if you want to do something like create spreadsheets
You put away your toys and use a keyboard and a mouse like any sane person would do.
use word
See above.
play windows games
All of which are designed to be used in conjunction with, you guessed, a keyboard and a mouse. Try playing Call of Duty with your "touch screen" and see how that works out for you. And any tablet centric games are already going to be on every other major tablet platform so there is no advantage to the Windows tab.
You can do it in theory with a windows 8 tablet
You can create spreadsheets, documents, and play games with practically every tablet on the market. Very few people do it, they use their real computers instead. Oh, and they all play games. The best car game I ever played is on my tablet. It's a stunt car game where you turn the tablet to steer and pull back to brake. It's a blast and more fun than any desktop race game ever could be played on the same device.
I'll be more than willing to trade in my android tablet for a windows 8 tablet.
Do whatever you want to do, it's your tablet. But, if you're doing it for the reasons outlined, prepare to be sorely disappointed.
This is just becoming an embarassment at this point. When is MS going to even try to compete? Windows tablets have been an abject failure in the consumer market for over a decade, Windows Mobile got stomped, Windows Phone is getting stomped and the kin lasted what, 2 months? Why can't Ballmer get it through his thick skull? Desktop Windows does not work on a tablet. Period. Why? Desktop Windows applications do not work on a tablet. It doesn't matter how many confusingly obfuscated skins you add over the top or how many "tiles" or useless UI paradigm flavors of the month you try to cram down people's throats. What you will end up with is a rehash of what happened to Windows Mobile which is when you drill through the skin, you get the ugly underneath that is the real operating system. No number of SPB shells or HTC Senses could do anything to stop the demise of WinMo and that is exactly what Microsoft is trying to do here with "big" windows. It didn't work then and it won't work now and all it is doing is further tarnishing their reputation in mobile and turning more consumers off.
What they need to do is what the current overwhelming market leader did, namely, make a touch centric operating system from the ground up add some great first party support and do whatever it takes to attract strong third party development. That's how the iPad is winning. Anything else, including this latest folly, is just throwing good money after bad.
I'd say the same thing about Jacksonville, FL. I can't say anything about your SQL prospects here but I do have a nice little gig as a java coder./bragging
You go and whine about.NET being a single vendor then give an example of something supposedly better "Java" which is ALSO SINGLE VENDOR.
Java has many completely open source implementations including openjdk and hotspot, is licensed under the GPL, is fully supported on dozens of platforms including Linux, OSX, Windows, *BSD, Solaris, etc., and has its premiere development solution that is completely free and open source and maintained and stewarded by a completely independent company (IBM) from it's primary developer (Sun/Oracle). Contrast this with.net that is owned and maintained by Microsoft, with a completely proprietary license, and whose premier development platform is again proprietary and owned by the single vendor Microsoft. Also note that.net is developed for and runs on nothing other than the MS ecosystem. The only serious alternative, Mono, is going nowhere now that the dev team got kicked out on the street and it never had full compatibility anyway so it was cross platform in name only.
Please clue yourself in before making ridiculous comparisons about things you obviously know nothing about.
I'm working at a job as a java coder right now and I hadn't seen one line of it before walking in the door. I demonstrated a bunch of stuff I'd written in Python that the boss really liked and got hired on the spot. Learned enough Java to do what I needed to do in about 3 weeks and now we're shipping the final product in about a week. It's been a wild ride but, I'm now convinced real programmers don't need to know the language to effectively build a product. And crappy programmers will never be able to do anything great other than accidentally no matter how much they "know".
University is no place to push a solution that is owned and controlled by a single vendor. There are many more languages that are more suited to teaching concepts than.net. Not to mention that there are already serious questions as to the future of.net seeing as MS seems to lost its enthusiasm for it for the next iteration of their desktop OS and the mono boys just got put out on the street. How practical is.net anyway? How many great programs are written in it as compared to C++ or Java? Not that many, actually. I can't think of too many reasons to teach it and I can think of many reasons not to.
Yes, I get that those problems are a side effect of flexibility and choice, but dont' try to pretend the the problems aren't there.
The problem of driving a car is having to get gas. The problem of living in a free society is having to pay taxes. You don't have a point other than stating the obvious.
Because it is ALL the apps that are launching.
Bull. "ALL" of her apps are not launching on boot. Please stop lying or better inform yourself.
