Phones are (in our current society) a Commodity; everyone "needs" a phone. For most people, they are the Primary Computing Device and Primary conduit in a connected world. The cheapest phone, or the most available phone will do. Android phones are a cheap and available alternative to the iPhone, so appeal to consumers as well as the Technorati.
The role of a Tablet is not as a Primary computing devices, but as a satellite computing device, Tablets are a Luxury. The only people who would purchase a Tablet other than an iPad are Technologists with a Political point of view. Any consumer who does any research whatsoever into Alternatives to the iPad will turn back to the iPad; the benefits of an Android Tablet (better Camera, Card Reader, USB Host, Legacy applet support, etc) pale into insignificance compared to the convenience of the iPad. A cheaper legacy device like a netbook is also significantly better than a Android Tablet in most of these regards too.
Also, if she has only used XP, she my find Windows 7 as confounding as Mac OS X.
Bootcamp it with a copy of W7, but don't Activate it until she is confidant she can adapt to W7. A lot of XP-Mac switches happened because XP-Vista was an infuriating learning curve. If they had to learn a new system, why stick with Windows?
If they purchased it from an unscrupulous Carrier outlet (and which Carrier outlets are scrupulous), they may have not known that they were buying a soon-to-be obsolete phone. If they had have purchased it from an Apple Store, or spent 30 seconds on Wikipedia however, they would have definitely known. Apple Store upsells to encourage customer satisfaction with the product, Carrier outlets downsell to clear obsolete inventory. Wikipedia Empowers consumers with knowledge, which is why it's not allowed in Carrier outlets.
Once your car is out-of-warranty, is the manufacturer obliged to keep parts in stock to restore it to showroom condition? What about Building Materials for your house, or Matching Furniture (if you break a chair for your dining room table) once the product has been taken off the market?
The Brand new iPhone 3G purchased 11 months ago was like a car that had been sitting on the lot for 3 years. It was in a runout sale. Apple have certainly learnt their PR lesson here, the iPad 1 is available for $100 less than an iPad 2, but purchasers definitely realise they are buying a product with a shortened obsolescence cycle.
I believe you are right, a bunch of obsolete hardware owners were convinced by the lawyers to sue Apple.
Apple wasn't legally allowed to perform R&D on devices they had already sold; They had to charge for the 802.11n driver for Tiger because they were adding value to a product that they had already been Accounted for. (They were able to bundle it with Leopard because it was a new product). They were legally obliged to plan obsolescence into new devices.
Those US Accounting laws have been changed since, but when the iPhone and iPhone 3G were released, Apple had to account for only half the value of the phone in one year and the other half the following year.
WebM still isn't ready for public consumption. By introducing the h.264/VP8 debate prematurely, Google have derailed the progress of HTML5.
Coupled with the stagnation of HTML5 YouTube and increased reliance on Adobe Flash in Google Maps, Stocks, Analytics and Android, it appears that Google have gone off HTML5. How long till Google Docs and gMail become Flash-based?
ARM development had stagnated; Hardware Manufacturers wanted cheap chips and were hesitant about pumping any more funds into R&D. The original iPhone had a 1176JZ underclocked to 412 MHz and still blew away other handsets. The 3GS had a Cortex A8 and once again set the pace for the rest of the industry to catch up.
YouTube's Video Player uses ActionScript. Wallaby doesn't support ActionScript.
The best way to stop YouTube from crashing is for Google to implement HTML5 as the default, rather than as an obscure and unstable option. For users, Addons and Extensions like YouTube5 http://www.verticalforest.com/youtube5-extension/ attempt to force YouTube to display plugin-free pages.
Wallaby creating extremely inefficient HTML5 out of inefficient Flash is a feature, not a bug.
Anyone with a free text-editor, cheap image editor and inexpensive HTML5 book can create efficient HTML5 ads. Adobe don't want Ad "developers" doing that, they want Ad "developers" to spend $1200 bi-annualy on their authoring tools. They also want to punish users who don't have Flash on their devices with inefficient Ads.
