I'm not sure if you were trying to amplify my point or respond to the original poster. What do you mean by "the multimedia entertainment or multimedia for work you left out is already there"? The prices are already equivalent to a low power PC and I actually recommend tablets like the Transformer over PCs now if the needs are limited to what they can handle (which in many cases is the case).
Personally I wonder if they are intentionally patenting the absurd simply to point out how broken the system is. I know some people don't like ads, but at the end of the day, ads displayed on websites by the choice of those websites as a means of generating revenue is not evil. Trying to make the ads more targeted so as to be meaningful to the user is not evil. It is actually really kind of good. The deal is they take what I want to do anyway and use it to be able to get marketers that I might want to actually hear from to pay for what I want to use and show me other things I may want to use. That is not a bad deal for me, it is in fact far better than the classical model of throwing any old thing in front of me regardless of whether it could have anything to do with my interests and wasting my time while giving me almost nothing for it.
Why not just make it a simulation and have the civilian casualties report to nice, clean incineration chambers? (For those not familiar, this is the plot of an episode of Star Trek.)
Yeah, it's really more using HIV's ability to avoid detection by white blood cells to allow it to be used as an efficient means of delivering genetically engineered information to someone's white blood cells. Not exactly a completely new approach, but awesome that they have made some very promising success in the process.
"(no real keyboard for a start)" - See Asus Transformer. It is the one and only reason that I bought in to the tablet market and is also the case for 4 of the other 8 tablet owners I know. 3 of the others are raging Apple fan boys and the 4th has a Xoom from before the Transformer came out that he got to investigate iPad alternatives.
As for a monopoly, yes, if someone legitimately can do so much better that they can force a standard, that is good, but that doesn't require a monopoly. Google has done just that with Android by forcing a standard by being the big kid on the block that lets other people actually play. The point of a standard is to have something that lets devices inter-operate while still competing and in that case, consumers win. In a monopoly where consumers have no choice and the monopoly crushes all attempts to compete through legal means rather than the quality of the product, the consumer 100% loses 100% of the time.
I wish I could not buy Apple products. Unfortunately as a developer, I have to develop for the platform and that involves having to have a Mac Mini (the cheapest one I could get) for building, which was actually a business purchase that I didn't make with my own personal money, but beyond that, I have not purchased Apple products in a long time (the only other things I ever bought were iPods when there were not better alternatives at a similar price, now I don't even use them as I prefer Rhapsody on my Galaxy S which has a better DAC anyway). Apple has always been about market control and being anti-competitive and has never been about consumer interest. That's been obvious since the 80s and became many times worse after iTunes.
Agreed, sometimes people have an idea that is genuinely a new thought and direction that nobody really saw coming. Sometimes they work out sometimes they don't, but they are certainly critical to innovation and it is cool to see something like this. I wish I could see the youtube videos while at work.
I disagree that tablets are a fad for exactly the reason you said. Battery life and low power. Laptops, in their quest to be desktop like, run way too hot and run way too short. It is that simple. Take a tablet like the transformer that is cheap and includes a keyboard that attaches like a netbook and you have a computer that will actually handle probably a good 75% of users needs very well for the same price as a laptop while running much cooler and much much longer with a more intuitive interface. That said, I don't believe the PC is dead, but I do think it will lose market share substantially until people as a whole start learning more about technology and wanting to do more with it than simply e-mail, web browsing and a glorified type writer.
While I agree with you in spirit, to be fair, I can play games beyond Angry Birds, but not beyond a current handheld game console, but still PS2 era graphics and OnLive has a client coming out in the fall. I can service my tablet myself to some extent by simply popping off the bezel and taking components off. It doesn't appear much harder than laptop maintenance if/when parts become available (and easily serviceable if you don't need replacement parts.) I can easily install software from sources other than the cloud and do regularly. You are however 100% correct about the performance thing and many people don't realize that a 1ghz Tegra2 is nothing similar to what say an i5 or even an i3 would be if it was similarly clocked since the instruction sets are not comparable. Also, virtual machine capability has been demoed on ARM based processors, but it is limited to ARM based OSes (not surprising). Video conversion can be done, but it is slow as hell (see instruction set differences).
