I didn't call out that with widescreen, movies look far better than on the iPad. I didn't mention that with 1280 width on the screen, that the iPad doesn't have, you see much of the web the way it has been designed to be seen this last decade without scaling. These things are important to people here. But I don't call that stuff out when I show it to people. I just hand it over and after a few minutes they ask me how to get one.
That Windows tablet has nothing in common with the thing I wrote about except the manufacturer. Quit trying to confuse people. You're talking about a $1200 tablet with three hour battery life that weighs a ton, is unresponsive on a good day, runs software completely inappropriate for a tablet. It's probably selling in the dozens, and I wouldn't take one for a gift. I'm talking about something... else. Would you Microsoft marketing trolls PLEASE go away for a little while and let the grownups talk?
I don't hate the iPad - I've got one at work and it's intuitive, easy to use, has a great software selection. It's just not my thing for buying with my own money. You're right: the littles take right to it.
But I can't be critical of you for drinking the haterade, because somebody might ask me about the horror that is Windows on a tablet.
That said, my Android tablets are all toddler tested and toddler approved. "Tablet, Gampa?" is often the first thing I hear on arriving home.
It's a Darwinian thing. Nature floats a lot of trial balloons. Some of them work out and are improved upon. Some of them don't. But progress moves forward.
I have this one too, and can confirm the above. The stock ROM bites, and having no experience flashing Android devices thought I had bricked it for a few weeks until I had time to read up. Now that I've fixed it I can see that it's really hard to actually make the thing unflashable, but finding the right firmware sets and drivers to get the job done is not a trivial challenge for the average person.
It seems unlikely Viewsonic turned a profit on these - they're selling through Woot now, probably bought remaindered in bulk. But if you've got the nerd skills this tablet is a heck of a good value at $260. Capacitive 10" touchscreen means no multitouch and slightly sluggish reaction time. The screen doesn't have wide angle viewing. It does have a full-sized USB port on the tablet for USB storage or mouse, and a microSD slot on the tablet. The speakers are decent and with the right software load you can get Flash and Netflix. Makes a great little dedicated browser too.
But don't let the battery run all the way out. It seems not to have a battery backed real-time clock so if you discharge it all the way you'll have to reset the time to get it back into useful condition.
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We're a decade in. I'd go to symbolset's house and find out what that fucker wants 'cuz he's spoiling a lot of shit. I'd find a way to make him play along.
What has Microsoft got to give but a halt to progress to preserve their control? Diddly. Is that enough? Maybe, if we're not watching.
Oh, yeah. They should have bought into Plays For Now, or Zune and they didn't. What fools they are! They should have grasped that brass ring when it was before them, and now they could be enjoying the rapture of Windows Phone's one percent market share. after having sold their soul to the devil to get there like Nokia is doing.
Um, no. Not just no, but Fuck no. Are you fucking kidding? I saw this movie and it doesn't end well. It's a sole survivor flick where even the survivor is tortured.
But it's different now because Microsoft has grown warm and fuzzy.
Fuck you. We've had that story a thousand times, and it's a faustian bargain every time. The devil treats only when it's his advantage to do so. Make a deal with him, and he gets your soul. That's how it works.
The T2 is due any day. They've sold out of the T1. That's a good thing. Apple launches a new model without fear the old one will sell out also. Asus must take more care to make that happen, and they do.
They did once. If they'd held it that bit would double their value now. But they lacked vision, then as now.
OOh. We get eight levels deep in the slashdot where nobody will read it, and now I get the real shizzle. Well thanks for the marginal respect, to let me have this little bit.
You still suck, and you're not going to win. Let me tell you why.
W8 is a year out at best, and two before it peaks - and we know that after is coming versions we have to migrate to and buy again. You'll sell a brazillian copies, just like you did with Vista, but almost nobody will actually use it. That will probably be the last time for that trick.
We like our phones, and our tablets too. And when there's an update, we click update and have the new version automagically. We don't have to buy it. We don't have to swap out our gear. Every supported function is supported until our gear doesn't do the new things other people do. We have to buy new gear when it actually does new stuff, rather than when the buttons on the old stuff are moved around, which is your current plan for selling more units.