This is more like MS offering a win16 converter for Linux that only displays the Splash Screen.
Adobe's cash cow isn't Flash-based Video or Interactive Flash Games/Apps. It is non-interactive Flash Ads. This converter only converts Flash Animations to HTML5, ActionScript (which is needed for Flash Games and Apps) isn't supported. Flash Video Players also rely on ActionScript.
Adobe had gotten around this by omitting support for ActionScript. Wallaby won't be able to convert interactive Flash, only non-interactive animations. The purpose of this is to convert annoying, resource-intensive proprietary Flash Ads with annoying, resource-intensive obfuscated HTML5.
Adobe's bread-and-butter is Flash Ads, with less and less devices supporting Flash, they need a way to lock in their customer base of Ad "developers".
Apple aren't using anti-competative behaviour, except where their obliged to. iTunes Music is available DRM free which can play on any device. iTunes TV and Movies contains DRM because the studios force them to. App Store Apps contain DRM to protect Developers IP and Protect Users from Rogue Developers. The 30% on subscription is to prevent Third Parties from back-dooring Apple. Otherwise developers could say "The App is free, but the functionality is subscription based." They have been pushing Cross-Platform Web Apps from day one with the Original iPhone; once again to discourage vendor lock-in. They haven't allowed Adobe Flash on iOS devices because it is still not ready for mobile, touch devices (just ask Motorola). Adobe are so regressive that it will never be. They even avoid suing clone-makers; The Palm Pr violated dozens of Apple-held patents; Android and WP7 also impinge on quite a few Apple patents. They only drag out their Portfolio to counter-sue, as Nokia and HTC have found out.
About the only behaviour Apple could be faulted is the transparency of the App Store approval process, and they are working on that
Bell and Microsoft were subjected to the DoJ because they abused their monopoly positions. Apple are all but actively encouraging competition. They are trying to encourage competence, but only Palm (HP) are stepping up to the plate.
Unless you purchased a retail box, you don't own your copy of Windows either. OEM Windows licences are locked to a motherboard. (Microsoft occasionally lets you upgrade your motherboard if you ask nicely).
For that matter, you don't own your GNU/Linux OS either. That code is owned by the hard working individuals who wrote it. You have more freedom than Windows, and significantly more freedom than the Proprietary components of Mac OS X, but you don't own the software.
"Devotees" of Apple products are more like Beer Snobs. Users or Windows or Android devices are more like the people who drink Bud or Victoria Bitter. "Quality" PC's from HP and Alienware are like "Boutigue Breweries" that are owned by a Megabrewer. "Guiness" brewed under licence by CUB is an example.
The first time you drink a quality beer from a Microbrewery, you may think, "This is different to the usual stuff I drink; it actually has body and flavour." The third or fourth time you may think, "This is *so* much better than the other crap." The same goes for Apple products. The first time you use a Mac, or an iPhone you think, "This is different to how I usually use a computer or phone.", after a while, something just clicks and "different" changes to "better".
The problem with N-Gage and PSP is that they try to be Portable Gaming for Hard-Core Gamers. The truth is, Hard-Core Gamers would rather sit at their Overclocked PC, or in front of their X-Box or PS3 to play their Hard-Core Games. Casual Gamers are the only people who play games on their phone.
Speaking of Casual Games. My 5-year-old Niece loaded all the (free) games onto her iPod Touch. Her father loaded lots of free games onto an old iPhone 3G. His new Android doesn't have any games on it, because he can't figure out the Android Marketplace on his Phone.
Android is the most common, not necessary most popular. Would you say that Windows is more popular than Mac OS X, or only more common.
Android's current ubiquity is mainly because of Saturation of the US Market with cheap/free handsets. In other countries, WM7, Symbian and Android are equal competitors, vying for sales when iPhones are out-of-stock.