My only real concern is what one of the other posters put about the fact that PCs may lose the economies of scale and go back to having the $7000+ price tags they used to have before economies of scale drove prices down. I would expect that if the major PC manufacturers don't adapt to the changing landscape, their buying power or even profitability could substantially erode and if they fall, I would expect desktop components to start going up in price some too, though the fact that some of the main component manufacturers also have tablets does encourage me since the fabrication processes should be similar enough that I expect prices to stay down for building your own. Business will also keep it going strong in the server segment since, while virtualization of the desktop is a growing trend, it still requires substantial server power (and may actually be good for pushing processor tech forward in a post mainstream PC world).
So yeah, PCs are not going anywhere, but they might go up in price and I do think the market popularity has begun a decline until you reach a power user shelf. I also kind of expect it will pick up again in about 10 years as more people become comfortable with tablet technology and begin to adapt back to PC tech as they want to do more that can't easily be done in a tablet form factor.
A processor that actually has a full instruction set. You're 1ghz processor is far more limited than you think outside of a particular range of processing. Don't get me wrong, they are great chips for what they do, but they were built for low power, not high performance. Don't delude yourself in to thinking that they will be able to compete with the processing power of a desktop or laptop anytime soon (read next probably 5 to 10 years by which point Android won't even resemble what we have now.) The OS itself is also very limited in terms of what can be done with it. Tablets with good generic hardware support and good keyboard addons are a great addition to the computing space, but they do not by any means replace the PC. Get back to me when you can run Premiere or real Photoshop on your tablet (for comparison, grab the "Photoshop" app from Adobe on Android and look at how limited it is and how it performs compared to a desktop version.)
Technically there is some distortion inherent in tubes, just not the kind you are thinking of when you think distortion. That is the reason they are preferred by many. They give the sound a characteristic "warm" sound which is precisely from the lack of digital precision involved in a digital conversion. This is why people have worked on tube modeling DPS effects to attempt to replicate the subtle way in which tubes distort the sound.
Microsoft does have a donation program as well, but if the charity does not qualify for donations or needs more than they can get donated, they have several options available. What I forgot to mention is the Windows copy is for Windows 7 Pro and if they prefer, the rental version is available for $12. It appears that the costs did actually go up some on office and windows (though they are still a fraction of the retail cost(it looks like they prefer the rental model now which is actually cheaper in the long run based on average release cycle)), though server and CAL licenses are still incredibly cheap ($4 to $6 for cals and around $100 for servers that normally cost over $2000. Also, you point out universities, they also qualify under both the Open Charity and Open Academic programs in addition to Academic Alliance where the institution pays a certain amount annually and gets better prices. It's kind of a volume discount/partnership type discount. Also, MS has always had a particular soft spot for education.
Ridiculously cheap might have been an overstatement, but they are still offered at a substantial discount to retail and they have been invaluable aids to my work with non-profits. At the end of the day, you can make arguments that something like Linux is a cheaper alternative for charities, but that simply isn't true. The support requirements alone to keep users functional on Linux (when they have enough trouble with Windows as it is) cost more than the licensing costs in the first week alone just in lost hours of work by the users.
Most charities will wipe the systems out anyway and have a computer person available that works with them, particularly if they accept donations of computers. I have worked with multiple charities and in every case it was SOP to wipe and reinstall the computer when it came in. Having the original OS is nice as it implies a license is available and if the Certificate of Authenticity is still on the box or included with the machine, then that license can be used if they want. (Otherwise, charities can get ridiculously cheap licenses of MS software from Open Charity Licensing (a copy of windows is like $30 and office is like $12.) )
Except their prices are much CHEAPER than ours. Not more expensive. They simply run their networks better and benefit from the population density. The point I was trying to make is that hairyfeet's argument that the cellular network can only support so much or that the system is unworkable in an efficient way is bullshit and Europe proves this. The US very much has it's own unique challenges as we have lower population density, but lower density should also mean that high bandwidth users have less impact as there is more space in the spectrum since users are more spread out.