SHe's end up either uninstalling everything or doing it one by one, checking to see ifthe problem has gone away after each uninstall
Learn to use your phone. In the settings, there is an option called "Applications". It will tell you everything that is running at that moment. Use common sense to figure out what app is causing a problem. App downloads lots of data from the 'net? Might be a problem.
Wow, the fact that we're even going down this road totally reinforces my impression of Android. This is shit that users shouldn't have to deal with.
No, the fact that we are going down this route is you are both (with all due respect) clueless on how to use your phone. Obviously, you'd rather have the walled garden experience than take the minimal amount of time it takes to not install a bunch of crap apps on your Android device. The rest of us with more than 2 brain cells to bang together will continue using our Android devices.
I'm not. She's really trying to solve the problem and she is tech savvy, but it is looking like it will be easier to just reinstall.
You are taking an anecdotal situation of a particular user's bad experience and using it as an indictment of the whole platform. Sure, a side effect of being able to download what you want when you want is going to manifest itself in facebook-widget-weatherbug service-itis until the phone slows to a crawl. And not every Android dev is a hotshot. A particular example is up until honeycomb, you could run any downloading in the same thread as the UI thus blocking the app from updating its interface until whatever it was you were downloading was done. You didn't have to do this but some people just don't know any better. Guess what, Honeycomb and Ice Cream going forward will not allow you to do this without throwing an exception. That's how it's done. You don't abandon the open platform because people are abusing it. You route around the damage and everyone including the bad developers ends up better for it in the end.
Here's another anecdote for you. I have 2 Android phones and a Motorola Xoom. I have never had the problems you mention and my phone runs blazingly fast. It's not that hard, dude.
It is an option, but it isn't isn't a whole lot better than reinstalling the whole system and starting from scratch.
Uninstalling multiple apps takes less than 5 minutes. Re imaging the phone and setting it all back up can take over an hour. How is that not a "whole lot better"?
I think you miss my point -- it's not that they could afford them, it's that they had no preference for them. People are just buying the default and the features and market differentiation of Android is having only marginal effect. Android isn't bought because people want it, it's bought because it's what's on the shelf. Android users could become Windows users next week if Microsoft makes a better deal with Samsung and Verizon than Google makes, Android users aren't sticky. Google's completely dependent upon the carriers and OEMs to distribute their OS, and it's up to them what will run on their phones -- the bulk of the users clearly don't give a damn and will use any old thing as long as it has a touchscreen and plays movies and the web browser doesn't suck
So, the crux of your argument is basically a series of anti-Android talking points that have no basis in any verifiable fact whatsoever and is just regurgitated on tech forums to fuel the fud flames and keep the fanboys happy? Got it.
Every benefit you mentioned (aside from form-factor) can be achieved through jailbreaking/unlocking. Since I like the iPhone form factor just fine, I'll stick with that.
Well, of course, with enough effort and dedication, any software limitation can be broken through. Hell, if you had enough money and manpower, you could rewrite the entire OS to your liking. The only thing is, the points I outlined are available to everybody making the choice of an Android device while what you have here is only available to the vanishingly small proportion of the population that is willing and able to do a jailbreak. Now, I'm not denigrating this as I have immediately rooted every Android devices I've ever bought and installed Cyanogenmod/Tiamat kernel/you name it. But, I can do that, most people can't.
How about compilation time? I'd be all about developing Android applications on my Xoom but compiling the Java/C/C++ source down to bytecode/machine code would be a bit onerous, I think.
Some people also like to be able to always run the latest OS without jailbreaking or waiting for their carrier modulo their OEM to get their act together.
Yeah, some people do. I'd bet it's mostly nerds (like myself) that run around on tech blogs more so than the general population. Normal people buy an appliance when they get a cell phone and that's what they want. You don't upgrade the OS on an appliance. Smartphones in particular are complicated. People that aren't nerds have a hard enough time just getting used to how it is out of the box, do you really think that just when they are starting to feel cool using their new device that they want the rug snatched from underneath them by rebooting their phone into an unfamiliar version of the OS? Of course they don't.
Two-for-one deals and "I want a phone that supplements an iPhone and is compatible with my network," is a powerful force.
I know, isn't it just terrible that there is a great smartphone that normal working people can actually afford? The HORROR!
Android somehow has a majority of share and growth among smartphones, yet it does about 1/4 of all the mobile web browsing and something like 1/5th of all the app sales.
Why lie, man? Do you think it helps your case to quote such easily verifiably bogus stats? Here, Android has 36.4 percent of smartphone subscribers in the US and it is extremely doubtful that it is higher than that worldwide what with the penetration of Symbian. That is no kind of a majority so please just stop. BTW, the exposition of your lies invalidates the rest of your argument that was based on said lies.