You're talking now about stuff that happened way back when Microsoft had a 20% share of mobile, and was fighting for a fraction of a point. Nokia had huge share then, and could have counted coup, but they didn't. Much like Microsoft could have innovated in the space and didn't. A lot of water has gone under that bridge.
Now Nokia seems to be trying to shed points as fast as they can, and Microsoft is looking up at one single point of share as an aspirational goal they hope they might achieve but don't know how to get there.
Nokia though in my mind is totally to blame for being in a position where Microsoft could do what they have done.
I'm going to be a total ass and suggest that this is equivalent to saying "She dressed like a slut, implying she wanted to be raped." It's harsh, but do you see what I'm getting at?
Nokia had some great stuff, some middling stuff, and some bad stuff. It had a heirarchy that didn't know or care which was which as long as it moved units, which worked for longer than it should have. But that day is done. We want new stuff.
It sounds to me like you're going to get what you want for Christmas.
"Other than flash" well that deals out something like 90% of web apps. My Android phone doesn't do Silverlight-light, like her phone does, which cuts me out of just about nuthin. Her Windows phone can't even do Zombo.com. And everything is possible at Zombo.com. (Sorry iFans, you don't get zombocom.)
Apparently in iOS and Android a weather widget or flight planner is one app no matter where you might be, but Microsoft is spiffing per app to get their app count up so in Windows phone each of those is thousands of apps depending on where you might be and they have to rate-limit app submissions to hundreds per day per developer.
There are darned few Android apps that can't be had on iOS. Due to the relative market share however, 95% of Android apps can't be had on Windows phone, and the percentage is higher on iOS. But not even 5% of Android apps can be had on Windows Phone, and a lot of those are damned good. iOS has two apps that are awesome that Android can't have: GarageBand and iMovie. That's it.
My wife's a bright girl. 130+ IQ, classically educated with a 4 year degree in programming (best marks), and considerable self-study beyond that. She can discuss at length the moral implications of exobiology, argue both for and against life-extension without emotion, consider the implications of FTL muons with the best of us, and still get the kids to school in relativistic time. If it weren't so I'd find her impossibly boring. She's working on Android apps now as an author. Yes, she knows how to work her phone and find the few apps it does have. She bought it to spite me, and has realized her mistake. It doesn't have the apps my Android phone has, and it's not gonna. She's stubborn, not stupid.
Thanks for playing. If you got paid for that, they didn't get their money's worth.
These things move ahead fast when there's enough community interest - and there sure as hell is in this case.
Yeah, that. Though the thing is damned nice as it comes in the box for folks who don't like to diddle. For the folks who do, it's diddleable in the extreme. The next version with 5x the processor power and much more powerful video due for Christmas even more so. We've really turned the corner on a new dimension in tech, and the old guard with their "cannibalization" concerns aren't coming with us into this new era.
It has Windows Phone 7, the No Donuts revision. Why would I be talking about Windows Mobile 6? Ah- don't answer that. A little Googling shows that folks with WM6.5 LOB apps have found a way to flash their HD7s with that decrepit ware. That's really sad. Kind of indicative of a serious disconnect between the OS vendor and the user base. That's really an odd corner case question. Is there somebody selling the HD7 with 6.5? That might explain why 6.5 is still selling better than 7.*. Forgive me - I was never into the Windows Mobile thing.
The Mango update will come along shortly for us I suppose. Not that it will change anything about my assessment, as it's got nothing to do with the OS. Multitasking, the ability to customize your device, choose backgrounds and ringtones, to do copy and paste, these are all essential features that make up the bare minimum of what a phone must do to even exist now. But even if Windows Phone hits all of our mandatory minimums it still doesn't have the apps we like and it isn't going to because between them iPhones and Android phones sell more units in a week than Windows Phone has ever. Maybe in two or three days even. Developers are not going to be motivated to make apps for this platform if they want to make money or have fame, which are the two primary motivators for app development. We have 10" Android tablets for our app needs now, and that's even better than having an Android phone because of the huge beautiful screens. The problem with our Android tablets is with 3G connectivity when you're away from wifi hotspots because our Android tablets don't have 3G or 4G, and we wouldn't pay the premium for that if it were available. We're not willing to pay an extra wireless contract for that. That's just crazy when you can activate Wifi tethering on a real phone or buy a MiWi and tether all your gear to it - your camera, your phone, your tablet, your laptop, and everybody else at the table too.