This is Microsoft Research we are talking about. They are probably one of the best computational research centers around. I'd trust their security research quite a bit. These are the same people that made a managed code kernel with a native code compiler for.Net just to study how to make OSes in a different, more secure way. It actually did a lot of process isolation in a similar way to how Android does it, but actually predated Android development. As far as I know, that project is still ongoing (it's called Singularity if you are interested and it is quite interesting imho.)
They have many other very innovative and ground breaking research credits to their name, but as other people have mentioned, they are unfortunately more think tank than product development so a lot of times what they come up with isn't really used, at least not by Microsoft. (Note they were also doing multi-touch interaction with their "Surface" research a long time ago too. Some of that actually appears to be getting worked in to Windows 8.)
Also think the cheaper new Mac Mini's that are running Intel graphics. This could be used at least for more video outputs if not better graphics performance.
I've yet to find a hotel or free wifi hotspot that had better internet than my 3G connection in both terms of latency and bandwidth. This says nothing of 4G. Also, why does Europe not have these problems? As I understand it they have higher population density and cheaper cell service (though perhaps also better Wifi coverage and maybe that is the answer.) That all said, I will use whatever the best available connection is. If it is wifi, I will use that. If it is cellular, I will use that.
Does HTC really make 90% of the phones? I know they are a popular manufacturer, but I know Samsung and Motorola have some very popular models as well. Anyone know if this works on the Asus Transformer?
Minor detail, it is "our" not "are" good ol' friend Marriam and that definition agrees with me.
An innovation is the introduction of something new. A new idea, method or device. The ideas, methods and device were equivalent in function but better in design. It was a better implementation of a given concept, but was not a new concept. Since Android does not use the same implementation of the concept, Apple is not innovating in some way that Samsung copied any more than Apple copied it from the predecessors they improved on.
The Wikipedia definition might consider design to be innovation, but it might not. It is less clear than the Marrian Webster definition and it only says what it generally is used to refer to.
Either way, it's semantics. My point is that they things that while the iPhone was better designed than previous smartphones, the things that Android copied have existed in PDAs and smart phones for long before the iPhone. (With the exception of the app market, but I don't really see the idea of having a store to get apps as being innovative as it existed in other platforms prior to the introduction to handhelds (see Steam).) So as it relates to this case, Apple is full of crap.
This was exactly my question as well. It relies on an uninvolved party being able to recognize and redirect the request which would seem to render the entire system useless if the censor can get access to a router that recognizes the data to be forwarded. It could then be stripped or blocked. I've yet to hear a good explanation of how the system is supposed to avoid this issue.
1. Internet search says Treo had Threaded SMS prior to iPhone. 2. VVM was an innovation but isn't relevant to a discussion on tablets. 3. Unlimited Data existed before smart phones were even popular for feature phones. 4. This is not an innovation, it is simply a manufacturer having enough leverage to demand conditions to the carrier. 5. This is not an innovation, it is simply better design of a feature that already existed. It isn't innovation unless it is a new feature, otherwise it is just improving on what it copied. 6. Again, not an innovation, just better design. 7. The main UI for selecting apps is very similar, the applications are just better developed with stricter coding guidelines and a storefront that enforces them (this was arguably the one actual innovation with the iPhone.) 8. Again, not an innovation, just better design. 9. Again, not an innovation, just better design. 10. There were apps that could do this for treo.
Please don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that the iPhone was not a giant step forward in terms of design, but it was NOT innovative. It did not change the basic way we design or use smartphones, it was just a much better implementation of existing thought processes. Other companies have made there own hardware designs running with it's own variations and are no different. They are perhaps not as much of a jump forward in design by some people's view, but I would consider my Asus Transformer for example to be a substantial jump forward from an iPad in relation to what matters to me.