Does it mean my options for installing apps are somewhat limited? Maybe, but in practice it really doesn't matter that much.
I think you may be glossing over some of the other obvious benefits of Android over the iPhone that are just as important. Things like choice of form factor for example. Some people like devices with slide out keyboards like the Samsung Epic 4G or blackberry-esque business phones like the Droid Pro. People, at least in the US, like to have a choice of carrier. Sprint and T-Mobile have Android, they don't have iPhones. And don't discount the widget loving contingent of Android users. Many people like those giant clock and weather report boxes on their home screens rather than just a static icon list. There are obviously many reasons people choose Android as evidenced by the meteoric rise in market share and it is a bit arrogant for you to presume what people "need to worry about" when it comes to their choice of phone.
I didn't think it was too bad; indeed our normal 3G seems to run at the USA's "4G" speed: I often download Ubuntu updates to my netbook at over 700KB/s sustained
In Jacksonville, FL, I just tested my Motorola Droid and got a 111ms ping, and 972KBps which is just short of a Megabyte. 4G speeds, i.e., LTE, are much faster.
Yeah, it's strange that Motorola didn't take the blame when non-bundled third party apps cause problems with their phones.
See, that's just it. This guy is a hypocrite. The MotoBlur launcher is the worst culprit on Motorola phones for reducing performance and battery life. Replace that and the phone "magically" comes back to life.
The difference is that they never had a touch interface before.
What difference does it make if the third party stuff is written for mouse and keyboard? There are tons of older programs that people use that will never be rewritten at all be it for touch, Windows ARM or what have you. For the stuff still being developed, e.g., Photoshop, Quicken, etc., Windows tablets are going to have to actually, you know, sell before efforts are made to adapt the UI of those applications for it. The questions remains though, how will Windows tablets sell if it's no fun running applications on it? Maybe it will work out. Or maybe millions of people will just keep buying iPads. What do you think?
In other words, spend a lot more time making it usable??
Huh? Not any more work than you would go through downloading the regular Ubuntu CD and installing it. Or you can just search for it in the Ubuntu Software Center and install Lubuntu Desktop (LXDE), Xubuntu Desktop (XFCE), Kubuntu Desktop (KDE) or if you're a power user, like the guy I was replying to, you can install any of the window managers, log out and log back in for your shiny new desktop. If this is hard then iTunes is hard. It works the same way.
For handhelds and tablets, I get the power of a full OS and file system with the ease-of-use of WP7.
What applications can be written for this "full OS" that make sense on a tablet that can't be written for Android Honeycomb? Now that Honeycomb has USB host, what devices make sense for a tablet that can't run on Android? How is the file system more "full" on Windows than Android?
I don't think it really is supposed to be used on a desktop with a mouse. You still have the standard Windows 7 style desktop that you can switch to, and I'm assuming that will be what you're primarily be using when there's no touch screen available.
If Microsoft keeps their Windows Media Player interface intact as well, you're talking about a pretty powerful little device.
What do you do when none of your favorite third party applications are designed for touch? Microsoft has been beating the Windows tablet drum for more than a decade and nothing has happened.
RedHat's interface is stuck in some stone age like Windows 3.1 with crutches, and Ubuntu is now sporting some kind of equally dreadful thing.
Due to the fact that you are even know this much about Linux, you probably also know the ease with which you can just install and run any of dozens of other desktop environments or window managers. Since you seem to prefer a more traditional style desktop, I'd suggest Ubuntu with the LXDE environment. Not only does it give you that Windows 2k warm and fuzzy, it's blazing fast. There is also XFCE for gnome 2.x lovers. I'm just merrily going along with Gnome 2.32 on Ubuntu 11.04 with no problems at all despite
I'm not sure what all your battery display does but a good reason to ask for storage access is so you can persist a log/settings in case the user uninstalls/reinstalls the application. Without sdcard write access, all of your files have to be written to the/data/data/youapphere directory and if the user uninstalls your app, those files are gone. If they are on the sdcard and the user decides later to reinstall your program, it can just pick right up where it left off. The same thing happens on Linux OSX and Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
if you want to do something like create spreadsheets
You put away your toys and use a keyboard and a mouse like any sane person would do.
use word
See above.
play windows games
All of which are designed to be used in conjunction with, you guessed, a keyboard and a mouse. Try playing Call of Duty with your "touch screen" and see how that works out for you. And any tablet centric games are already going to be on every other major tablet platform so there is no advantage to the Windows tab.
