This has nothing to do with chances of success. Apple has stellar marketing. Many of their products suck, but sell into the 10's of millions. I don't think this is necessarily a different case with the iPad.. they probably will be selling millions if not tens of millions. That doesn't make the device suck any less. It might suggest flaws in our educational system or diet, but it doesn't mean this is a marketing failure.
And no,/. is not the place to worry too much about the success or failure of the device. But it is the place to discuss the tech, and the other various interesting ideas surrounding this announcement.
We understand the purpose of that class of device. We just lament that the iPad, while the first one of these getting huge national press, is kind of a crappy example. I think many of us here would buy the right tablet computer. After all, this is a geek zone... how many here have just one computer? How many here are the last on their block buying any cool new tech toy?
Personally, I would never buy an Apple product, for many reasons. But I do like to see hot new tech, and it would be far more interesting if Apple had done well, particularly given that everyone and their cat showed off a new tablet device of some kind as CES a few weeks ago. Apple has occasionally done things well, and no, it's never really been the hardware. People got all doe-eyed over the original iPhone and forgot that the hardware sucked -- EDGE network in the age of 3G, and a phone that barely even did "The Phone Thing". The form factor was obvious, and rumored for a good year-and-a-half before it shipped.
And yet, it did teach some lessons. Their finger-driven GUI worked, and that's preferable to using a stylus. Good enough.
Now there's the iPad. Same old software, only at 1024x768 (apparently, Jobs didn't get the memo that clearly stated just how dead, dead, dead the idea of 4:3 video is now). They're doing iBooks... great... already on the iPhone, Android, etc. And these make good eBook readers, but largely because they can access many different closed eBook standards, as well as the open ones. But otherwise, they suck.. you can't read an iPhone or DROID or iPad screen in the bright sunlight. Never been a problem for a real book. So this is a fail. And they sure seem to have stolen the GUI for their eBook application directly from Aldiko, KiwiTech, and bunch of these eBook reader guys. If that's innovation... oh, right. Apple was late to the MP3 player game, late to the PMP party, late to the Smart Phone show, and now late to the tablet market. It's never even remotely about innovation... Apple has great marketing. That's the only reason they're not one of these tiny, struggling companies.
In short... the iPad announcement was a chance to find something interesting about Apple again. I mean, I love good tech, and miss the old days of the personal computer market. That's gone fairly lame... incremental stuff every year, but the only big news is when people do stupid things (Apple eliminates removable batteries, for example). So I was hoping for something interesting in the iPad announcement. All I got was "yawn", and a way-too-easily mocked name.
On a portable device, there's no assumption of unlimited memory. As you request more resources by opening new applications, older ones just sitting idle get terminated. Automatically. By the OS. It just works. I've had my DROID powered on for weeks at a time, and never once had an issue with resources. This can be done right. And yes, it is something that needs to go into a mobile OS as part of the multitasking model.
But unlike the Desktop, Palm got the mobile model right decades ago. There should be no "SAVE" option... when you work on something, it's always stored. So there's no problem terminating any application. Android apps can even save their context, so when you start them back up, they go right back to where they were, just like PalmOS. If you can't tell, I used PalmOS for many years before switching to Android. Today's Android is better in every way than the old PalmOS.
Apparently, not the iPad, so much. Every in-depth article I've read claims it's too heavy to hold with one hand. Ok, so they're wimpy computer nerds... but still. Real Men don't buy Apple products, so they should have engineered this for regular plain old everyday folks to be able to hold it while walking.
And if you have to ask, yeah, I can walk around holding my 7lbs HP laptop. But typing sucks with one hand, virtual keyboard or real one. My DROID is a much better "walking around with" device. Not to mention the combination of camera, GPS, and virtual reality software actually gives it something useful to do while I'm walking about.
But what if I want 1000? 10,000? Apple's going to say "no", I'm going to say "jail-break it"... if I were stupid enough to accept Apple's control of my purchased hardware in the first place. I'm not. And in fact, I'm very happy about Apple's policies. They're part of the reason why, within the next two years, they'll be in second place against Android. That will be a very good thing to everyone who's not an Apple stockholder or fanboy.
There is never any reason to open a task killer app to free up memory... Android kills off unused apps as resources are needed.
The rare actual need for a task killer is when you get a poorly behaved application that's sucking down power when it should be quiescent. I've found this once since I got my DROID. No, you won't get this on the iPhone, but I'll take real multitasking over the rare abuse of it, rather than no multitasking, any day of the week.
Closing apps is also a choice available to the applications programmer. You can offer a "close" function in your app, it's just not necessary for most applications.
