So, it's Android's problem that you allowed someone physical access to your device long enough to connect it to a PC, unlock the bootloader, and flash custom firmware to it? Let's not forget the fact that unlocking the bootloader entails a data wipe on most devices, so it would have been FUCKING OBVIOUS that your device had been tampered with due to the fact that it would have been WIPED CLEAN.
The fact remains that at a $100 price point, it's pretty obvious you were using some cheapass Chinese knockoff and you shouldn't be surprised that it was backdoored. You keep on saying how horrible Android is, but you won't even state the make and model of the device you claim was compromised.
The only 10" tablet in 4:3 I am aware of is the iPad - definitively NOT an Android tablet.
Touchpad may be 4:3 too but that only has Android on it unofficially though hacks.
There is not a single mainstream Android 10" tablet I am aware of that is not widescreen... Or did you fall to Apple's photoshop shenanigans that altered the Tab 10.1's aspect ratio to make it look like it was 4:3 when it wasn't?
Tab 7.7 has a LOT of issues - I'd take the N7 over it any day.
1) Samsung used an Atheros wifi chipset in this and the Tab 7.0 Plus. Their implementation of it is utter and complete crap, and since Atheros gave them the choice of dual-license (GPL or BSD), Samsung chose BSD. As a result, you have a wifi driver that sucks AND is closed source so you can't fix it. 2) Extremely expensive due to the SAMOLED screen 3) Samsung's Touchwizzed Honeycomb - I'm not sure if ICS is out for it yet, but it tends to lag the current Android version by at least one major release. Samsung has, for whatever reason, been VERY bad about updating their tablet products. Tab 10.1 didn't see ICS until a week or two ago despite being a Tegra2 Honeycomb tab, which was easymode for ICS bringups.
Big flaw in your argument: On the Best Buy displays for Samsung devices, it is VERY clearly marketed as being Samsung, it is not anywhere near the (usually obvious) Apple mini-store/display area, and it also prominently displays the Galaxy branding. More importantly, as another person said:
YOU HAVE TO ASK FOR IT - iPads and Galaxy Tabs are not just sitting in boxes on the shelf. There is no way that someone could have "accidentally" received a Galaxy Tab instead of an iPad unless the salesperson was intentionally pulling a switch on them.
"I mean, let's be brutally honest. How many people are going to go in a store wanting an iPhone, get confused, and come out with a Galaxy instead?"
I don't know about iPhone, but there was an incident where it supposedly happened with iPad.
Never mind the fact that iPad packaging doesn't have the word "Tab" or "Tablet" anywhere, doesn't have the word "Samsung" anywhere, doesn't have the word "Galaxy" anywhere, and similarly, nowhere on the Tab 10.1 packaging does "Pad" appear, not does anything related to Apple appear... To some degree, what is being put on trial here is American stupidity. Some users are too stupid to understand that there is more than just Apple in the market. Samsung did nothing to deceive users in this regard - the Galaxy Tab series are pretty clearly marked with the "Galaxy" branding and as being Samsung devices.
What Samsung's lawyers need to do is show both Galaxy Tab and iPad playing a widescreen video - the difference between the two devices and importance of aspect ratio becomes obvious there.
1) Droid 4 - Verizon exclusive, outdated software 2) Cappy Glide - Redheaded stepchild. Outdated software, vastly obsolete CPU (It's barely OK to ship a Cortex-A9 dual-core flagship - the Tegra2 is the worst of the A9 dual cores by a long shot. Even at the same clock speed, OMAP4 can easily smoke Tegra 2, which is how Samsung got away with the Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 and 10.1 not being total epic failures.) 3) HTC Status is a low-end Facebook phone 4) 1.2 GHz Snapdragon S3 (weak), Gingerbread (obsolete and outdated), 768MB RAM (even last year's phones had 1GB), 4GB storage (I haven't seen anything but lowend phones sell with less than 16GB) - Undoubtedly low-end
TI OMAP4? Brand X? Are you fucking kidding me? You realize it's the same CPU as the Galaxy Nexus (with the exception of a slightly slower GPU, which doesn't matter that much for a business device. The CPU and the Ducati subsystem for media encoding and playback are the same.)
However every other criticism you have of the D4 is correct... Outdated software + locked bootloader = kills the phone.
The Captivate Glide is in an even worse situation - while it has a great screen, it has a Tegra 2 (OMAP4 smokes T2 across the board even at the same clock frequency, which is how Samsung managed to get away with making the Galaxy Tab 2 the same clock speed and core count as the original Tab) and vastly outdated software.