You can do it in theory with a windows 8 tablet
You can create spreadsheets, documents, and play games with practically every tablet on the market. Very few people do it, they use their real computers instead. Oh, and they all play games. The best car game I ever played is on my tablet. It's a stunt car game where you turn the tablet to steer and pull back to brake. It's a blast and more fun than any desktop race game ever could be played on the same device.
I'll be more than willing to trade in my android tablet for a windows 8 tablet.
Do whatever you want to do, it's your tablet. But, if you're doing it for the reasons outlined, prepare to be sorely disappointed.
Windows Tablet
This is just becoming an embarassment at this point. When is MS going to even try to compete? Windows tablets have been an abject failure in the consumer market for over a decade, Windows Mobile got stomped, Windows Phone is getting stomped and the kin lasted what, 2 months? Why can't Ballmer get it through his thick skull? Desktop Windows does not work on a tablet. Period. Why? Desktop Windows applications do not work on a tablet. It doesn't matter how many confusingly obfuscated skins you add over the top or how many "tiles" or useless UI paradigm flavors of the month you try to cram down people's throats. What you will end up with is a rehash of what happened to Windows Mobile which is when you drill through the skin, you get the ugly underneath that is the real operating system. No number of SPB shells or HTC Senses could do anything to stop the demise of WinMo and that is exactly what Microsoft is trying to do here with "big" windows. It didn't work then and it won't work now and all it is doing is further tarnishing their reputation in mobile and turning more consumers off.
What they need to do is what the current overwhelming market leader did, namely, make a touch centric operating system from the ground up add some great first party support and do whatever it takes to attract strong third party development. That's how the iPad is winning. Anything else, including this latest folly, is just throwing good money after bad.
Don Quixote would be proud.
I hate this place.
I'd say the same thing about Jacksonville, FL. I can't say anything about your SQL prospects here but I do have a nice little gig as a java coder. /bragging
You go and whine about .NET being a single vendor then give an example of something supposedly better "Java" which is ALSO SINGLE VENDOR.
Java has many completely open source implementations including openjdk and hotspot, is licensed under the GPL, is fully supported on dozens of platforms including Linux, OSX, Windows, *BSD, Solaris, etc., and has its premiere development solution that is completely free and open source and maintained and stewarded by a completely independent company (IBM) from it's primary developer (Sun/Oracle). Contrast this with .net that is owned and maintained by Microsoft, with a completely proprietary license, and whose premier development platform is again proprietary and owned by the single vendor Microsoft. Also note that .net is developed for and runs on nothing other than the MS ecosystem. The only serious alternative, Mono, is going nowhere now that the dev team got kicked out on the street and it never had full compatibility anyway so it was cross platform in name only.
Please clue yourself in before making ridiculous comparisons about things you obviously know nothing about.
I'm working at a job as a java coder right now and I hadn't seen one line of it before walking in the door. I demonstrated a bunch of stuff I'd written in Python that the boss really liked and got hired on the spot. Learned enough Java to do what I needed to do in about 3 weeks and now we're shipping the final product in about a week. It's been a wild ride but, I'm now convinced real programmers don't need to know the language to effectively build a product. And crappy programmers will never be able to do anything great other than accidentally no matter how much they "know".
University is no place to push a solution that is owned and controlled by a single vendor. There are many more languages that are more suited to teaching concepts than .net. Not to mention that there are already serious questions as to the future of .net seeing as MS seems to lost its enthusiasm for it for the next iteration of their desktop OS and the mono boys just got put out on the street. How practical is .net anyway? How many great programs are written in it as compared to C++ or Java? Not that many, actually. I can't think of too many reasons to teach it and I can think of many reasons not to.
With all due respect, fuck off. You don't get to say "with all due respect" after accusing me of lying and talking down to me like I'm an idiot.
Awww... you mad, bro?
Yes, I get that those problems are a side effect of flexibility and choice, but dont' try to pretend the the problems aren't there.
The problem of driving a car is having to get gas. The problem of living in a free society is having to pay taxes. You don't have a point other than stating the obvious.
Because it is ALL the apps that are launching.
Bull. "ALL" of her apps are not launching on boot. Please stop lying or better inform yourself.
SHe's end up either uninstalling everything or doing it one by one, checking to see ifthe problem has gone away after each uninstall
Learn to use your phone. In the settings, there is an option called "Applications". It will tell you everything that is running at that moment. Use common sense to figure out what app is causing a problem. App downloads lots of data from the 'net? Might be a problem.
