You better be. Here's the thing:
Most of us can not afford to pay 500 dollars for a toy. But we can afford to pay 199. That's why the Fire outsold the iPad over Christmas. Granted, Apple's business model doesn't require market share. You could say the very brief smartphone and current tablet market domination were just gravy for them. But already, Android has taken 40 percent of the world tablet market in less than six months with some admittedly clumsy products. Understand that even smartphones have only penetrated 25 percent of the world market, and tablets barely 5 percent (15 percent in the US), so the rest of us that can afford 199 dollars will find amazing highly polished tablets like the Nexus 7 very attractive. Joe Sixpack (most of us) can't justify or afford an iPad, but he can justify 199 bucks. He just needed a big enough name behind it to justify it. Amazon kicked the door open first. Now the 199 dollar Nexus 7 kicks open that door even further. Nobody was taking the glut of 99 dollar tablets from China very seriously. But now that a company as universally respected as Google, especially during Apple's current legal woes, has created an amazing high end alternative to the iPad at a 199 dollar price point, they will easily sell a whole lot of tablets. Probably more than enough to push the global market share of Android tablets well over 50 percent. This opens the door for someone else to undercut Google (Probably Amazon if they are smart) with an even less expensive Jellybean tablet with a "this is almost as good as the google tablet, but cheaper yet" justification. And it's going to happen. Just like it did with smartphones. So are you ready for the Android Tablet world? It will mean increased attention to Android as developers jump ship for the Android easy money. We've already seen an amazing increase in app development and quality as Android took the smartphone market. Get ready to watch Google and Amazon fight against each other, soar past Apple, and turn the entire market in their direction.
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Are you prepared for the Android Tablet world?
I own or have owned a bunch of tablets: an original and third-generation iPad, as well as an original Galaxy Tab (stuck on Android 2.2 until this week when I installed a 4.0-based Cyanogenmod on it) Nook Color (which I eventually put a 2.3-based version of Cyanogenmod on), a Kindle Fire (rooted to install apps from the Play Store but otherwise untouched), and an HP TouchPad with a 4.0-based Cyanogenmod.
Frankly, I've been really disappointed with the Android tablets. My favorites are the Cyanogenmod TouchPad and the Kindle Fire, and the basic Google ICS experience on the 10.1-inch TouchPad might even be in the same league as the base OS experience on the original iPad. But the new iPad blows them all away in speed/responsiveness, not to mention the retina screen, and once you start to install third-party software, the Android experience quickly degenerates whereas there's much more high-quality software available on iOS. I've sampled a lot of software — my iTunes library has about 900 iOS apps in it and between the Android and Google app stores my Android collection stands at around 215 apps. Crap is crap on either platform, and there's plenty of it. But good iOS apps are really, really good, and there simply doesn't seem to be a wealth of high-quality apps with decent attention to detail available on Android, particularly for tablets.
I'm also generally disappointed with seven-inch tablets as a form factor. The screen just isn't big enough; it's awkward to read anything with layout (especially on the cruddy 1024x600 resolution) and both the blown-up phone layouts and the shrunken-down tablet layouts are awkward. Video looks okay if you hold the seven-incher in your hand, so it's nice for watching YouTube videos, but set it on a desk or the coffee table and it's just too small. (1024x600 sucks for video but I'm not holding that against the form factor.)
Finally I'm not convinced that being “the cheap tablet” is going to promote a healthy ecosystem. Developers that I know and that I follow seem to generally share the opinion that iOS users will pay for apps but Android users won't; so the apps they make for Android get less effort and add less value to the platform. I don't see how Google bootstraps their way out of this quality disparity with cheap tablets.
tl;dr: I'm not sure a flood of cheap Android tablets is going to save it from being a cesspool of ads, malware and low-quality apps, but maybe I'll gamble again on the rumored Nexus 10.
Frankly, I've been really disappointed with the Android tablets. My favorites are the Cyanogenmod TouchPad and the Kindle Fire, and the basic Google ICS experience on the 10.1-inch TouchPad might even be in the same league as the base OS experience on the original iPad. But the new iPad blows them all away in speed/responsiveness, not to mention the retina screen, and once you start to install third-party software, the Android experience quickly degenerates whereas there's much more high-quality software available on iOS. I've sampled a lot of software — my iTunes library has about 900 iOS apps in it and between the Android and Google app stores my Android collection stands at around 215 apps. Crap is crap on either platform, and there's plenty of it. But good iOS apps are really, really good, and there simply doesn't seem to be a wealth of high-quality apps with decent attention to detail available on Android, particularly for tablets.