We can't even wifi tether to the thing with Mango when we get the update because that feature won't be enabled on legacy Windows Phones in Mango - and that might have extended its useful life. Something about the wifi chipset, or they didn't want to code around it, or maybe their traditional move-along strategy. Otherwise it would make a decent 3G hotspot at least. My Samsung Epic with Android is nearly a year old and it has 4G wifi hotspot tethering, which is nice for me on the odd occasion I'm away from open wifi, but now and again my wife is out & about with her Android tablet away from a hotspot and would like to browse the 'net. Doctor waiting rooms and whatnot. She's got a data-able HD7 WP7 phone, and it can't even give her that little thing. So in that rare corner case she can't browse the Internet except on the tiny phone screen - but she can catch up on her movies and TV episodes, she can move forward on the books she's working on. And at this point she'd rather do that than wrestle with IE over 3G on her HD7 with Windows Phone.
It'll make a nice toy when I put Android on it. Frankly I doubt we'll wait for the contract to expire. My wife's fallen in love with Android now that she's got the tablet and she's likely to go with an Android phone long before the contract expires in 18 months. She's downstairs right now refreshing her ancient Java skills to build Android apps. She doesn't care if the contract is up because it's my job to go get the money and if she wants a new phone she can stress me until I get it for her, even if it's every six months. Maybe I can convince her to let me have a go at Android mods for her HD7 first, if they have the phone part working. I haven't checked that yet. It's not bad hardware, like I said. Even if phone and data is a no-go, it'll make a nice Android test device and maybe I can talk her into a feature phone and a MiWi type thing so she can get her Android tablet online when she's out and about.
We're an odd bunch. We do tech from WAY back. Our kids get their own PC on their first birthday, and build their own in second grade, and we start coding in third. Their kindergarden teachers are surprised to get kids who know their alphabet. They don't know what to do with kids who can type short stories.
They have ARM Ubuntu and Debian now, and some people are dual-booting their Transformers. You can Google it. It's not for me. There are lots of apps for it though. I always have Debian or Ubuntu handy, at least as a pendrive boot or VM so don't need this from my tablet.
Get the double battery widget. It's a neat desktop widget that shows both batteries independently.
Apple keeps showing The Way here.
Gotta give you that one. The changes Jobs has wrought are disruptively innovative and I think that's a good thing. I might take exception to "not 'more'" as flash and sideloading and alternate marketplaces are quite a lot "more" to me.
One day the progression from iTunes to iPod to iPhone to iPad to whatever comes next is going to seem like a grand vision with just the right application of leverage at just the right time - a thing only Apple could have gotten away with that brought about a reorientation of our technology's focus from incremental gadgetry to human wants and needs. Brilliance.
It comes with a gilded cage though, and that's not for me. Glad to see an alternative path.
Well I've got one - my wife's. A top-o-the line HTC HD7 she bought without talking it over with me. Every time I show her an app on my SGS Epic she wants that on her phone, and it just won't do that. I had to buy her an Android tablet to make her happy, and now she only uses the phone for talk-n-text like it was a feature phone. When the contract is up I'll put an Android on it and give it to the kids as a toy for playing music and games and movies and that will be that. It's her last Windows Phone ever. The hardware's not bad - but the apps are lacking and that's not going to get better any time before it's obsolete. See, the utility in the thing isn't in the package at all - it's in the app ecosystem and that's why Windows Phone is having such an uphill battle. It's too little, too late.
I have both of them, as I said. They are not just a little different, they're a lot different. The iPad concept is a Cathedral. The Transformer concept is a Bazaar. They're both "insanely great" products and they have some commonalities. But they are not the same thing at all.
Ubuntu and Debian. Google it. It's not for me, but some people claim good results with a dual-boot of Ubuntu and Android. I like mine just the way it came out of the box. I have an Ubuntu laptop for when I want to do laptop stuff, and my problem with desktop Linux on this thing is the same problem as desktop Windows. They're not designed for each other, it's not what the thing is about. Horses for courses. But knock yourself out. Maybe what you want is different from what I want.