Wow, the fact that we're even going down this road totally reinforces my impression of Android. This is shit that users shouldn't have to deal with.
No, the fact that we are going down this route is you are both (with all due respect) clueless on how to use your phone. Obviously, you'd rather have the walled garden experience than take the minimal amount of time it takes to not install a bunch of crap apps on your Android device. The rest of us with more than 2 brain cells to bang together will continue using our Android devices.
I'm not. She's really trying to solve the problem and she is tech savvy, but it is looking like it will be easier to just reinstall.
You are taking an anecdotal situation of a particular user's bad experience and using it as an indictment of the whole platform. Sure, a side effect of being able to download what you want when you want is going to manifest itself in facebook-widget-weatherbug service-itis until the phone slows to a crawl. And not every Android dev is a hotshot. A particular example is up until honeycomb, you could run any downloading in the same thread as the UI thus blocking the app from updating its interface until whatever it was you were downloading was done. You didn't have to do this but some people just don't know any better. Guess what, Honeycomb and Ice Cream going forward will not allow you to do this without throwing an exception. That's how it's done. You don't abandon the open platform because people are abusing it. You route around the damage and everyone including the bad developers ends up better for it in the end.
Here's another anecdote for you. I have 2 Android phones and a Motorola Xoom. I have never had the problems you mention and my phone runs blazingly fast. It's not that hard, dude.
It is an option, but it isn't isn't a whole lot better than reinstalling the whole system and starting from scratch.
Uninstalling multiple apps takes less than 5 minutes. Re imaging the phone and setting it all back up can take over an hour. How is that not a "whole lot better"?
I think you miss my point -- it's not that they could afford them, it's that they had no preference for them. People are just buying the default and the features and market differentiation of Android is having only marginal effect. Android isn't bought because people want it, it's bought because it's what's on the shelf. Android users could become Windows users next week if Microsoft makes a better deal with Samsung and Verizon than Google makes, Android users aren't sticky. Google's completely dependent upon the carriers and OEMs to distribute their OS, and it's up to them what will run on their phones -- the bulk of the users clearly don't give a damn and will use any old thing as long as it has a touchscreen and plays movies and the web browser doesn't suck
So, the crux of your argument is basically a series of anti-Android talking points that have no basis in any verifiable fact whatsoever and is just regurgitated on tech forums to fuel the fud flames and keep the fanboys happy? Got it.
Every benefit you mentioned (aside from form-factor) can be achieved through jailbreaking/unlocking. Since I like the iPhone form factor just fine, I'll stick with that.
Well, of course, with enough effort and dedication, any software limitation can be broken through. Hell, if you had enough money and manpower, you could rewrite the entire OS to your liking. The only thing is, the points I outlined are available to everybody making the choice of an Android device while what you have here is only available to the vanishingly small proportion of the population that is willing and able to do a jailbreak. Now, I'm not denigrating this as I have immediately rooted every Android devices I've ever bought and installed Cyanogenmod/Tiamat kernel/you name it. But, I can do that, most people can't.
How about compilation time? I'd be all about developing Android applications on my Xoom but compiling the Java/C/C++ source down to bytecode/machine code would be a bit onerous, I think.
Some people also like to be able to always run the latest OS without jailbreaking or waiting for their carrier modulo their OEM to get their act together.
Yeah, some people do. I'd bet it's mostly nerds (like myself) that run around on tech blogs more so than the general population. Normal people buy an appliance when they get a cell phone and that's what they want. You don't upgrade the OS on an appliance. Smartphones in particular are complicated. People that aren't nerds have a hard enough time just getting used to how it is out of the box, do you really think that just when they are starting to feel cool using their new device that they want the rug snatched from underneath them by rebooting their phone into an unfamiliar version of the OS? Of course they don't.
Two-for-one deals and "I want a phone that supplements an iPhone and is compatible with my network," is a powerful force.
I know, isn't it just terrible that there is a great smartphone that normal working people can actually afford? The HORROR!
Android somehow has a majority of share and growth among smartphones, yet it does about 1/4 of all the mobile web browsing and something like 1/5th of all the app sales.
Why lie, man? Do you think it helps your case to quote such easily verifiably bogus stats? Here, Android has 36.4 percent of smartphone subscribers in the US and it is extremely doubtful that it is higher than that worldwide what with the penetration of Symbian. That is no kind of a majority so please just stop. BTW, the exposition of your lies invalidates the rest of your argument that was based on said lies.