As for Flash, no, Apple will never support Flash. It's an alternate means of delivering programs to their device. For the same reason, they will never support Java. You're damn lucky you got Javascript. And a very nice Javascript... really fast for a mobile device (the iPhone 3GS was like 30% faster than my DROID in the standard benchmarks). In fact, so good, some folks are writing Javascript applications for the iPhone, bypassing the iTunes store. Imagine that... Apple was right. This whole "we need to be paid for every application" is why you can't get a Commodore 64 or Nintendo emulator for the iPhone. Apparently, 8-bit programs from the early 80s represent a serious threat to the future of the iPhone.
As for the disk space available, again, you misunderstand.
The Android security model is very robust. Each Android application runs in its own Dalvik VM, it's own Linux process, under it own Linux UID. So my app can't mess with your app. To achieve this level of security, you need a file system that, well, supports security. So they're running ext3 or some-such on the flash filesystem that's in the built-in Flash. This varies from 256MB to 1GB, depending on the Android device, but there's no practical limit.
Like most smart phones other than the iPhone, we have expandable memory on microSD flash. The DROID, for example, ships with a 16GB microSDHC card, but I can obviously keep a bunch of others.
Applications can and do use microSD memory for bulk data. Anything but code can live there, and usually does. So I have over 100 apps on my DROID, and still have half of the internal flash free. My 16GB card is fairly full, but most of that's my music collection, and some random videos.
I'm not entirely defending this, just explaining this. You can put ext3 on the microSD card, and have all the memory you want for apps. The problem is, the SDHC standard mandates FAT32, so once you do this, mounting the flash drive on a PC is problematic. Many have done this... it's no big deal, but you do need to create a root login to do it.
Perhaps a better idea would be to set aside some space on the flash card, either via partitioning or setting up a virtual ext3 file system in a FAT32 file.
I rather expect Google will address this problem, before it becomes a huge issue. In particular, it's needed to support older phones. Apple has shown, correctly, that it's important to push OS updates to as many iPhone users as possible.. they charge, but not much (I think the update for my kid's iPod was $10). Some of the older phones, with less on-board flash, will have no space left for apps in the internal flash as Android goes forward. It's probably not a serious long-term problem, since few people keep their phone for more than 3-4 years, but I think they will get smarter about these limitations. If not, someone else in the Android world will... that's the big win of Open Source. The problem can still be fixed, even if Google doesn't want to do it.
See Apple about multitasking before you get too haughty about the relatively few flaws in Android.
Google isn't claiming that the Android Market is perfectly open to all applications. They can and will reject applications for what they consider good reasons. Apple does this, too. Neither one "just accepts" malware.. but sometimes it's not obvious. There are rules for the Android Market. For example, let's say I create a "Davedoid Market" program that links to my store full of Android applications. That's totally possible, there's no magic you need to run this on your Android device. But Google won't accept it in the Android Market... as well as malware, they do not accept direct competition. Even at that, it's not a draconic limit... they don't accept alternative Android application market apps. They have no problem with other classes of "alternate apps" that would be rejected from the iTunes store. Emulators, for example. I have the Commodore 64 emulator on my DROID, just as I had it on my Treo. You can't get this for the iPhone, Apple says "no", because, apparently, 8-bit programs from the early 80s are a serious threat to the future of the iPhone. Not to mention Commodore BASIC 2.0.
The big difference, the meaning of "open' is that anyone else can offer Android applications. Other companies can create their own app stores, developers can offer direct application downloads. On the iPhone, you can only, ever, buy applications from Apple, unless you jail break your device.
Sure you can. You can, and probably do, bring in video from multiple sources.
Apple isn't stopping you (so far) from bringing in other video sources. But they sell video. Some it's at 640x480/24-30p, and some is at 1280x1024/24-30p. All fits just dandy on the iPad. There's no high def video output anyway, so there's no point, from Apple's prespective, in dealing with higher resolution video. After all, the preferred model is that you buy it from them anyway.
Not even.. its 1024x768, which doesn't even meet the legal definition of "High Definition". Probably doesn't matter on a 10" screen, anyway. There won't be any 1080p anyway, since Apple's "HD" is all about the 720p, at least so far. Which mates perfectly with this device. The video output is analog CVBS, like the iPod... there's no HD output, thus, not reason to even discuss 1080p.
The Tegra2 is pretty hot stuff... and cool... average power draw of 500mW. Seriously...
nVidia has done a very nice job on this. Consider that it can play back H.264 in 1080p without using much CPU.. the decoding engine was designed not only to offload the CPUs, but to do the decode using far, far less power than a CPU decode would. There's also a 1080p encoding engine on-chip, so any Tegra2 device with a video camera should be capable of realtime H.264 HD video capture.
The Cortex A9s are like the A8s, but with a slightly shorter pipeline and out-of-order execution of the two instruction streams. Some bets place it ahead of the recent Intel Atoms at the same clock speed (nVidia's doing 1GHz, but ARM does have a 2GHz core certified from TSMC's 40nm process).. regardless, it's pretty close.