I'm also generally disappointed with seven-inch tablets as a form factor. The screen just isn't big enough; it's awkward to read anything with layout (especially on the cruddy 1024x600 resolution) and both the blown-up phone layouts and the shrunken-down tablet layouts are awkward. Video looks okay if you hold the seven-incher in your hand, so it's nice for watching YouTube videos, but set it on a desk or the coffee table and it's just too small. (1024x600 sucks for video but I'm not holding that against the form factor.)
Finally I'm not convinced that being “the cheap tablet” is going to promote a healthy ecosystem. Developers that I know and that I follow seem to generally share the opinion that iOS users will pay for apps but Android users won't; so the apps they make for Android get less effort and add less value to the platform. I don't see how Google bootstraps their way out of this quality disparity with cheap tablets.
tl;dr: I'm not sure a flood of cheap Android tablets is going to save it from being a cesspool of ads, malware and low-quality apps, but maybe I'll gamble again on the rumored Nexus 10.
See, I had the exact opposite experience. Every time I want something special for the New iPad, it's iPhone only, and it looks horrible with the 2x button on the New iPad, and usually doesn't support anything but portrait mode. HIGHLY annoying. That and I had serious issues finding quality apps for things like ssh, remote desktop, web browsing (is there a single decent browser on iOS?) and I hate the black bars and dumb 4:3 form factor. It turns the iPad into a 7" tablet when you watch video, which I do a lot. Games are also a lot better on Android. It's annoying how much worse high end games like the Need for Speed games, or any of the nvidia games look on the iPad. That, and I didn't really see much much difference between my Transformer Prime (1280x800) and the New iPad from more than 16 inches away, or the normal viewing distance, other than the Prime is bright as hell outside, and the iPad is useless. I guess it boils down to usage and workflow. The iPad feels like more of a toy, where the Prime is a true desktop replacement. Factor in the safari crashes, and the graphics slowdowns on the iPad when you play a game that's both graphics and CPU intensive (Bloons TD4 will lock it up solid) and the 100 dollars you have to spend on browsers for flash, and file managers that connect to cloud storage, and the general lack of quality in apps that aren't free that would be on Android, and I really don't understand how anybody could prefer the iPad at all.
This is fascinating, because it just sounds like we're in different worlds here. The idea that the iPad is a toy just seems absurd; it's a serious machine all around for me. The Android Browser app is a joke, though Chrome for Android is better. I love 4:3 for almost everything I do on the device, and don't mind it for video (and I really dislike the widescreen format of the other devices — it's fine for video but it's super awkward for everything else, especially if the keyboard's up (when portrait becomes useless)). The iPad is the only one of my tablets that's been useful outside (I'm in Washington though, so it's usually overcast :-). Mobile Safari is the most stable browser I've ever used (iCab is my backup for when I want to download files or have a second session open with different cookies). I use Panic's Prompt for SSH, LogMeIn Ignition for personal remote desktop and Wyse PocketCloud for RDP/VNC to servers.
I can't necessarily judge games because most of my Android tablets have been either hideously slow (un-modded Nook Color & Galaxy Tab) or may well have had graphics driver issues (all the Cyanogenmod versions). But my son plays Bloons TD4 a lot on my iPad and has never locked it up. A few games I've tried on the Kindle Fire (my only decently performing Android tablet with the stock OS) as well as on the iPad — Temple Run, Broken Sword Director's Cut, and Dungeon Defenders Second Wave — have had big responsiveness problems on the KF but not the iPad.
Maybe the Prime really is that much better than the KF, Nook & Galaxy Tab. Maybe we just have different ideas of what work and toy mean, or maybe I just haven't found the high-quality Android apps (it's not for lack of trying, though). Your perspective is definitely interesting to hear.
I can't necessarily judge games because most of my Android tablets have been either hideously slow (un-modded Nook Color & Galaxy Tab) or may well have had graphics driver issues (all the Cyanogenmod versions). But my son plays Bloons TD4 a lot on my iPad and has never locked it up. A few games I've tried on the Kindle Fire (my only decently performing Android tablet with the stock OS) as well as on the iPad — Temple Run, Broken Sword Director's Cut, and Dungeon Defenders Second Wave — have had big responsiveness problems on the KF but not the iPad.