This stuff just doesn't matter. You guys are always here, bringing up this stuff that doesn't matter. What's up with that? You would think by now you would be willing to admit the thing has been rejected by the market and move on. What is wrong with you people? Is it that this is all you've got, the slim thread you're clinging to until Windows 8 brings mobile salvation?
Bad news: W8 hasn't got it either. Now what? Why don't you guys go do something useful with your lives? That would be nice.
Nice trying to shift the blame, but they took the Manchurian CEO and he's quite quickly doing them in. In Europe they just ditched their established disty partners, burning their bridge to retail outlets that give them any sort of hope. That bridge is going to take a year to rebuild that they just don't have, and Europe was their only market with margins in it.
This one was over the day American investors called up the Chairman of Nokia and told him to take Elop or be fired and Elop would take over anyway. It's an inside job, the deliberate burning down of an established company. And it's an evil thing to do. It's crushing the economy of Finland, many retirement funds are going bust. Competent engineers with families thrown out of work. And the goal seems to be to get Nokia down to a size Microsoft can swallow, for the patents.
After he's done, where is Elop going to go? Where else? He'll come back to Redmond dragging the corpse of Nokia behind him, and it'll be stored in a filing cabinet next to Sendo's IP - and that will be the end of it.
Now who were those American investors? We don't know yet, but I bet it will come out one day in the shareholder lawsuit.
If I want a Windows netbook my wife has an Acer Aspire One, so for my household I guess it wasn't an either/or thing. I agree that the new Brazos netbooks are pretty slick. But I have no use for a netbook. I've got several laptops, and around a dozen PCs set up around the house, servers in a closet and the garage. The whole house has wifi coverage, gigabit Ethernet to every room and a 50mbps cable Ethernet Internet uplink. There's no shortage of PCs here - I'm in the business, have to carry at least one laptop with me everywhere I go even when I'm nominally off work. But the tablet, it was for me - not for family or work - it was to be all mine.
From the first moment I unboxed the original iPad (only days after launch) I knew that this was almost what I wanted, but not quite. Slim, beautiful display, an interface so intuitive my toddler could use it after finding it on the couch, all-day battery life. So sexy people would come up and want to fondle it. But with that iTunes chain you just can't get away from, choices like "no flash" - not that I'm fond of flash really, but when I'm buying gear I expect to be the master of it and for it to obey only me. I knew I wanted an Android tablet because I had an Android phone, but it couldn't be just any Android tablet.
It had to be priced better than the iPad, with a frontside camera for video chat, competitive CPU specs, and the glorious IPS display but in widescreen because I prefer the widescreen movie experience and having seen what that looks like on iPad's 1024 wide 4:3 display I knew it was unsat - it would be fine if I was into standard def TV, but I haven't been for many years. It had to have a nice supply of ports and all-day battery life. It needed the capacitive multitouch screen. I actually wrote about it here at the time the iPad first came out. It had to have the full Google experience because the Android Market with 200K apps was something I was used to on my phone and anything less would be unsat. They say the apps aren't optimized for tablets, but that's not my experience - Android scales well.
So when the Transformer launched I knew "this is it!" and drove all over town trying to get one on launch weekend. After 100 miles and six places I almost gave up and settled for an iPad or Acer Iconia. But I finally found it at Fry's, and they didn't even know they had it - I had to wait half an hour while they dug it out of the warehouse and they only had four. I think the techs in the electronics department got the other three. I didn't get the keyboard at first, and I don't use it much, but it's nice to have. I hadn't thought about the mini-HDMI, or that I would use it, but now the kids love browsing YouTube on the bigscreen and that's a fun activity we can do together.
I bought the Gtablet afterward, mostly to get the rest of the family to leave my Transformer alone.