In short, Apple's got problems trying to match nVidia's device here. Sure, they can license the same ARM cores anyone else can. They have the A9 in there... did they go multi-core? Is there anything for a multicore processor to do in an iPhone? I'll bet it's single core.
The rest of the Tegra isn't rocket science: ARM7 supervisor processor, audio DSP, etc. But nVidia really knows their graphics. Just about everyone else (even Intel, on the low-end) are using some version of the PowerVR core for their graphics. Nice, easy, licensed solution, but it's no nVidia. Apple's gone with the ARM MALI GPU, so presumably, they believe it's an improvement over the PowerVR they use in the iPhone 3GS. I haven't heard much of this, but it's hard to imagine it's much of a threat to nVidia... unless nVidia is slumming it on the Tegra2 (pretty unlikely... they're clearly looking at device computing as a monsterous future market, with their stuff at the high end).
And I'll also bet, given Apple's cash supply, that this is just a first step. They're licensing the ARM core, makes sense... Apple was already an ARM licensee, even before they bought PA Semi. But they do have a full chip design company there. They probably had an Implementation or Foundry license, but I would be really surprised if they haven't upgraded to an Architecture License. This would let Apple make significant changes/improvements to existing ARM cores, or even design their own from scratch.
Everyone thought Apple bought PA-Semi for the PowerPC they did, but I didn't buy it for a femtosecond. Apple just doesn't make enough Macs to justify anyone making a desktop-class CPU for it, custom. But look at how many frickin' ARMs they sell. Then consider that PA-Semi was founded by Dan Dobberpuhl, the chief architect not only of some of DEC's Alpha CPUs, but also their StrongARM chips (which became Intel's XScale, now owned by Marvell). The PA-Semi guys have to be chompin' at the bit to do their own super ARM. They're also wizards at low power.. that was one of the big selling points of their PPC. So the interesting part of this, in a big sense, had nothing to do with the silly iPad (not that Apple fanboys are smart enough to know when they're being snookered), and most it hasn't actually happened yet.
Android application development in Dalvik/Java is seriously easy. Much easier than the crufty Windows API (or any of the bolt-on frameworks designed to make up for the crappy native API). If you need the performance (rare, but certainly possible), use the NDK instead.
Do you have thick calluses, or some other weirdness of the fingers? As a guitar player, I have very thick calluses on my fretting hand (left), and yeah, capacitive touch screens are trouble. Generally works great with my right hand, though (I use a DROID, and have had no problem operating iPhones, aside from a slight sense of revulsion).
One option is to use a conductive stylus. Regular plastic one is only for resistive touch panels, but if it conducts electricity well enough, it'll work fine on a capacitive screen. And the contact with your hand negates the insulating effect of thick fingers.
Appliance is a one-shot device... it's not reprogrammable to do other things. That's your DVD player (but not necessarily your PS3), your microwave over, your Motorola RAZR, the Kindle. These devices have every function they will ever have when they ship from the factory, more or less (some, like digital cameras and cellphones, do allow software updates of those basic functions, but they don't have the resources to do profoundly different things).
The AppleTV... does that run applications? The old iPod... that's an appliance... it does a pre-defined set of things. iPod Touch is a PDA... a pocket computer.
The iPad, your iPhone, my DROID, the laptop I'm using... they're all very much general purpose computers. They run applications, they are not appliances. Apple's spent lots of time trying to convince users that computers and other application processors are just appliances. They are wrong.
I'm not even sure about the awesomeness of the eBook reader... any chance you can see this at all in the bright sun on a beach? That's one big criteria for eBook readers in my mind. A big reason for an eBook reader -- it's much more portable than your PC. It has to at the very least run all day, and needs to work in bright light, outdoors, etc.
The other, this does well... enough resolution, and color (at least optionally) to support not simply books, but magazine and datasheets. One other missing piece there... I need external memory, like flash cards. Just considering the eBook reader, I have many, many gigabytes of datasheets, organized by project. Some kind of tablet/book reader with long life would be a pretty nice adjunct to a PC in a lab situation for reading datasheets. But I want easy, fast access to all of them, older projects, etc. Memory cards are the best solution for this in general, since you can have all you want. Networks are too slow.. I want my "books" right at hand, all the time. Local device storage, even on the 64GB model, probably too small. Let's see... the work directory on my PC here, just the hardware stuff, has 496,615 files in 23GB. But lots of these are electronics CAD files... they get much larger if I print to PDF.
I'm not suggesting this is substantially better or worse an eBook reader than any of the others... and you get points for not being JUST an eBook reader, but points taken away because of Apple's demands for control of most other things.