Phones are going to be more powerful; The iPhone 4 is more powerful and has more memory than the iPad; that time is already here. Come April, May or whenever the iPad X2 is released, Tablets are going to be more powerful than Phones; at least until the iPhone 5 is released.
We are already seeing more and more powerful tablets. The constant churn of Android Tablets are getting faster and faster, more and more cores. The mythical Playbook is supposed to be Quad Core, isn't it?
Tablets also have the (obvious) Screen Size advantage, but they also have other benefits too. Heat Dissipation is easier on a large device like a tablet than on a compact device like a phone, as well as full-size Card Readers and USB/HDMI ports on some Android Tablets (which you can't fit into a Phone without dongles).
Meanwhile, the price of Silver will stay relatively constant.
Silver may be less expensive than a Tablet, but next year (or next week in the case of Android Tablets), it will still have that value. An iPad will only hold it's value for 1 year; and Android tablet will only hold it's value until the next Android tablet is released.
Users shouldn't have a say, The IT dept. should have the say. Unfortunately, bean counters and upper management have more of a say than those who actually know all the issues. System sales reps use buzzwords to impress the management, or provide kickbacks for bean counters, lumping the IT dept. with an overpriced piece of crap that any competent sysadmin could roll themselves in a weekend (as long as they didn't get interruptions from Clueless Users) using a Linux system, Apache and MySQL. It's all well and good purchasing a commercial system so you have someone to blame when it doesn't work, but unless you renew the service contract annually, you can't blame them when something goes wrong.
Most Android Phones currently for sale are lucky if they run 2.1 and the Hardware vendors aren't looking to update them to 2.2. They are current devices and they are already 2-generations obsolete.
SWF is open like WebM and PDF. Adobe still control the specification for SWF and PDF, Apple still pay huge license fees for Display Postscript in MacOSX. Only Adobe can change the spec. Adobe refused to let Microsoft bundle their own implementation in Windows 7. That is not what I call Open.
WebM is still controlled by Google. It goes one step closer to being closed that PDF; Google have stated that their Implementation overrides the spec, meaning third-party implementations will never be 100% compatible. When they submit the spec to ISO, or MPEG, or OSI, it will be Open, but until they relinquish control it will still be a closed corporate tool like VC-1 and FairPlay DRM.
H.264 is an ISO standard. The spec is maintained by an Open committee that can be joined by anyone who is an expert on video encoding. Even MPEG-LA don't have control of the spec, they just handle the licensing. There are multiple different implementations of the spec, several commercial and at least one GPLed. You can't get more open than that unless you throw out the US Patent System.
The only reason iPhone Clones are running Flash is the developers believe that will give them a competitive edge over Apple. Unfortunately, all Flash compatibility on a Mobile Device does is dilute native development. BBC iPlayer is a native App on the iPhone while it is a Flash App on Android. Android currently has a competitive edge due to misinterpretation of Market Share figures, They could have hundreds of native Apps and actually be a viable alternative to iOS on higher end devices, but instead will piss it all away reenforcing Adobe Flash as the "Write Once, Test Everywhere, still have a woeful experience" technology. Google's pissing contest with Oracle over Jalvik doesn't help the platform either. "We're not evil, but we refuse to pay licencing to Oracle for Java, but love paying licensing to Adobe for Flash.
WiFi support on XP-SP2, SP3, Vista and 7 are so ridiculously easy to use though. Why do they install this software on the Laptop to start with?
I removed a whole lot of "WiFi Assistants" from our technicians laptops recently because they didn't work with an AirPort AP with WPA-encryption. The Official solution from the manufacturers was to downgrade the Wireless Security to WEP. The native Windows XP-SP2 wizard connected easily and supported WPA2 with no problems, except on one particularly old, second-hand Lenovo.
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Phones are (in our current society) a Commodity; everyone "needs" a phone. For most people, they are the Primary Computing Device and Primary conduit in a connected world. The cheapest phone, or the most available phone will do. Android phones are a cheap and available alternative to the iPhone, so appeal to consumers as well as the Technorati.