As for why you would want one rather than a netbook, maybe you wouldn't. You certainly wouldn't like one of the Windows tablets. The tablet form factor has some advantages that I admittedly didn't think were important until I'd used an iPad. But they're hard to enumerate and they don't translate to Windows. It's a convenience thing. Once you get used to one the idea of giving it up is horrible. And it's not $250 more - the Transformer is only $400, or $100 more. In my mind the question isn't whether one or the other is the better value for money or even the better price - it's just whether it's the thing I want. The Transformer is, the iPad and the Windows netbook aren't.
If you don't want to give up your Windows experience, tablets are not for you. And that's ok. We all have comfort levels, and these Android tablets are definitely different. They will not run your old Quicken. But at what they do do, they are frankly amazing. If you read the reviews you'll get a sense of the awe people have about this thing: it's transformative, magical. That it doesn't run Far Cry is irrelevant - your toaster doesn't run Far Cry either and that doesn't diminish its value to you. That's not what it's for.
Acer, Asus, Samsung and Moto seem to be making a go of it on some models and are strong companies with huge economies of scale. Hundreds of companies large and small in China are running off small lots of low-end no-name tablets that are doing well in BRIC and on eBay and Amazon. Amazon just launched their own tablet and 90K units presold to end-users on day one isn't too bad a launch for a new product line sight unseen - it's not Apple numbers, but it will do. We see different things I guess.
Some companies, for one reason or another, threw their tablet under the bus. There was RIM, who wanted to go proprietary and then delivered an unsat tablet. There's Toshiba, Dell and HP and all the other Windows tablet OEMs who are just plain retarded, launching a new product into a category that's failed for fifteen consecutive years. Some like Moto and Samsung targeted for an unrealistic bottom price point and were uncompetitive but have learned.
In all it's working like it's supposed to work. The cream rises to the top.
I did mention the user reviews in that post, and down below I rate it "Toddler tested, toddler approved." It runs all the Android apps from my phone - full screen and beautiful detail, and I don't have to buy them again. All my content is "just there". This is slashdot, and specs are appreciated. I know calling out specs isn't the Apple way: it's gauche. But here it matters, and this isn't an iPad.
I didn't call out that with widescreen, movies look far better than on the iPad. I didn't mention that with 1280 width on the screen, that the iPad doesn't have, you see much of the web the way it has been designed to be seen this last decade without scaling. These things are important to people here. But I don't call that stuff out when I show it to people. I just hand it over and after a few minutes they ask me how to get one.
That Windows tablet has nothing in common with the thing I wrote about except the manufacturer. Quit trying to confuse people. You're talking about a $1200 tablet with three hour battery life that weighs a ton, is unresponsive on a good day, runs software completely inappropriate for a tablet. It's probably selling in the dozens, and I wouldn't take one for a gift. I'm talking about something... else. Would you Microsoft marketing trolls PLEASE go away for a little while and let the grownups talk?
I don't hate the iPad - I've got one at work and it's intuitive, easy to use, has a great software selection. It's just not my thing for buying with my own money. You're right: the littles take right to it.
But I can't be critical of you for drinking the haterade, because somebody might ask me about the horror that is Windows on a tablet.
That said, my Android tablets are all toddler tested and toddler approved. "Tablet, Gampa?" is often the first thing I hear on arriving home.
It's a Darwinian thing. Nature floats a lot of trial balloons. Some of them work out and are improved upon. Some of them don't. But progress moves forward.
I have this one too, and can confirm the above. The stock ROM bites, and having no experience flashing Android devices thought I had bricked it for a few weeks until I had time to read up. Now that I've fixed it I can see that it's really hard to actually make the thing unflashable, but finding the right firmware sets and drivers to get the job done is not a trivial challenge for the average person.
It seems unlikely Viewsonic turned a profit on these - they're selling through Woot now, probably bought remaindered in bulk. But if you've got the nerd skills this tablet is a heck of a good value at $260. Capacitive 10" touchscreen means no multitouch and slightly sluggish reaction time. The screen doesn't have wide angle viewing. It does have a full-sized USB port on the tablet for USB storage or mouse, and a microSD slot on the tablet. The speakers are decent and with the right software load you can get Flash and Netflix. Makes a great little dedicated browser too.
But don't let the battery run all the way out. It seems not to have a battery backed real-time clock so if you discharge it all the way you'll have to reset the time to get it back into useful condition.