Capacitive touch on glass... it's not pressure sensitive. Maybe clever enough reading of the touch panel can tell a hard press from a soft one from your finger, based on the area covered, but that gets pretty sticky, since it would have to be trained to the individual's use to some extent. And this kind of display doesn't work at all with a stylus. Well, maybe a metal one.
ePub is an open format, yes. But it absolutely does support DRM, and there are several DRMs in use for it now. Adobe makes the most popular ePub DRM, which is supported by the Sony eBook readers, among others. Barnes & Nobles' "nook" uses a modified version of the Adobe DRM, so their books only read on the nook and other readers licensed by B&N. These all read non-DRMed ePub books as well, but Apple has not yet said anything about the DRM(s) they're supporting in "iBooks". I don't think anyone would be shocked if they built a varient of "FairPlay" that works within ePub.
But this is Apple.. DRM on apps, DRM on video, etc. Yeah, they let up on music... pretty much at the same time other DRM-free music stores came online to compete. They aren't against DRM, and it's a pretty safe bet their eBooks only read on Apple products.
I want to install Firefox on the iPod Touch, iPhone, and iPad. But I can't. Thus, your first statement is false.
Jailbreak is not really an answer. Apple's walled garden will limit most of the interesting applications they reject from every being fully realized on these devices. Or applications that need to run as daemons, for example, rather than user-facing applications.
That's ok... it simply means that Apple's dominance in the mobile device world will end sooner than it might have otherwise. I'm good with that.
There's a difference. For one, Android is open source. Google is obviously not interested in controlling it at the level of Microsoft. Yes, they are pushing it forward, for now.
Yes, competition brings on lower prices, but it's also been very good for many companies. The smart phone market was overall boring and failing in many areas before Apple sparked it up again. Android is like MS-DOS in the sense of being something anyone can use, but it's not, in the sense of being inferior to Apple's product at the time. Android isn't yet as polished as some aspects of iPhone OS, but it's overall a better OS, better design, and hey... open source.
MS-DOS was pretty horrible, but it did a few useful things -- it allowed multiple companies to enter the computer business, under a common software platform. It let hardware guys innovate like hardware guys, without also having to be OS authors, too. There are big advantages to not allowing one vendor have too much power over you. I like the smart phone idea, but I don't necessarily want to move to a whole new set of applications, new OS, etc. every time I change network providers.
Google can't dominate software in the same way Microsoft did. Microsoft used MS-DOS and later Windows as the club by which to beat hardware companies into submission and get them to take Office, too. Google doesn't have a club, and so far, they don't seem to be interesting in selling apps, but rather making good ones you prefer to use. If they actually win by being better, it's hard to complain too loudly. And it's not like the iPxx devices... if you don't like Apple's browser, get a different phone. Otherwise, you're SOL. That's far, far worse than anything Microsoft inflicts on Windows users, even if the software is currently better (eg, Safari vs. IE).
Yup. I have my office wired with GigE, and a GigE link to another switch in my media room. But I still need wireless for the kids computers, portable devices, etc. No problems... I don't have any neighbors within 802.11n distance, I moved my cordless phone to 5GHz years back, and the only other 2.4GHz source other than the microphone is a video sender so I can TV in the kitchen.
Some years back I was developing 2.4GHz radios, which was fun... but then, you actually want the interferences at times, to see how you hold up against the background (eg, the competition). Taking it to an urban locale, just about any, was a great test... there's just stray RF everyone in a major city. 2.4GHz is just a piece of that. But you're probably still better off at 5GHz if you have the option, particularly for short range, high bandwidth stuff.
Actually, chances are pretty high your neighbor is using the wireless router with all original settings, including the default SSID and password. So just log in to his router and change the settings. Ok, maybe a little different in higher-tech communities, but in most places, there are people setting these things up without knowing what they're doing.
Yeah, the 10.5Mb/s from DVD is a peak for the transport layer. It's rare to encode anything that high, since you're cutting back on time. Cheap consumer grade encoders might use constant bitrate (CBR), but just about anything else will be using variable bitrate encoders. Commercial DVDs are compressed by a compression mastering engineer, who's tweaking compression locally to deliver the best visuals based on the film's length, special features, etc, and still keep within the limits of the medium. They have to keep the video rate low enough to allow for several audio tracks as well, usually one AC-3 (448kb/s) surround in English, one AC-3 (192kb/s) stereo in English, maybe one AC-3 stereo in Spanish and/or French, etc (for the North American market).
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This has nothing to do with chances of success. Apple has stellar marketing. Many of their products suck, but sell into the 10's of millions. I don't think this is necessarily a different case with the iPad.. they probably will be selling millions if not tens of millions. That doesn't make the device suck any less. It might suggest flaws in our educational system or diet, but it doesn't mean this is a marketing failure.