The role of a Tablet is not as a Primary computing devices, but as a satellite computing device, Tablets are a Luxury. The only people who would purchase a Tablet other than an iPad are Technologists with a Political point of view. Any consumer who does any research whatsoever into Alternatives to the iPad will turn back to the iPad; the benefits of an Android Tablet (better Camera, Card Reader, USB Host, Legacy applet support, etc) pale into insignificance compared to the convenience of the iPad. A cheaper legacy device like a netbook is also significantly better than a Android Tablet in most of these regards too.
Also, if she has only used XP, she my find Windows 7 as confounding as Mac OS X.
Bootcamp it with a copy of W7, but don't Activate it until she is confidant she can adapt to W7.
A lot of XP-Mac switches happened because XP-Vista was an infuriating learning curve. If they had to learn a new system, why stick with Windows?
If they purchased it from an unscrupulous Carrier outlet (and which Carrier outlets are scrupulous), they may have not known that they were buying a soon-to-be obsolete phone.
If they had have purchased it from an Apple Store, or spent 30 seconds on Wikipedia however, they would have definitely known. Apple Store upsells to encourage customer satisfaction with the product, Carrier outlets downsell to clear obsolete inventory. Wikipedia Empowers consumers with knowledge, which is why it's not allowed in Carrier outlets.
Caveat Emptor.
Once your car is out-of-warranty, is the manufacturer obliged to keep parts in stock to restore it to showroom condition?
What about Building Materials for your house, or Matching Furniture (if you break a chair for your dining room table) once the product has been taken off the market?
The Brand new iPhone 3G purchased 11 months ago was like a car that had been sitting on the lot for 3 years. It was in a runout sale.
Apple have certainly learnt their PR lesson here, the iPad 1 is available for $100 less than an iPad 2, but purchasers definitely realise they are buying a product with a shortened obsolescence cycle.
I believe you are right, a bunch of obsolete hardware owners were convinced by the lawyers to sue Apple.
Apple wasn't legally allowed to perform R&D on devices they had already sold; They had to charge for the 802.11n driver for Tiger because they were adding value to a product that they had already been Accounted for. (They were able to bundle it with Leopard because it was a new product). They were legally obliged to plan obsolescence into new devices.
Those US Accounting laws have been changed since, but when the iPhone and iPhone 3G were released, Apple had to account for only half the value of the phone in one year and the other half the following year.
WebM still isn't ready for public consumption. By introducing the h.264/VP8 debate prematurely, Google have derailed the progress of HTML5.
Coupled with the stagnation of HTML5 YouTube and increased reliance on Adobe Flash in Google Maps, Stocks, Analytics and Android, it appears that Google have gone off HTML5. How long till Google Docs and gMail become Flash-based?
ARM development had stagnated; Hardware Manufacturers wanted cheap chips and were hesitant about pumping any more funds into R&D.
The original iPhone had a 1176JZ underclocked to 412 MHz and still blew away other handsets. The 3GS had a Cortex A8 and once again set the pace for the rest of the industry to catch up.
YouTube's Video Player uses ActionScript. Wallaby doesn't support ActionScript.
The best way to stop YouTube from crashing is for Google to implement HTML5 as the default, rather than as an obscure and unstable option.
For users, Addons and Extensions like YouTube5 http://www.verticalforest.com/youtube5-extension/ attempt to force YouTube to display plugin-free pages.
To fortify their market of ad authoring tools.
Adobe don't care if Ads are in Flash, HTML5 or *shudder* Silverlight. As long as Ad Authors use Adobe's tools to make them.
Wallaby creating extremely inefficient HTML5 out of inefficient Flash is a feature, not a bug.
Anyone with a free text-editor, cheap image editor and inexpensive HTML5 book can create efficient HTML5 ads. Adobe don't want Ad "developers" doing that, they want Ad "developers" to spend $1200 bi-annualy on their authoring tools.