Maybe the Prime really is that much better than the KF, Nook & Galaxy Tab. Maybe we just have different ideas of what work and toy mean, or maybe I just haven't found the high-quality Android apps (it's not for lack of trying, though). Your perspective is definitely interesting to hear.
To give you an idea, I frequently have 20 apps open in the background on my Prime (18 at the moment with a glance). Cant do that on an iPad. The lack of true multitasking kills it already. I guess I'm just used to being able to view an entire document in portrait mode while having a keyboard up. I hate that I can't do that on the iPad. The workflow is just so much slower. I find it hard to believe you haven't had a safari crash. I've had it crash on this site more than a few times. RDC apps are a huge deal to me because I use them a lot, along with ssh apps. It's annoying as hell to pay what you have to pay for the top rated ssh and rdc apps to only have them become flaky when you have more than a few sessions open. I think the iPad is fine if you are only doing a few things at a time, but the second you start getting into serious app switching it becomes a slow unstable dog. And yeah, you are talking worlds of difference between a 4 core processor and 12 core graphics processor over the iPad. It's almost not a fair comparison. Multitasking (my biggest beef) is a lot easier with that many cores. It's just highly annoying that even as a toy tablet, which is what it's supposed to be, watching video is worse, browsing the web is worse, and you can't stream anything. You are pretty much locked into iTunes for content, which is intolerably slow. So you end up spending so much money to own a mac (because it doesn't play nice with windows) and paying something for every little thing (because if you don't use iTunes, getting content is a chore of the highest order) and you still don't have a decent web browser. I got used to using three. Puffin for flash based work utilities (which is ungodly slow but faster than any other options) Atomic (so you can lie to corporate pages that want IE and have them actually work) and Safari for everything else, but it crashes on heavily graphical pages like Cnet for example, which is mildly ironic because they are over the top apple zealots. It's just so annoying compared to a high end Android tablet experience where Chrome and the stock browser handle anything, I don't have to pay but 3 bucks to have a perfect ssh and RDC experience, multitasking is real and actually works, I can throw 64G of tv shows on an sdcard, label it "Stargate SG1", and keep it in a pocket for when I'm bored, and have no problem playing any of them, and I can connect to my windows shares (93 percent of us own Windows machines) at home and stream video for free with ES File Manager, while I get to pay 20 bucks for a file manager that SUPPOSEDLY will mount smb shares, find out it does not in fact mount them but wants to download everything first, and then I can't get a refund. Seriously. The iPad just doesn't seem to actually be good at anything it's supposed to be good at. Factor in it's heavy, has a strange form factor, no expandable storage, is thick, and even things that don't work cost money, and the constant workarounds you have to do if you won't jailbreak the thing (I don't even root my android tablets) and it feels more like mucking around with a linux laptop than actually enjoying some pleasing experience if you don't want to dump 900 bucks into their app store. I guess I'm saying if time and money have no value to you, then the iPad is probably pretty awesome. Those things matter to most of us.
Entire document in portrait mode with keyboard: I don't buy this as an argument for seven-inch tablets, where you're looking at, what, 4.5-5 inches? And even on 10.1-inch 1280x800 tablets, there are so many fewer pixels than on the iPad that I don't see these zoomed-out views as useful unless your document uses large font sizes exclusively. (Personally, if working on long documents I'm using a Bluetooth keyboard so I can still see full pages on the iPad.)
20 apps in the background sounds great and all, but what are the end-user benefits to it that you don't get on the iPad? Give me examples of how multitasking helps you, rather than just allowing apps to drain your battery.
Safari: I didn't say it never crashes, I said it's the most stable browser I've ever used. It crashes much less than Chrome or Firefox on Mac or Windows; and when it does crash it's relatively graceful about it (goes to the homescreen, I restart it and my tabs reopen and I move on). For me, that's a once-a-month-or-so experience, which like I said is far better than any other browser at my disposal.
My SSH and remote desktop apps keep up with me just fine. _I'd_ get flaky if I had “more than a few” connections open, but I can flip between 4-5 systems with no complaints (I've never tried for more than that).
I play non-iTunes video from my PCs or FreeNAS box with Air Video ($3) and use Windows shares with FileBrowser ($5). These were the first apps I tried for these purposes a long, long time ago, and they've worked great.
There's only so much one can say in response to all your 'toy' comments, but I'll just say that Pages and Numbers, OmniOutliner and OmniGraffle, and Textastic, to name a few, are not tools that feel limiting. Show me examples from the Android app world with similar levels of functionality and polish.