And no, /. is not the place to worry too much about the success or failure of the device. But it is the place to discuss the tech, and the other various interesting ideas surrounding this announcement.
We understand the purpose of that class of device. We just lament that the iPad, while the first one of these getting huge national press, is kind of a crappy example. I think many of us here would buy the right tablet computer. After all, this is a geek zone... how many here have just one computer? How many here are the last on their block buying any cool new tech toy?
Personally, I would never buy an Apple product, for many reasons. But I do like to see hot new tech, and it would be far more interesting if Apple had done well, particularly given that everyone and their cat showed off a new tablet device of some kind as CES a few weeks ago. Apple has occasionally done things well, and no, it's never really been the hardware. People got all doe-eyed over the original iPhone and forgot that the hardware sucked -- EDGE network in the age of 3G, and a phone that barely even did "The Phone Thing". The form factor was obvious, and rumored for a good year-and-a-half before it shipped.
And yet, it did teach some lessons. Their finger-driven GUI worked, and that's preferable to using a stylus. Good enough.
Now there's the iPad. Same old software, only at 1024x768 (apparently, Jobs didn't get the memo that clearly stated just how dead, dead, dead the idea of 4:3 video is now). They're doing iBooks... great... already on the iPhone, Android, etc. And these make good eBook readers, but largely because they can access many different closed eBook standards, as well as the open ones. But otherwise, they suck.. you can't read an iPhone or DROID or iPad screen in the bright sunlight. Never been a problem for a real book. So this is a fail. And they sure seem to have stolen the GUI for their eBook application directly from Aldiko, KiwiTech, and bunch of these eBook reader guys. If that's innovation... oh, right. Apple was late to the MP3 player game, late to the PMP party, late to the Smart Phone show, and now late to the tablet market. It's never even remotely about innovation... Apple has great marketing. That's the only reason they're not one of these tiny, struggling companies.
In short... the iPad announcement was a chance to find something interesting about Apple again. I mean, I love good tech, and miss the old days of the personal computer market. That's gone fairly lame... incremental stuff every year, but the only big news is when people do stupid things (Apple eliminates removable batteries, for example). So I was hoping for something interesting in the iPad announcement. All I got was "yawn", and a way-too-easily mocked name.
But that's the PC model.
On a portable device, there's no assumption of unlimited memory. As you request more resources by opening new applications, older ones just sitting idle get terminated. Automatically. By the OS. It just works. I've had my DROID powered on for weeks at a time, and never once had an issue with resources. This can be done right. And yes, it is something that needs to go into a mobile OS as part of the multitasking model.
But unlike the Desktop, Palm got the mobile model right decades ago. There should be no "SAVE" option... when you work on something, it's always stored. So there's no problem terminating any application. Android apps can even save their context, so when you start them back up, they go right back to where they were, just like PalmOS. If you can't tell, I used PalmOS for many years before switching to Android. Today's Android is better in every way than the old PalmOS.
The iPad will certainly be a "better Kindle" if you're sitting in a dark room, reading a color eZine, rather than a book.
The iPad will completely fail as any sort of eBook reader, if you're sitting on a beach in the bright sun, trying unsuccessfully to read anything.
Apparently, not the iPad, so much. Every in-depth article I've read claims it's too heavy to hold with one hand. Ok, so they're wimpy computer nerds... but still. Real Men don't buy Apple products, so they should have engineered this for regular plain old everyday folks to be able to hold it while walking.
And if you have to ask, yeah, I can walk around holding my 7lbs HP laptop. But typing sucks with one hand, virtual keyboard or real one. My DROID is a much better "walking around with" device. Not to mention the combination of camera, GPS, and virtual reality software actually gives it something useful to do while I'm walking about.
But what if I want 1000? 10,000? Apple's going to say "no", I'm going to say "jail-break it"... if I were stupid enough to accept Apple's control of my purchased hardware in the first place. I'm not. And in fact, I'm very happy about Apple's policies. They're part of the reason why, within the next two years, they'll be in second place against Android. That will be a very good thing to everyone who's not an Apple stockholder or fanboy.
There is never any reason to open a task killer app to free up memory... Android kills off unused apps as resources are needed.
The rare actual need for a task killer is when you get a poorly behaved application that's sucking down power when it should be quiescent. I've found this once since I got my DROID. No, you won't get this on the iPhone, but I'll take real multitasking over the rare abuse of it, rather than no multitasking, any day of the week.
Closing apps is also a choice available to the applications programmer. You can offer a "close" function in your app, it's just not necessary for most applications.