As for Android, I think maybe part of the issue is you don't realize how different Android actually is from iOS. The platforms are very different under the hood. They have a similar look and feel to the extend of a home screen that has icons on it, but that is a carry over from PalmOS days and prior. The level of similarities between Android and iOS really are comparable to the similarities between iOS and PalmOS. I'm not saying they are the same at all, but I'm also arguing that Android and iOS are not the same at all. They use some common design improvements and go their own ways in others. Since they are design improvements and not innovations that are being copied (with the arguable exception of the app store idea), they really are no more a copy than the iPhone was from the Treo.
Thanks a bunch for the link. For the graphics professionals out there, check the bottom of the "What is it" page for the critical details. Basically they define what points exist and the color information for them and then use a search to determine each pixel's color based on the location and direction of the camera. In combination with some other technologies, it does have some interesting possibilities, but is still very limited. It could have some use in landscape rendering I would think though. That said, I'd still much more like to watch the future of tessellation for scaling vector geometry and eventually real time ray tracing as far superior technologies.
The lighting looks terrible because they were trying to show detail and used bland lighting to show it. There is no reason that the technology could not be used for very high quality static landscapes in combination with existing techniques, but it is useless for anything that is moving as the search parameters would not match up. I would also expect it to take a rather large amount of data to do since it isn't mathematically modeled, but rather actual point clouds (unless they worked some really crazy math).
Saying android is a clone of iPhone is a bit like saying that iPhone is a clone of a Palm Treo. Other than the addition of a multi-touch capacitive screen and a somewhat more streamlined interface, the iPhone was not innovative other than it's marketing and building on a successful MP3 player brand. The similarities between an iPhone and an Android phone as analogous to the similarities between a Palm device and an iPhone. Increasing screen size doesn't exactly make it a unique platform either.
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I'm not sure if you were trying to amplify my point or respond to the original poster. What do you mean by "the multimedia entertainment or multimedia for work you left out is already there"? The prices are already equivalent to a low power PC and I actually recommend tablets like the Transformer over PCs now if the needs are limited to what they can handle (which in many cases is the case).
Thanks for the info. I knew the sound, but had never bothered to learn the technical reason before now. Very cool information.
Personally I wonder if they are intentionally patenting the absurd simply to point out how broken the system is. I know some people don't like ads, but at the end of the day, ads displayed on websites by the choice of those websites as a means of generating revenue is not evil. Trying to make the ads more targeted so as to be meaningful to the user is not evil. It is actually really kind of good. The deal is they take what I want to do anyway and use it to be able to get marketers that I might want to actually hear from to pay for what I want to use and show me other things I may want to use. That is not a bad deal for me, it is in fact far better than the classical model of throwing any old thing in front of me regardless of whether it could have anything to do with my interests and wasting my time while giving me almost nothing for it.
Why not just make it a simulation and have the civilian casualties report to nice, clean incineration chambers? (For those not familiar, this is the plot of an episode of Star Trek.)
Yeah, it's really more using HIV's ability to avoid detection by white blood cells to allow it to be used as an efficient means of delivering genetically engineered information to someone's white blood cells. Not exactly a completely new approach, but awesome that they have made some very promising success in the process.
"(no real keyboard for a start)" - See Asus Transformer. It is the one and only reason that I bought in to the tablet market and is also the case for 4 of the other 8 tablet owners I know. 3 of the others are raging Apple fan boys and the 4th has a Xoom from before the Transformer came out that he got to investigate iPad alternatives.
As for a monopoly, yes, if someone legitimately can do so much better that they can force a standard, that is good, but that doesn't require a monopoly. Google has done just that with Android by forcing a standard by being the big kid on the block that lets other people actually play. The point of a standard is to have something that lets devices inter-operate while still competing and in that case, consumers win. In a monopoly where consumers have no choice and the monopoly crushes all attempts to compete through legal means rather than the quality of the product, the consumer 100% loses 100% of the time.