20 apps in the background sounds great and all, but what are the end-user benefits to it that you don't get on the iPad? Give me examples of how multitasking helps you, rather than just allowing apps to drain your battery.
Safari: I didn't say it never crashes, I said it's the most stable browser I've ever used. It crashes much less than Chrome or Firefox on Mac or Windows; and when it does crash it's relatively graceful about it (goes to the homescreen, I restart it and my tabs reopen and I move on). For me, that's a once-a-month-or-so experience, which like I said is far better than any other browser at my disposal.
My SSH and remote desktop apps keep up with me just fine. _I'd_ get flaky if I had “more than a few” connections open, but I can flip between 4-5 systems with no complaints (I've never tried for more than that).
I play non-iTunes video from my PCs or FreeNAS box with Air Video ($3) and use Windows shares with FileBrowser ($5). These were the first apps I tried for these purposes a long, long time ago, and they've worked great.
There's only so much one can say in response to all your 'toy' comments, but I'll just say that Pages and Numbers, OmniOutliner and OmniGraffle, and Textastic, to name a few, are not tools that feel limiting. Show me examples from the Android app world with similar levels of functionality and polish.
Documents work perfectly fine on 1280x800. It's only 150ppi on a Prime, and just as crisp on a 200ppi screen on a 7" tablet. Looks like you fell for marketing rhetoric. 20 apps in the background means it can function as a real desktop replacement. That's what makes the iPad a toy, mostly meant for games and media rather than actually getting things done. The benefits of multitasking are switching between apps to do things like look up things or cut and paste. Cut and paste something that frequently breaks for no reason on the iPad I've noticed.
Chrome has been an order of magnitude more stable than any other browser. You don't have to take my word for it. That's probably why it's the number one browser in the world, and the number one download on the iOS market right now for free apps.
Filebrowser does not truly mount the partitions. You have to still download (cache) entire files to use them. Try streaming a movie.
Your unique set of tools can be matched by a unique set of tools I use that either suck or are missing on the iPad. True geeks develop for Android rather than artsy types, so more geeklike stuff is available for me. If the iPad serves you well, that's awesome. I find it grossly deficient for it's intended purpose, and useless as a desktop replacement.
Chrome has been an order of magnitude more stable than any other browser. You don't have to take my word for it. That's probably why it's the number one browser in the world, and the number one download on the iOS market right now for free apps.
Filebrowser does not truly mount the partitions. You have to still download (cache) entire files to use them. Try streaming a movie.
Your unique set of tools can be matched by a unique set of tools I use that either suck or are missing on the iPad. True geeks develop for Android rather than artsy types, so more geeklike stuff is available for me. If the iPad serves you well, that's awesome. I find it grossly deficient for it's intended purpose, and useless as a desktop replacement.
Yeah, I downloaded Chrome for iOS too, and it crashes even more than Chrome for Windows, Mac or Android; I assume Google will fix that over the next few releases since their iOS software tends to launch weak and improve dramatically (see Gmail, Earth). On the desktop and Android, I actually like Chrome despite the crashiness, but “more stable than Mobile Safari” it is not.
I just tried streaming a movie from ES File Explorer (while composing my last reply). It handed off to ES Media Player which downloaded 75% of the file (no streaming) and then crashed. Maybe if I transcode for it it would work better, but then how is that any different than iTunes?
I named my unique tools. Name yours. Tell me about these geek apps that are better on Android. History says I'll try them out, because this stuff really does interest me and I really do want to give Android a fair shake.
But whatever, I'm just an artsy false-geek who falls for everything anyone markets to me and makes my living playing with toys.
I just tried streaming a movie from ES File Explorer (while composing my last reply). It handed off to ES Media Player which downloaded 75% of the file (no streaming) and then crashed. Maybe if I transcode for it it would work better, but then how is that any different than iTunes?
I named my unique tools. Name yours. Tell me about these geek apps that are better on Android. History says I'll try them out, because this stuff really does interest me and I really do want to give Android a fair shake.
But whatever, I'm just an artsy false-geek who falls for everything anyone markets to me and makes my living playing with toys.
They were stuck using the buggy Safari underpinnings, so if you do a test like trying to zoom on a google images search result for example, it will crash just like Safari. It's a real shame too because the Chrome underpinnings are a lot more advanced and stable webkit than Safari.