There are few games I've enjoyed. Parallel Kingdom is one of them - While it is "freemium", unlike some "freemium" games it is completely enjoyable without the in-app purchases.
Dead Trigger is one of the awful "freemium" games. The game is fun until the 3rd or 4th mission when you're told, "you lost your gun. Now grind for 2-3 hours with a shitty one to get a remotely equivalent one, or you can buy it right back NOW for $2!"
However for the most part, I just don't game any more, and when I do, it's either PC or emulators.
waaah! waah!! Android users aren't sheep that will readily accept an app that has a $1 purchase price if it RAPIDLY puts heavy pressure on you to make an additional $2 purchase from in the game!
Seriously - Within 3-4 missions of Dead Trigger, there's an ingame event that causes you to lose the gun that you start with. You are immediately given the option to repurchase it for 35 "gold" - Thing is, to get 35 gold, you must spend around $2 to buy 300-400 gold with real money.
Dead Trigger is a shitty "freemium" game that should never have had an initial purchase price assigned to it.
Dead Trigger is fun until you reach the point where it pushes you to buy ingame cash with real money.
TFA leaves out a critical aspect of Dead Trigger - It was one of the only examples of a "freemium" game that relied HEAVILY on in-app purchases, which also had an initial purchase price.
Note that they're not citing any piracy problems with their more expensive (but not "freemium" in their payment structure) games.
The way the article is written, it makes it sound like the developer is hurting and this has dropped their revenues to zero - which is bullshit. 90% of Dead Trigger's revenue was from IAPs to begin with. Dropping the purchase price to zero helps them by exposing more users to their IAP push.
He didn't... Dead Trigger is a "freemium" app - given how critical in-app-purchases (IAPs) are for that game, it should never have had an initial purchase price assigned to it.
90%+ of their revenue was from IAPs to begin with.
They're blaming it on piracy - but plenty of other developers are having no issues with piracy. The fact was they put in a perfect recipe to drive people towards piracy - not making your app worth the money paid for it. Dead Trigger's reliance on IAP meant that the initial purchase price did nothing but anger users.
I normally hate whiskey... But I'm tempted to buy a bottle of JD for guests and tell them "I hate whisky - but I bought some of yours anyway because you rock."
The ONLY thing that is available on the Kindle Fire but not on a standard Android tablet is streaming to the tablet.
That limitation prevented me from signing up for Prime for many months after my "Kindle Fire free month" ran out. I eventually resubbed for one year for the shipping benefits and PS3 streaming... However while my Fire made a great hacktoy, I can't think of anything Amazon could offer in this generation that would make me choose any of their new products over a Nexus 7.
BS. The only situation where 802.11g WLAN may have problems is legacy high definition MPEG-2 video (such as ATSC recordings) due to the poor compression ratios offered by MPEG-2.
720p H.264 video is easymode for a WLAN. Remember - Netflix and others are offering 720p streaming to customers, the majority of which have WAN connections that can't even come close to saturating 802.11g.
blah blah blah 100 Mbps, 1000 Mbps, shared vs. unshared.
Completely irrelevant when 90% of the use of these devices will be communications with the outside world, and 95%+ of WAN connections available to users can't even saturate 802.11g.
You were modded troll because of unnecessary spec-bashing.
Please, come up with a scenario in which a device whose primary market is media playback needs anything more than what 802.11g can provide. The ONLY one I can think of is the fairly niche market of devices that play back raw ATSC recordings - ATSC pushes the limits of what 802.11g can do in the real world.
However, in almost all other use cases, these devices will be used to consume content from the outside world - and in large parts of that world, 15 Mbps WAN connections are sadly considered "fast". 95%+ of US customers do not even have a fast enough Internet connection to saturate an 802.11g WLAN.
For the primary use cases of devices like these, gigabit Ethernet is simply a waste of money. At the sizes these device offer, wired Ethernet becomes a pain in the ass. My PandaBoard has a wired port - every time I use it I find myself fighting the cable. A cable that seems light and flexible when connected to a 5-pound laptop or a desktop suddenly becomes an unwieldy behemoth when connected to a device that is 2.88 ounces.
Especially since the Pi's only claim to fame is "cheap". It is, without a doubt, the least open of any of the well known ARM boards out there. Yet, despite the fact that it's a closed piece of shit with a minimally documented chip (It took MONTHS before ANY datasheet for the SoC was released, and the datasheet is utter and complete crap compared to those offered by TI for their chips. Similarly, TI's involvement with the open source community compared to Broadcom's is like night and day.