I wish I could not buy Apple products. Unfortunately as a developer, I have to develop for the platform and that involves having to have a Mac Mini (the cheapest one I could get) for building, which was actually a business purchase that I didn't make with my own personal money, but beyond that, I have not purchased Apple products in a long time (the only other things I ever bought were iPods when there were not better alternatives at a similar price, now I don't even use them as I prefer Rhapsody on my Galaxy S which has a better DAC anyway). Apple has always been about market control and being anti-competitive and has never been about consumer interest. That's been obvious since the 80s and became many times worse after iTunes.
Agreed, sometimes people have an idea that is genuinely a new thought and direction that nobody really saw coming. Sometimes they work out sometimes they don't, but they are certainly critical to innovation and it is cool to see something like this. I wish I could see the youtube videos while at work.
I disagree that tablets are a fad for exactly the reason you said. Battery life and low power. Laptops, in their quest to be desktop like, run way too hot and run way too short. It is that simple. Take a tablet like the transformer that is cheap and includes a keyboard that attaches like a netbook and you have a computer that will actually handle probably a good 75% of users needs very well for the same price as a laptop while running much cooler and much much longer with a more intuitive interface. That said, I don't believe the PC is dead, but I do think it will lose market share substantially until people as a whole start learning more about technology and wanting to do more with it than simply e-mail, web browsing and a glorified type writer.
While I agree with you in spirit, to be fair, I can play games beyond Angry Birds, but not beyond a current handheld game console, but still PS2 era graphics and OnLive has a client coming out in the fall. I can service my tablet myself to some extent by simply popping off the bezel and taking components off. It doesn't appear much harder than laptop maintenance if/when parts become available (and easily serviceable if you don't need replacement parts.) I can easily install software from sources other than the cloud and do regularly. You are however 100% correct about the performance thing and many people don't realize that a 1ghz Tegra2 is nothing similar to what say an i5 or even an i3 would be if it was similarly clocked since the instruction sets are not comparable. Also, virtual machine capability has been demoed on ARM based processors, but it is limited to ARM based OSes (not surprising). Video conversion can be done, but it is slow as hell (see instruction set differences).
My only real concern is what one of the other posters put about the fact that PCs may lose the economies of scale and go back to having the $7000+ price tags they used to have before economies of scale drove prices down. I would expect that if the major PC manufacturers don't adapt to the changing landscape, their buying power or even profitability could substantially erode and if they fall, I would expect desktop components to start going up in price some too, though the fact that some of the main component manufacturers also have tablets does encourage me since the fabrication processes should be similar enough that I expect prices to stay down for building your own. Business will also keep it going strong in the server segment since, while virtualization of the desktop is a growing trend, it still requires substantial server power (and may actually be good for pushing processor tech forward in a post mainstream PC world).
So yeah, PCs are not going anywhere, but they might go up in price and I do think the market popularity has begun a decline until you reach a power user shelf. I also kind of expect it will pick up again in about 10 years as more people become comfortable with tablet technology and begin to adapt back to PC tech as they want to do more that can't easily be done in a tablet form factor.
A processor that actually has a full instruction set. You're 1ghz processor is far more limited than you think outside of a particular range of processing. Don't get me wrong, they are great chips for what they do, but they were built for low power, not high performance. Don't delude yourself in to thinking that they will be able to compete with the processing power of a desktop or laptop anytime soon (read next probably 5 to 10 years by which point Android won't even resemble what we have now.) The OS itself is also very limited in terms of what can be done with it. Tablets with good generic hardware support and good keyboard addons are a great addition to the computing space, but they do not by any means replace the PC. Get back to me when you can run Premiere or real Photoshop on your tablet (for comparison, grab the "Photoshop" app from Adobe on Android and look at how limited it is and how it performs compared to a desktop version.)