They also want to punish users who don't have Flash on their devices with inefficient Ads.
This is more like MS offering a win16 converter for Linux that only displays the Splash Screen.
Adobe's cash cow isn't Flash-based Video or Interactive Flash Games/Apps. It is non-interactive Flash Ads.
This converter only converts Flash Animations to HTML5, ActionScript (which is needed for Flash Games and Apps) isn't supported. Flash Video Players also rely on ActionScript.
Adobe had gotten around this by omitting support for ActionScript.
Wallaby won't be able to convert interactive Flash, only non-interactive animations.
The purpose of this is to convert annoying, resource-intensive proprietary Flash Ads with annoying, resource-intensive obfuscated HTML5.
Adobe's bread-and-butter is Flash Ads, with less and less devices supporting Flash, they need a way to lock in their customer base of Ad "developers".
Apple aren't using anti-competative behaviour, except where their obliged to.
iTunes Music is available DRM free which can play on any device.
iTunes TV and Movies contains DRM because the studios force them to.
App Store Apps contain DRM to protect Developers IP and Protect Users from Rogue Developers.
The 30% on subscription is to prevent Third Parties from back-dooring Apple. Otherwise developers could say "The App is free, but the functionality is subscription based."
They have been pushing Cross-Platform Web Apps from day one with the Original iPhone; once again to discourage vendor lock-in.
They haven't allowed Adobe Flash on iOS devices because it is still not ready for mobile, touch devices (just ask Motorola). Adobe are so regressive that it will never be.
They even avoid suing clone-makers; The Palm Pr violated dozens of Apple-held patents; Android and WP7 also impinge on quite a few Apple patents. They only drag out their Portfolio to counter-sue, as Nokia and HTC have found out.
About the only behaviour Apple could be faulted is the transparency of the App Store approval process, and they are working on that
Bell and Microsoft were subjected to the DoJ because they abused their monopoly positions. Apple are all but actively encouraging competition. They are trying to encourage competence, but only Palm (HP) are stepping up to the plate.
Unless you purchased a retail box, you don't own your copy of Windows either. OEM Windows licences are locked to a motherboard. (Microsoft occasionally lets you upgrade your motherboard if you ask nicely).
For that matter, you don't own your GNU/Linux OS either. That code is owned by the hard working individuals who wrote it. You have more freedom than Windows, and significantly more freedom than the Proprietary components of Mac OS X, but you don't own the software.
"Devotees" of Apple products are more like Beer Snobs.
Users or Windows or Android devices are more like the people who drink Bud or Victoria Bitter. "Quality" PC's from HP and Alienware are like "Boutigue Breweries" that are owned by a Megabrewer. "Guiness" brewed under licence by CUB is an example.
The first time you drink a quality beer from a Microbrewery, you may think, "This is different to the usual stuff I drink; it actually has body and flavour." The third or fourth time you may think, "This is *so* much better than the other crap." The same goes for Apple products. The first time you use a Mac, or an iPhone you think, "This is different to how I usually use a computer or phone.", after a while, something just clicks and "different" changes to "better".
The first exploit using this technology should be called "corrosion".
The problem with N-Gage and PSP is that they try to be Portable Gaming for Hard-Core Gamers. The truth is, Hard-Core Gamers would rather sit at their Overclocked PC, or in front of their X-Box or PS3 to play their Hard-Core Games.
Casual Gamers are the only people who play games on their phone.
Speaking of Casual Games. My 5-year-old Niece loaded all the (free) games onto her iPod Touch. Her father loaded lots of free games onto an old iPhone 3G. His new Android doesn't have any games on it, because he can't figure out the Android Marketplace on his Phone.
Android is the most common, not necessary most popular.
Would you say that Windows is more popular than Mac OS X, or only more common.