Yet the open hardware people are getting all excited about this closed piece of crap because it's cheap.
Other more open (admittedly more expensive - but you get what you pay for) boards: BeagleBone - $89, significantly more powerful processor and GPU, far more openly documented processor, and far better open source community support from the vendor PandaBoard ES - $185, but this is the premiere open source development board out there. It has a dual-core 1.2 GHz CPU, in fact the same OMAP4460 as the Galaxy Nexus phone. Just like the BeagleBone, this has TI's documentation and community support behind it. It also has Google's support - the PandaBoard is the only non-Nexus device I am aware of with direct AOSP (Android Open Source Project) support The BeagleBoard existed for long before any of these, but it's effectively obsolete now - the Panda supersedes it at minimal cost increase
The Gooseberry is interesting in that it has the same chipset as those cheap Chinese "Android PC on a stick" products like the MK802 you see all over the place. While it doesn't have TI's level of support, Allwinner so far appears to be MUCH better to deal with than Broadcom, and these devices have proven to be excellent hacktoys.
Yeah. The GSII is actually the smallest device I've owned in the past year, it feels like a little toy now.
The real key with the Note, the Infuse, and the GSII in descending size order is how thin they are... Even a few millimeters thicker and "not actually that large" would be "unusable monster".
Yeah. This is why Samsung is likely to get away with an extra 0.2" of diagonal for the next Galaxy Note without increasing physical dimensions - but no more.
As to "do consumers want them?" - If consumers didn't want them, they wouldn't be selling.
I was originally concerned about the portability issues of my Galaxy Note (5.3" screen). At this point - my old phone with a 4.5" screen feels like a tiny toy to me.
The Note, believe it or not, fits more comfortably in my hand, the keyboard is FAR easier to use, the display is much easier to read - and it still fits in my pocket with no problems whatsoever.
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So, it's Android's problem that you allowed someone physical access to your device long enough to connect it to a PC, unlock the bootloader, and flash custom firmware to it? Let's not forget the fact that unlocking the bootloader entails a data wipe on most devices, so it would have been FUCKING OBVIOUS that your device had been tampered with due to the fact that it would have been WIPED CLEAN.
The fact remains that at a $100 price point, it's pretty obvious you were using some cheapass Chinese knockoff and you shouldn't be surprised that it was backdoored. You keep on saying how horrible Android is, but you won't even state the make and model of the device you claim was compromised.
You'll be waiting a long time. Tablets like what you want have, historically, been consistent in the market as "complete and total failures".
XP/Vista/Win7 tablets are nothing new. They're all niche products that are overpriced and barely staying in the market.
So wait - you had a cheap Chinese knockoff with Chinese spyware and you blame Android for it?
Nexus 7 has great design and build quality too. Only disadvantage is the lack of MicroSD... Which can be worked around using an OTG adapter cable.
The only 10" tablet in 4:3 I am aware of is the iPad - definitively NOT an Android tablet.
Touchpad may be 4:3 too but that only has Android on it unofficially though hacks.
There is not a single mainstream Android 10" tablet I am aware of that is not widescreen... Or did you fall to Apple's photoshop shenanigans that altered the Tab 10.1's aspect ratio to make it look like it was 4:3 when it wasn't?
Tab 7.7 has a LOT of issues - I'd take the N7 over it any day.
1) Samsung used an Atheros wifi chipset in this and the Tab 7.0 Plus. Their implementation of it is utter and complete crap, and since Atheros gave them the choice of dual-license (GPL or BSD), Samsung chose BSD. As a result, you have a wifi driver that sucks AND is closed source so you can't fix it.
2) Extremely expensive due to the SAMOLED screen
3) Samsung's Touchwizzed Honeycomb - I'm not sure if ICS is out for it yet, but it tends to lag the current Android version by at least one major release. Samsung has, for whatever reason, been VERY bad about updating their tablet products. Tab 10.1 didn't see ICS until a week or two ago despite being a Tegra2 Honeycomb tab, which was easymode for ICS bringups.
Slightly closer would be "cruise missiles".
Also "torpedos" fit for waterborne weapons of this type.
Big flaw in your argument: On the Best Buy displays for Samsung devices, it is VERY clearly marketed as being Samsung, it is not anywhere near the (usually obvious) Apple mini-store/display area, and it also prominently displays the Galaxy branding. More importantly, as another person said:
YOU HAVE TO ASK FOR IT - iPads and Galaxy Tabs are not just sitting in boxes on the shelf. There is no way that someone could have "accidentally" received a Galaxy Tab instead of an iPad unless the salesperson was intentionally pulling a switch on them.