Does it mean my options for installing apps are somewhat limited? Maybe, but in practice it really doesn't matter that much.
I think you may be glossing over some of the other obvious benefits of Android over the iPhone that are just as important. Things like choice of form factor for example. Some people like devices with slide out keyboards like the Samsung Epic 4G or blackberry-esque business phones like the Droid Pro. People, at least in the US, like to have a choice of carrier. Sprint and T-Mobile have Android, they don't have iPhones. And don't discount the widget loving contingent of Android users. Many people like those giant clock and weather report boxes on their home screens rather than just a static icon list. There are obviously many reasons people choose Android as evidenced by the meteoric rise in market share and it is a bit arrogant for you to presume what people "need to worry about" when it comes to their choice of phone.
I didn't think it was too bad; indeed our normal 3G seems to run at the USA's "4G" speed: I often download Ubuntu updates to my netbook at over 700KB/s sustained
In Jacksonville, FL, I just tested my Motorola Droid and got a 111ms ping, and 972KBps which is just short of a Megabyte. 4G speeds, i.e., LTE, are much faster.
Yeah, it's strange that Motorola didn't take the blame when non-bundled third party apps cause problems with their phones.
See, that's just it. This guy is a hypocrite. The MotoBlur launcher is the worst culprit on Motorola phones for reducing performance and battery life. Replace that and the phone "magically" comes back to life.
See http://www.riagenic.com/archives/487
Pure navel-gazing bs.
The difference is that they never had a touch interface before.
What difference does it make if the third party stuff is written for mouse and keyboard? There are tons of older programs that people use that will never be rewritten at all be it for touch, Windows ARM or what have you. For the stuff still being developed, e.g., Photoshop, Quicken, etc., Windows tablets are going to have to actually, you know, sell before efforts are made to adapt the UI of those applications for it. The questions remains though, how will Windows tablets sell if it's no fun running applications on it? Maybe it will work out. Or maybe millions of people will just keep buying iPads. What do you think?
In other words, spend a lot more time making it usable??
Huh? Not any more work than you would go through downloading the regular Ubuntu CD and installing it. Or you can just search for it in the Ubuntu Software Center and install Lubuntu Desktop (LXDE), Xubuntu Desktop (XFCE), Kubuntu Desktop (KDE) or if you're a power user, like the guy I was replying to, you can install any of the window managers, log out and log back in for your shiny new desktop. If this is hard then iTunes is hard. It works the same way.
For handhelds and tablets, I get the power of a full OS and file system with the ease-of-use of WP7.
What applications can be written for this "full OS" that make sense on a tablet that can't be written for Android Honeycomb? Now that Honeycomb has USB host, what devices make sense for a tablet that can't run on Android? How is the file system more "full" on Windows than Android?
I've never been more thankful for the diversity of X11 window managers in my life.
Amen. This could be a bigger opportunity for Linux on the desktop than Vista was. Hopefully it doesn't get blown again like it did last time.
I don't think it really is supposed to be used on a desktop with a mouse. You still have the standard Windows 7 style desktop that you can switch to, and I'm assuming that will be what you're primarily be using when there's no touch screen available.
If Microsoft keeps their Windows Media Player interface intact as well, you're talking about a pretty powerful little device.
What do you do when none of your favorite third party applications are designed for touch? Microsoft has been beating the Windows tablet drum for more than a decade and nothing has happened.
RedHat's interface is stuck in some stone age like Windows 3.1 with crutches, and Ubuntu is now sporting some kind of equally dreadful thing.
Due to the fact that you are even know this much about Linux, you probably also know the ease with which you can just install and run any of dozens of other desktop environments or window managers. Since you seem to prefer a more traditional style desktop, I'd suggest Ubuntu with the LXDE environment. Not only does it give you that Windows 2k warm and fuzzy, it's blazing fast. There is also XFCE for gnome 2.x lovers. I'm just merrily going along with Gnome 2.32 on Ubuntu 11.04 with no problems at all despite
Gnome is now broken.
there are a lot of people who like the Metro look.
If people like it, why aren't the devices featuring it selling?
I'm not sure what all your battery display does but a good reason to ask for storage access is so you can persist a log/settings in case the user uninstalls/reinstalls the application. Without sdcard write access, all of your files have to be written to the /data/data/youapphere directory and if the user uninstalls your app, those files are gone. If they are on the sdcard and the user decides later to reinstall your program, it can just pick right up where it left off. The same thing happens on Linux OSX and Windows.