As for Flash, no, Apple will never support Flash. It's an alternate means of delivering programs to their device. For the same reason, they will never support Java. You're damn lucky you got Javascript. And a very nice Javascript... really fast for a mobile device (the iPhone 3GS was like 30% faster than my DROID in the standard benchmarks). In fact, so good, some folks are writing Javascript applications for the iPhone, bypassing the iTunes store. Imagine that... Apple was right. This whole "we need to be paid for every application" is why you can't get a Commodore 64 or Nintendo emulator for the iPhone. Apparently, 8-bit programs from the early 80s represent a serious threat to the future of the iPhone.
As for the disk space available, again, you misunderstand.
The Android security model is very robust. Each Android application runs in its own Dalvik VM, it's own Linux process, under it own Linux UID. So my app can't mess with your app. To achieve this level of security, you need a file system that, well, supports security. So they're running ext3 or some-such on the flash filesystem that's in the built-in Flash. This varies from 256MB to 1GB, depending on the Android device, but there's no practical limit.
Like most smart phones other than the iPhone, we have expandable memory on microSD flash. The DROID, for example, ships with a 16GB microSDHC card, but I can obviously keep a bunch of others.
Applications can and do use microSD memory for bulk data. Anything but code can live there, and usually does. So I have over 100 apps on my DROID, and still have half of the internal flash free. My 16GB card is fairly full, but most of that's my music collection, and some random videos.
I'm not entirely defending this, just explaining this. You can put ext3 on the microSD card, and have all the memory you want for apps. The problem is, the SDHC standard mandates FAT32, so once you do this, mounting the flash drive on a PC is problematic. Many have done this... it's no big deal, but you do need to create a root login to do it.
Perhaps a better idea would be to set aside some space on the flash card, either via partitioning or setting up a virtual ext3 file system in a FAT32 file.
I rather expect Google will address this problem, before it becomes a huge issue. In particular, it's needed to support older phones. Apple has shown, correctly, that it's important to push OS updates to as many iPhone users as possible.. they charge, but not much (I think the update for my kid's iPod was $10). Some of the older phones, with less on-board flash, will have no space left for apps in the internal flash as Android goes forward. It's probably not a serious long-term problem, since few people keep their phone for more than 3-4 years, but I think they will get smarter about these limitations. If not, someone else in the Android world will... that's the big win of Open Source. The problem can still be fixed, even if Google doesn't want to do it.
See Apple about multitasking before you get too haughty about the relatively few flaws in Android.
You're missing the point of "open".
Google isn't claiming that the Android Market is perfectly open to all applications. They can and will reject applications for what they consider good reasons. Apple does this, too. Neither one "just accepts" malware.. but sometimes it's not obvious. There are rules for the Android Market. For example, let's say I create a "Davedoid Market" program that links to my store full of Android applications. That's totally possible, there's no magic you need to run this on your Android device. But Google won't accept it in the Android Market... as well as malware, they do not accept direct competition. Even at that, it's not a draconic limit... they don't accept alternative Android application market apps. They have no problem with other classes of "alternate apps" that would be rejected from the iTunes store. Emulators, for example. I have the Commodore 64 emulator on my DROID, just as I had it on my Treo. You can't get this for the iPhone, Apple says "no", because, apparently, 8-bit programs from the early 80s are a serious threat to the future of the iPhone. Not to mention Commodore BASIC 2.0.
The big difference, the meaning of "open' is that anyone else can offer Android applications. Other companies can create their own app stores, developers can offer direct application downloads. On the iPhone, you can only, ever, buy applications from Apple, unless you jail break your device.
Sure you can. You can, and probably do, bring in video from multiple sources.
Apple isn't stopping you (so far) from bringing in other video sources. But they sell video. Some it's at 640x480/24-30p, and some is at 1280x1024/24-30p. All fits just dandy on the iPad. There's no high def video output anyway, so there's no point, from Apple's prespective, in dealing with higher resolution video. After all, the preferred model is that you buy it from them anyway.
Not even.. its 1024x768, which doesn't even meet the legal definition of "High Definition". Probably doesn't matter on a 10" screen, anyway. There won't be any 1080p anyway, since Apple's "HD" is all about the 720p, at least so far. Which mates perfectly with this device. The video output is analog CVBS, like the iPod... there's no HD output, thus, not reason to even discuss 1080p.
The Tegra2 is pretty hot stuff... and cool... average power draw of 500mW. Seriously...
nVidia has done a very nice job on this. Consider that it can play back H.264 in 1080p without using much CPU.. the decoding engine was designed not only to offload the CPUs, but to do the decode using far, far less power than a CPU decode would. There's also a 1080p encoding engine on-chip, so any Tegra2 device with a video camera should be capable of realtime H.264 HD video capture.