"I mean, let's be brutally honest. How many people are going to go in a store wanting an iPhone, get confused, and come out with a Galaxy instead?"
I don't know about iPhone, but there was an incident where it supposedly happened with iPad.
Never mind the fact that iPad packaging doesn't have the word "Tab" or "Tablet" anywhere, doesn't have the word "Samsung" anywhere, doesn't have the word "Galaxy" anywhere, and similarly, nowhere on the Tab 10.1 packaging does "Pad" appear, not does anything related to Apple appear... To some degree, what is being put on trial here is American stupidity. Some users are too stupid to understand that there is more than just Apple in the market. Samsung did nothing to deceive users in this regard - the Galaxy Tab series are pretty clearly marked with the "Galaxy" branding and as being Samsung devices.
What Samsung's lawyers need to do is show both Galaxy Tab and iPad playing a widescreen video - the difference between the two devices and importance of aspect ratio becomes obvious there.
1) Droid 4 - Verizon exclusive, outdated software
2) Cappy Glide - Redheaded stepchild. Outdated software, vastly obsolete CPU (It's barely OK to ship a Cortex-A9 dual-core flagship - the Tegra2 is the worst of the A9 dual cores by a long shot. Even at the same clock speed, OMAP4 can easily smoke Tegra 2, which is how Samsung got away with the Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 and 10.1 not being total epic failures.)
3) HTC Status is a low-end Facebook phone
4) 1.2 GHz Snapdragon S3 (weak), Gingerbread (obsolete and outdated), 768MB RAM (even last year's phones had 1GB), 4GB storage (I haven't seen anything but lowend phones sell with less than 16GB) - Undoubtedly low-end
TI OMAP4? Brand X? Are you fucking kidding me? You realize it's the same CPU as the Galaxy Nexus (with the exception of a slightly slower GPU, which doesn't matter that much for a business device. The CPU and the Ducati subsystem for media encoding and playback are the same.)
However every other criticism you have of the D4 is correct... Outdated software + locked bootloader = kills the phone.
The Captivate Glide is in an even worse situation - while it has a great screen, it has a Tegra 2 (OMAP4 smokes T2 across the board even at the same clock frequency, which is how Samsung managed to get away with making the Galaxy Tab 2 the same clock speed and core count as the original Tab) and vastly outdated software.
There are few games I've enjoyed. Parallel Kingdom is one of them - While it is "freemium", unlike some "freemium" games it is completely enjoyable without the in-app purchases.
Dead Trigger is one of the awful "freemium" games. The game is fun until the 3rd or 4th mission when you're told, "you lost your gun. Now grind for 2-3 hours with a shitty one to get a remotely equivalent one, or you can buy it right back NOW for $2!"
However for the most part, I just don't game any more, and when I do, it's either PC or emulators.
More like...
waaah! waah!! Android users aren't sheep that will readily accept an app that has a $1 purchase price if it RAPIDLY puts heavy pressure on you to make an additional $2 purchase from in the game!
Seriously - Within 3-4 missions of Dead Trigger, there's an ingame event that causes you to lose the gun that you start with. You are immediately given the option to repurchase it for 35 "gold" - Thing is, to get 35 gold, you must spend around $2 to buy 300-400 gold with real money.
Dead Trigger is a shitty "freemium" game that should never have had an initial purchase price assigned to it.
Dead Trigger is fun until you reach the point where it pushes you to buy ingame cash with real money.
TFA leaves out a critical aspect of Dead Trigger - It was one of the only examples of a "freemium" game that relied HEAVILY on in-app purchases, which also had an initial purchase price.
Note that they're not citing any piracy problems with their more expensive (but not "freemium" in their payment structure) games.
The way the article is written, it makes it sound like the developer is hurting and this has dropped their revenues to zero - which is bullshit. 90% of Dead Trigger's revenue was from IAPs to begin with. Dropping the purchase price to zero helps them by exposing more users to their IAP push.
More specifically - Even when it cost $1, 90% of the revenue from the game was in-app purchases.
No other game on Android that I'm aware of had an initial purchase price set when combined with the heavy pushing of IAPs post-installation.
You can have an initial purchase price, or you can push IAPs heavily - but you can't do both and have users accept that.
He didn't... Dead Trigger is a "freemium" app - given how critical in-app-purchases (IAPs) are for that game, it should never have had an initial purchase price assigned to it.
90%+ of their revenue was from IAPs to begin with.