Technically there is some distortion inherent in tubes, just not the kind you are thinking of when you think distortion. That is the reason they are preferred by many. They give the sound a characteristic "warm" sound which is precisely from the lack of digital precision involved in a digital conversion. This is why people have worked on tube modeling DPS effects to attempt to replicate the subtle way in which tubes distort the sound.
Microsoft does have a donation program as well, but if the charity does not qualify for donations or needs more than they can get donated, they have several options available. What I forgot to mention is the Windows copy is for Windows 7 Pro and if they prefer, the rental version is available for $12. It appears that the costs did actually go up some on office and windows (though they are still a fraction of the retail cost(it looks like they prefer the rental model now which is actually cheaper in the long run based on average release cycle)), though server and CAL licenses are still incredibly cheap ($4 to $6 for cals and around $100 for servers that normally cost over $2000. Also, you point out universities, they also qualify under both the Open Charity and Open Academic programs in addition to Academic Alliance where the institution pays a certain amount annually and gets better prices. It's kind of a volume discount/partnership type discount. Also, MS has always had a particular soft spot for education.
Ridiculously cheap might have been an overstatement, but they are still offered at a substantial discount to retail and they have been invaluable aids to my work with non-profits. At the end of the day, you can make arguments that something like Linux is a cheaper alternative for charities, but that simply isn't true. The support requirements alone to keep users functional on Linux (when they have enough trouble with Windows as it is) cost more than the licensing costs in the first week alone just in lost hours of work by the users.
Most charities will wipe the systems out anyway and have a computer person available that works with them, particularly if they accept donations of computers. I have worked with multiple charities and in every case it was SOP to wipe and reinstall the computer when it came in. Having the original OS is nice as it implies a license is available and if the Certificate of Authenticity is still on the box or included with the machine, then that license can be used if they want. (Otherwise, charities can get ridiculously cheap licenses of MS software from Open Charity Licensing (a copy of windows is like $30 and office is like $12.) )
Except their prices are much CHEAPER than ours. Not more expensive. They simply run their networks better and benefit from the population density. The point I was trying to make is that hairyfeet's argument that the cellular network can only support so much or that the system is unworkable in an efficient way is bullshit and Europe proves this. The US very much has it's own unique challenges as we have lower population density, but lower density should also mean that high bandwidth users have less impact as there is more space in the spectrum since users are more spread out.
This is Microsoft Research we are talking about. They are probably one of the best computational research centers around. I'd trust their security research quite a bit. These are the same people that made a managed code kernel with a native code compiler for .Net just to study how to make OSes in a different, more secure way. It actually did a lot of process isolation in a similar way to how Android does it, but actually predated Android development. As far as I know, that project is still ongoing (it's called Singularity if you are interested and it is quite interesting imho.)
They have many other very innovative and ground breaking research credits to their name, but as other people have mentioned, they are unfortunately more think tank than product development so a lot of times what they come up with isn't really used, at least not by Microsoft. (Note they were also doing multi-touch interaction with their "Surface" research a long time ago too. Some of that actually appears to be getting worked in to Windows 8.)
Also think the cheaper new Mac Mini's that are running Intel graphics. This could be used at least for more video outputs if not better graphics performance.
I've yet to find a hotel or free wifi hotspot that had better internet than my 3G connection in both terms of latency and bandwidth. This says nothing of 4G. Also, why does Europe not have these problems? As I understand it they have higher population density and cheaper cell service (though perhaps also better Wifi coverage and maybe that is the answer.) That all said, I will use whatever the best available connection is. If it is wifi, I will use that. If it is cellular, I will use that.
Does HTC really make 90% of the phones? I know they are a popular manufacturer, but I know Samsung and Motorola have some very popular models as well. Anyone know if this works on the Asus Transformer?
Minor detail, it is "our" not "are" good ol' friend Marriam and that definition agrees with me.