For what it's worth, I just tried zooming a Google Images search result and flipping through several images in both Mobile Safari and Chrome/iOS on my iPad, and it was fine, so I'm not clear on what that example's about.
In my usage so far, Chrome on iOS crashes a lot, and it's the only browser on my device that does so. If Apple's WebKit were to blame, then wouldn't those crashes also affect Safari, Sleipnir and iCab?
That said, I really do think this is an aberration, as like I said earlier, Google's other iOS apps have tended to launch buggy as hell but get fixed relatively quickly. That was certainly the case for Gmail and Earth.
In my usage so far, Chrome on iOS crashes a lot, and it's the only browser on my device that does so. If Apple's WebKit were to blame, then wouldn't those crashes also affect Safari, Sleipnir and iCab?
That said, I really do think this is an aberration, as like I said earlier, Google's other iOS apps have tended to launch buggy as hell but get fixed relatively quickly. That was certainly the case for Gmail and Earth.
That defies logic though. Chrome on iOS is Safari. It's basically just reskinned. So if it's crashing a lot, that would make sense because safari crashes a lot. You simply have to be imagining safari is more stable because right now, chrome and safari are essentially the exact same thing on iOS.
Lol. That only applies if it's the rendering engine that's crashing. In fact it hasn't mostly been crashing while rendering a page, it's crashing in the Omnibar or the bookmarks or when opening or closing tabs. Must be my imagination, though.
What I mean is this: if I can successfully enter a URL or pick a bookmark and start loading a page, Chrome/iOS isn't crashing on me. I can zoom, scroll, read pages, follow links, and it's been fine. When it's been crashing is when I am interacting with Chrome's own UI elements: when adding a tab or closing a tab, when typing into the Omnibar, or when trying to navigate bookmarks or select a tab from another device.
(And how is blaming Chrome for Chrome's crashes magical debugging ESP but blaming Safari for them is not? Neither one of us knows whose line of code is hitting an exception and bailing.)
(And how is blaming Chrome for Chrome's crashes magical debugging ESP but blaming Safari for them is not? Neither one of us knows whose line of code is hitting an exception and bailing.)
Oh, as for Apps, you won't find a ES File Manager for free you can use to connect to windows shares. You won't find a GrooveIP for making free phonecalls. You'll find a knockoff that wants to charge a subscription model. You won't find reliable flash. You'll find Puffin. You won't find anything like anything for torrents, or a proper nzb client or interface to sabnzbd+. You won't find BTEP (better terminal emulator pro). Nothing as good as Connectbot or VX Connectbot. No RDC client anywhere close to as good as Xtralogic or Remote RDP. You won't be able to do anything but support VNC with Splashtop, which is buggy as hell. It's a shame because it's actually good on Android and supports VNC and RDC. And the worst part is the things you do find will still cost money, and still be buggy just like File Manager, Splashtop, etc. Logmein is great, but I can't install that on a corporate server as approved software. It's the same story over and over with the iPad when you try to do important things. It's either buggy as hell, or you have to jump through ten hoops converting things to get them to fit the Apple paradigm. Very closed ecosystem. Deny it. If you got something in return, like say more stability, that would be great but iOS is buggier than Android and has been for quite some time.
www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2012/02/02/does-io...
www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2012/02/02/does-io...
I don't care about Flash, but just to follow up on it, Flash is the app whose Google Play listing reads like this: “** NOTE: FLASH PLAYER IS NO LONGER BEING UPDATED FOR NEW DEVICECONFIGURATIONS. FLASH PLAYER WILL NOT BE SUPPORTED ON ANY ANDROID VERSION BEYOND ANDROID 4.0.x *** While Flash Player remains on Google Play for installation on Android devices that are certified by the manufacturer, installing Flash Player on an uncertified device may result in unexpected behavior and can potentially destabilize your device.” Yup, that's going to power the new world of Android tablets into the future, sure.
Torrents and sabnzbd? Okay, so when you say Android is better for “important things,” you mean it's better for pirating stuff.
There are lots of VNC clients on iOS, and you're right, Splashtop is iffy (in my experience some releases are stable and some aren't). But Wyse PocketCloud works great for VNC and RDP.
I have no experience with BTEP, Connectbot or Xtralogic, but I'll take a look. Thanks for the pointers.
Torrents and sabnzbd? Okay, so when you say Android is better for “important things,” you mean it's better for pirating stuff.
There are lots of VNC clients on iOS, and you're right, Splashtop is iffy (in my experience some releases are stable and some aren't). But Wyse PocketCloud works great for VNC and RDP.