The Cortex A9s are like the A8s, but with a slightly shorter pipeline and out-of-order execution of the two instruction streams. Some bets place it ahead of the recent Intel Atoms at the same clock speed (nVidia's doing 1GHz, but ARM does have a 2GHz core certified from TSMC's 40nm process).. regardless, it's pretty close.
In short, Apple's got problems trying to match nVidia's device here. Sure, they can license the same ARM cores anyone else can. They have the A9 in there... did they go multi-core? Is there anything for a multicore processor to do in an iPhone? I'll bet it's single core.
The rest of the Tegra isn't rocket science: ARM7 supervisor processor, audio DSP, etc. But nVidia really knows their graphics. Just about everyone else (even Intel, on the low-end) are using some version of the PowerVR core for their graphics. Nice, easy, licensed solution, but it's no nVidia. Apple's gone with the ARM MALI GPU, so presumably, they believe it's an improvement over the PowerVR they use in the iPhone 3GS. I haven't heard much of this, but it's hard to imagine it's much of a threat to nVidia... unless nVidia is slumming it on the Tegra2 (pretty unlikely... they're clearly looking at device computing as a monsterous future market, with their stuff at the high end).
And I'll also bet, given Apple's cash supply, that this is just a first step. They're licensing the ARM core, makes sense... Apple was already an ARM licensee, even before they bought PA Semi. But they do have a full chip design company there. They probably had an Implementation or Foundry license, but I would be really surprised if they haven't upgraded to an Architecture License. This would let Apple make significant changes/improvements to existing ARM cores, or even design their own from scratch.
Everyone thought Apple bought PA-Semi for the PowerPC they did, but I didn't buy it for a femtosecond. Apple just doesn't make enough Macs to justify anyone making a desktop-class CPU for it, custom. But look at how many frickin' ARMs they sell. Then consider that PA-Semi was founded by Dan Dobberpuhl, the chief architect not only of some of DEC's Alpha CPUs, but also their StrongARM chips (which became Intel's XScale, now owned by Marvell). The PA-Semi guys have to be chompin' at the bit to do their own super ARM. They're also wizards at low power.. that was one of the big selling points of their PPC. So the interesting part of this, in a big sense, had nothing to do with the silly iPad (not that Apple fanboys are smart enough to know when they're being snookered), and most it hasn't actually happened yet.
Android application development in Dalvik/Java is seriously easy. Much easier than the crufty Windows API (or any of the bolt-on frameworks designed to make up for the crappy native API). If you need the performance (rare, but certainly possible), use the NDK instead.
Do you have thick calluses, or some other weirdness of the fingers? As a guitar player, I have very thick calluses on my fretting hand (left), and yeah, capacitive touch screens are trouble. Generally works great with my right hand, though (I use a DROID, and have had no problem operating iPhones, aside from a slight sense of revulsion).
One option is to use a conductive stylus. Regular plastic one is only for resistive touch panels, but if it conducts electricity well enough, it'll work fine on a capacitive screen. And the contact with your hand negates the insulating effect of thick fingers.
A conductive stylus works just dandy on a capacitive screen.
Appliance is a one-shot device... it's not reprogrammable to do other things. That's your DVD player (but not necessarily your PS3), your microwave over, your Motorola RAZR, the Kindle. These devices have every function they will ever have when they ship from the factory, more or less (some, like digital cameras and cellphones, do allow software updates of those basic functions, but they don't have the resources to do profoundly different things).
The AppleTV... does that run applications? The old iPod... that's an appliance... it does a pre-defined set of things. iPod Touch is a PDA... a pocket computer.
The iPad, your iPhone, my DROID, the laptop I'm using... they're all very much general purpose computers. They run applications, they are not appliances. Apple's spent lots of time trying to convince users that computers and other application processors are just appliances. They are wrong.
I'm not even sure about the awesomeness of the eBook reader... any chance you can see this at all in the bright sun on a beach? That's one big criteria for eBook readers in my mind. A big reason for an eBook reader -- it's much more portable than your PC. It has to at the very least run all day, and needs to work in bright light, outdoors, etc.
The other, this does well... enough resolution, and color (at least optionally) to support not simply books, but magazine and datasheets. One other missing piece there... I need external memory, like flash cards. Just considering the eBook reader, I have many, many gigabytes of datasheets, organized by project. Some kind of tablet/book reader with long life would be a pretty nice adjunct to a PC in a lab situation for reading datasheets. But I want easy, fast access to all of them, older projects, etc. Memory cards are the best solution for this in general, since you can have all you want. Networks are too slow.. I want my "books" right at hand, all the time. Local device storage, even on the 64GB model, probably too small. Let's see... the work directory on my PC here, just the hardware stuff, has 496,615 files in 23GB. But lots of these are electronics CAD files... they get much larger if I print to PDF.