They're blaming it on piracy - but plenty of other developers are having no issues with piracy. The fact was they put in a perfect recipe to drive people towards piracy - not making your app worth the money paid for it. Dead Trigger's reliance on IAP meant that the initial purchase price did nothing but anger users.
I normally hate whiskey... But I'm tempted to buy a bottle of JD for guests and tell them "I hate whisky - but I bought some of yours anyway because you rock."
The ONLY thing that is available on the Kindle Fire but not on a standard Android tablet is streaming to the tablet.
That limitation prevented me from signing up for Prime for many months after my "Kindle Fire free month" ran out. I eventually resubbed for one year for the shipping benefits and PS3 streaming... However while my Fire made a great hacktoy, I can't think of anything Amazon could offer in this generation that would make me choose any of their new products over a Nexus 7.
BS. The only situation where 802.11g WLAN may have problems is legacy high definition MPEG-2 video (such as ATSC recordings) due to the poor compression ratios offered by MPEG-2.
720p H.264 video is easymode for a WLAN. Remember - Netflix and others are offering 720p streaming to customers, the majority of which have WAN connections that can't even come close to saturating 802.11g.
blah blah blah 100 Mbps, 1000 Mbps, shared vs. unshared.
Completely irrelevant when 90% of the use of these devices will be communications with the outside world, and 95%+ of WAN connections available to users can't even saturate 802.11g.
You were modded troll because of unnecessary spec-bashing.
Please, come up with a scenario in which a device whose primary market is media playback needs anything more than what 802.11g can provide. The ONLY one I can think of is the fairly niche market of devices that play back raw ATSC recordings - ATSC pushes the limits of what 802.11g can do in the real world.
However, in almost all other use cases, these devices will be used to consume content from the outside world - and in large parts of that world, 15 Mbps WAN connections are sadly considered "fast". 95%+ of US customers do not even have a fast enough Internet connection to saturate an 802.11g WLAN.
For the primary use cases of devices like these, gigabit Ethernet is simply a waste of money. At the sizes these device offer, wired Ethernet becomes a pain in the ass. My PandaBoard has a wired port - every time I use it I find myself fighting the cable. A cable that seems light and flexible when connected to a 5-pound laptop or a desktop suddenly becomes an unwieldy behemoth when connected to a device that is 2.88 ounces.
Especially since the Pi's only claim to fame is "cheap". It is, without a doubt, the least open of any of the well known ARM boards out there. Yet, despite the fact that it's a closed piece of shit with a minimally documented chip (It took MONTHS before ANY datasheet for the SoC was released, and the datasheet is utter and complete crap compared to those offered by TI for their chips. Similarly, TI's involvement with the open source community compared to Broadcom's is like night and day.
Yet the open hardware people are getting all excited about this closed piece of crap because it's cheap.
Other more open (admittedly more expensive - but you get what you pay for) boards:
BeagleBone - $89, significantly more powerful processor and GPU, far more openly documented processor, and far better open source community support from the vendor
PandaBoard ES - $185, but this is the premiere open source development board out there. It has a dual-core 1.2 GHz CPU, in fact the same OMAP4460 as the Galaxy Nexus phone. Just like the BeagleBone, this has TI's documentation and community support behind it. It also has Google's support - the PandaBoard is the only non-Nexus device I am aware of with direct AOSP (Android Open Source Project) support
The BeagleBoard existed for long before any of these, but it's effectively obsolete now - the Panda supersedes it at minimal cost increase
The Gooseberry is interesting in that it has the same chipset as those cheap Chinese "Android PC on a stick" products like the MK802 you see all over the place. While it doesn't have TI's level of support, Allwinner so far appears to be MUCH better to deal with than Broadcom, and these devices have proven to be excellent hacktoys.
Yeah. The GSII is actually the smallest device I've owned in the past year, it feels like a little toy now.
The real key with the Note, the Infuse, and the GSII in descending size order is how thin they are... Even a few millimeters thicker and "not actually that large" would be "unusable monster".
Yeah. This is why Samsung is likely to get away with an extra 0.2" of diagonal for the next Galaxy Note without increasing physical dimensions - but no more.
As to "do consumers want them?" - If consumers didn't want them, they wouldn't be selling.
I was originally concerned about the portability issues of my Galaxy Note (5.3" screen). At this point - my old phone with a 4.5" screen feels like a tiny toy to me.
The Note, believe it or not, fits more comfortably in my hand, the keyboard is FAR easier to use, the display is much easier to read - and it still fits in my pocket with no problems whatsoever.
While that's pretty shady, it is "the least of all evils"
I really don't care if it's unlimited or 2GB - I don't come remotely close to 2GB.