An innovation is the introduction of something new. A new idea, method or device. The ideas, methods and device were equivalent in function but better in design. It was a better implementation of a given concept, but was not a new concept. Since Android does not use the same implementation of the concept, Apple is not innovating in some way that Samsung copied any more than Apple copied it from the predecessors they improved on.
The Wikipedia definition might consider design to be innovation, but it might not. It is less clear than the Marrian Webster definition and it only says what it generally is used to refer to.
Either way, it's semantics. My point is that they things that while the iPhone was better designed than previous smartphones, the things that Android copied have existed in PDAs and smart phones for long before the iPhone. (With the exception of the app market, but I don't really see the idea of having a store to get apps as being innovative as it existed in other platforms prior to the introduction to handhelds (see Steam).) So as it relates to this case, Apple is full of crap.
This was exactly my question as well. It relies on an uninvolved party being able to recognize and redirect the request which would seem to render the entire system useless if the censor can get access to a router that recognizes the data to be forwarded. It could then be stripped or blocked. I've yet to hear a good explanation of how the system is supposed to avoid this issue.
1. Internet search says Treo had Threaded SMS prior to iPhone.
2. VVM was an innovation but isn't relevant to a discussion on tablets.
3. Unlimited Data existed before smart phones were even popular for feature phones.
4. This is not an innovation, it is simply a manufacturer having enough leverage to demand conditions to the carrier.
5. This is not an innovation, it is simply better design of a feature that already existed. It isn't innovation unless it is a new feature, otherwise it is just improving on what it copied.
6. Again, not an innovation, just better design.
7. The main UI for selecting apps is very similar, the applications are just better developed with stricter coding guidelines and a storefront that enforces them (this was arguably the one actual innovation with the iPhone.)
8. Again, not an innovation, just better design.
9. Again, not an innovation, just better design.
10. There were apps that could do this for treo.
Please don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that the iPhone was not a giant step forward in terms of design, but it was NOT innovative. It did not change the basic way we design or use smartphones, it was just a much better implementation of existing thought processes. Other companies have made there own hardware designs running with it's own variations and are no different. They are perhaps not as much of a jump forward in design by some people's view, but I would consider my Asus Transformer for example to be a substantial jump forward from an iPad in relation to what matters to me.
As for Android, I think maybe part of the issue is you don't realize how different Android actually is from iOS. The platforms are very different under the hood. They have a similar look and feel to the extend of a home screen that has icons on it, but that is a carry over from PalmOS days and prior. The level of similarities between Android and iOS really are comparable to the similarities between iOS and PalmOS. I'm not saying they are the same at all, but I'm also arguing that Android and iOS are not the same at all. They use some common design improvements and go their own ways in others. Since they are design improvements and not innovations that are being copied (with the arguable exception of the app store idea), they really are no more a copy than the iPhone was from the Treo.
Thanks a bunch for the link. For the graphics professionals out there, check the bottom of the "What is it" page for the critical details. Basically they define what points exist and the color information for them and then use a search to determine each pixel's color based on the location and direction of the camera. In combination with some other technologies, it does have some interesting possibilities, but is still very limited. It could have some use in landscape rendering I would think though. That said, I'd still much more like to watch the future of tessellation for scaling vector geometry and eventually real time ray tracing as far superior technologies.
The lighting looks terrible because they were trying to show detail and used bland lighting to show it. There is no reason that the technology could not be used for very high quality static landscapes in combination with existing techniques, but it is useless for anything that is moving as the search parameters would not match up. I would also expect it to take a rather large amount of data to do since it isn't mathematically modeled, but rather actual point clouds (unless they worked some really crazy math).
Saying android is a clone of iPhone is a bit like saying that iPhone is a clone of a Palm Treo. Other than the addition of a multi-touch capacitive screen and a somewhat more streamlined interface, the iPhone was not innovative other than it's marketing and building on a successful MP3 player brand. The similarities between an iPhone and an Android phone as analogous to the similarities between a Palm device and an iPhone. Increasing screen size doesn't exactly make it a unique platform either.