I'm not suggesting this is substantially better or worse an eBook reader than any of the others... and you get points for not being JUST an eBook reader, but points taken away because of Apple's demands for control of most other things.
Capacitive touch on glass... it's not pressure sensitive. Maybe clever enough reading of the touch panel can tell a hard press from a soft one from your finger, based on the area covered, but that gets pretty sticky, since it would have to be trained to the individual's use to some extent. And this kind of display doesn't work at all with a stylus. Well, maybe a metal one.
ePub is an open format, yes. But it absolutely does support DRM, and there are several DRMs in use for it now. Adobe makes the most popular ePub DRM, which is supported by the Sony eBook readers, among others. Barnes & Nobles' "nook" uses a modified version of the Adobe DRM, so their books only read on the nook and other readers licensed by B&N. These all read non-DRMed ePub books as well, but Apple has not yet said anything about the DRM(s) they're supporting in "iBooks". I don't think anyone would be shocked if they built a varient of "FairPlay" that works within ePub.
But this is Apple.. DRM on apps, DRM on video, etc. Yeah, they let up on music... pretty much at the same time other DRM-free music stores came online to compete. They aren't against DRM, and it's a pretty safe bet their eBooks only read on Apple products.
I want to install Firefox on the iPod Touch, iPhone, and iPad. But I can't. Thus, your first statement is false.
Jailbreak is not really an answer. Apple's walled garden will limit most of the interesting applications they reject from every being fully realized on these devices. Or applications that need to run as daemons, for example, rather than user-facing applications.
That's ok... it simply means that Apple's dominance in the mobile device world will end sooner than it might have otherwise. I'm good with that.
There's a difference. For one, Android is open source. Google is obviously not interested in controlling it at the level of Microsoft. Yes, they are pushing it forward, for now.
Yes, competition brings on lower prices, but it's also been very good for many companies. The smart phone market was overall boring and failing in many areas before Apple sparked it up again. Android is like MS-DOS in the sense of being something anyone can use, but it's not, in the sense of being inferior to Apple's product at the time. Android isn't yet as polished as some aspects of iPhone OS, but it's overall a better OS, better design, and hey... open source.
MS-DOS was pretty horrible, but it did a few useful things -- it allowed multiple companies to enter the computer business, under a common software platform. It let hardware guys innovate like hardware guys, without also having to be OS authors, too. There are big advantages to not allowing one vendor have too much power over you. I like the smart phone idea, but I don't necessarily want to move to a whole new set of applications, new OS, etc. every time I change network providers.
Google can't dominate software in the same way Microsoft did. Microsoft used MS-DOS and later Windows as the club by which to beat hardware companies into submission and get them to take Office, too. Google doesn't have a club, and so far, they don't seem to be interesting in selling apps, but rather making good ones you prefer to use. If they actually win by being better, it's hard to complain too loudly. And it's not like the iPxx devices... if you don't like Apple's browser, get a different phone. Otherwise, you're SOL. That's far, far worse than anything Microsoft inflicts on Windows users, even if the software is currently better (eg, Safari vs. IE).
Better still, why not just buy a device from a company that respects your freedoms?
Yup. I have my office wired with GigE, and a GigE link to another switch in my media room. But I still need wireless for the kids computers, portable devices, etc. No problems... I don't have any neighbors within 802.11n distance, I moved my cordless phone to 5GHz years back, and the only other 2.4GHz source other than the microphone is a video sender so I can TV in the kitchen.
Some years back I was developing 2.4GHz radios, which was fun... but then, you actually want the interferences at times, to see how you hold up against the background (eg, the competition). Taking it to an urban locale, just about any, was a great test... there's just stray RF everyone in a major city. 2.4GHz is just a piece of that. But you're probably still better off at 5GHz if you have the option, particularly for short range, high bandwidth stuff.
Actually, chances are pretty high your neighbor is using the wireless router with all original settings, including the default SSID and password. So just log in to his router and change the settings. Ok, maybe a little different in higher-tech communities, but in most places, there are people setting these things up without knowing what they're doing.
Yeah, the 10.5Mb/s from DVD is a peak for the transport layer. It's rare to encode anything that high, since you're cutting back on time. Cheap consumer grade encoders might use constant bitrate (CBR), but just about anything else will be using variable bitrate encoders. Commercial DVDs are compressed by a compression mastering engineer, who's tweaking compression locally to deliver the best visuals based on the film's length, special features, etc, and still keep within the limits of the medium. They have to keep the video rate low enough to allow for several audio tracks as well, usually one AC-3 (448kb/s) surround in English, one AC-3 (192kb/s) stereo in English, maybe one AC-3 stereo in Spanish and/or French, etc (for the North American market).
You get that with any TDMA protocol: DAMPS and GSM, too. Though not on GSM if you have a 3G voice connection, that's CDMA.