Android's current ubiquity is mainly because of Saturation of the US Market with cheap/free handsets. In other countries, WM7, Symbian and Android are equal competitors, vying for sales when iPhones are out-of-stock.
Phones are going to be more powerful; The iPhone 4 is more powerful and has more memory than the iPad; that time is already here.
Come April, May or whenever the iPad X2 is released, Tablets are going to be more powerful than Phones; at least until the iPhone 5 is released.
We are already seeing more and more powerful tablets. The constant churn of Android Tablets are getting faster and faster, more and more cores. The mythical Playbook is supposed to be Quad Core, isn't it?
Tablets also have the (obvious) Screen Size advantage, but they also have other benefits too. Heat Dissipation is easier on a large device like a tablet than on a compact device like a phone, as well as full-size Card Readers and USB/HDMI ports on some Android Tablets (which you can't fit into a Phone without dongles).
Meanwhile, the price of Silver will stay relatively constant.
Silver may be less expensive than a Tablet, but next year (or next week in the case of Android Tablets), it will still have that value.
An iPad will only hold it's value for 1 year; and Android tablet will only hold it's value until the next Android tablet is released.
Users shouldn't have a say, The IT dept. should have the say.
Unfortunately, bean counters and upper management have more of a say than those who actually know all the issues. System sales reps use buzzwords to impress the management, or provide kickbacks for bean counters, lumping the IT dept. with an overpriced piece of crap that any competent sysadmin could roll themselves in a weekend (as long as they didn't get interruptions from Clueless Users) using a Linux system, Apache and MySQL.
It's all well and good purchasing a commercial system so you have someone to blame when it doesn't work, but unless you renew the service contract annually, you can't blame them when something goes wrong.
Most Android Phones currently for sale are lucky if they run 2.1 and the Hardware vendors aren't looking to update them to 2.2. They are current devices and they are already 2-generations obsolete.
SWF is open like WebM and PDF.
Adobe still control the specification for SWF and PDF, Apple still pay huge license fees for Display Postscript in MacOSX. Only Adobe can change the spec. Adobe refused to let Microsoft bundle their own implementation in Windows 7. That is not what I call Open.
WebM is still controlled by Google. It goes one step closer to being closed that PDF; Google have stated that their Implementation overrides the spec, meaning third-party implementations will never be 100% compatible. When they submit the spec to ISO, or MPEG, or OSI, it will be Open, but until they relinquish control it will still be a closed corporate tool like VC-1 and FairPlay DRM.
H.264 is an ISO standard. The spec is maintained by an Open committee that can be joined by anyone who is an expert on video encoding. Even MPEG-LA don't have control of the spec, they just handle the licensing. There are multiple different implementations of the spec, several commercial and at least one GPLed. You can't get more open than that unless you throw out the US Patent System.
The only reason iPhone Clones are running Flash is the developers believe that will give them a competitive edge over Apple.
Unfortunately, all Flash compatibility on a Mobile Device does is dilute native development. BBC iPlayer is a native App on the iPhone while it is a Flash App on Android.
Android currently has a competitive edge due to misinterpretation of Market Share figures, They could have hundreds of native Apps and actually be a viable alternative to iOS on higher end devices, but instead will piss it all away reenforcing Adobe Flash as the "Write Once, Test Everywhere, still have a woeful experience" technology. Google's pissing contest with Oracle over Jalvik doesn't help the platform either.
"We're not evil, but we refuse to pay licencing to Oracle for Java, but love paying licensing to Adobe for Flash.
WiFi support on XP-SP2, SP3, Vista and 7 are so ridiculously easy to use though. Why do they install this software on the Laptop to start with?
I removed a whole lot of "WiFi Assistants" from our technicians laptops recently because they didn't work with an AirPort AP with WPA-encryption. The Official solution from the manufacturers was to downgrade the Wireless Security to WEP.
The native Windows XP-SP2 wizard connected easily and supported WPA2 with no problems, except on one particularly old, second-hand Lenovo.