I have no experience with BTEP, Connectbot or Xtralogic, but I'll take a look. Thanks for the pointers.
They keep saying "Flash is going away" but there are 175 million sites that support it, and they keep updating the flash client in the market. My guess is it will be around a little while longer until they replace that missing 20 percent of the technology that HTML5 and WebGL simply can't do yet. "Flash is going" but even a heavily apple biased site like Cnet is riddled with it.
X-rays via Usenet? That one's new to me. How that work for HIPAA compliance?
Yup I am ready. My nexus 7 will be my fourth android tablet, yet the first 3 haven't been all rainbows and joy. My favourite one I had up to this point is the original Galaxy Tab (unfortunately running 2.2 Froyo)
I still believe that Google is moving in the right direction, and the undercutting of the cost to an iPad is the best strategy for them. With more people buying android devices, the Google Play App and Content markets will grow as well.
The thing Google really needs to work on is going global here. Apple has been bringing out the iPad in many countries, and has a unified functionality across them. Google limits features in countries that are not the USA (heck the Nexus Q is ONLY in America at this point) and if they can achieve this, they have a really bright future.
I still believe that Google is moving in the right direction, and the undercutting of the cost to an iPad is the best strategy for them. With more people buying android devices, the Google Play App and Content markets will grow as well.
The thing Google really needs to work on is going global here. Apple has been bringing out the iPad in many countries, and has a unified functionality across them. Google limits features in countries that are not the USA (heck the Nexus Q is ONLY in America at this point) and if they can achieve this, they have a really bright future.
I completely agree. They need to expand global. Still, considering how gimped the global offerings have been they still managed to take 40 percent of the global market in record time. Google has been quiet about the initial nexus 7 sales numbers. I know so many people getting one. I'm betting it's going to be a stupidly large number. My first "real" android tablet was the Transformer Prime running 4.0.3, and I'm stupidly impressed. It completely replaced my desktop and laptop. I'm using it now actually. I'm so pleased with it I may not bother with the TF700T. I HAD to get the first Nexus tablet though after playing with the dev one. It's just so damn smooth and impressive. I'm getting anxious waiting for my 16G to get here. I tried to bribe the white dev nexy off my google friend, and he said "500 bucks" and I bulked. For one thing I'm rough on everything I own, so I knew I'd scratch it, and it would be twice as annoying considering it's a limited run item. That, and I wanted to force myself to be patient and get the Nexus 7. That being said, I'm so happy I went with the Transformer Prime. Since Asus makes the Nexus 7, and the hardware is so similar to the Prime, I imagine I won't be waiting very long for a Jellybean update!
It will all come down to marketing more than price point. I say this because for the last 5+ years Apple products have always been sold at a premium price over other competing devices with better internals. Yet they continue to sell so well because Apple markets them so well and so aggressively to get people to think "I need this device". The main reason the Fire and Nook have done so much better than other tablets is marketing. Amazon and B&N have been able to do what Apple does and show people how the devices fit into their life. I think the Fire also did so well because not only price but ecosystem. The Kindle sells because Kindle has become synonymous with e-books much like iPod did with MP3. Amazon was fully aware of this so when the Fire was released Amazon already knew they'd have people ready to buy it but they just needed to show why it was better than cheaper/similarly priced Kindles and they could with everything else they have going on.
It remains to be seen how Google is going to handle marketing the Nexus 7 and that will be a big determining factor in how well it does. They need to really show off why the Nexus is a great device to pick up and really push their entire ecosystem. A lot of consumers probably don't realize Google offers movies, books and music services now so that really needs a good focus. They also need to really focus on ease of use and make it seem like Android is not an intimidating OS from a usability standpoint; I'm not saying it's hard to use but compared to the look and feel of iOS it's very different which can turn people off.
Just throwing one last thing out there: I think this is less about Android vs iPad and more about Google vs Amazon vs Barnes & Noble.
tl;dr - Marketing matters more than the price in the long run and Google/Android has never been entirely good at this.
It remains to be seen how Google is going to handle marketing the Nexus 7 and that will be a big determining factor in how well it does. They need to really show off why the Nexus is a great device to pick up and really push their entire ecosystem. A lot of consumers probably don't realize Google offers movies, books and music services now so that really needs a good focus. They also need to really focus on ease of use and make it seem like Android is not an intimidating OS from a usability standpoint; I'm not saying it's hard to use but compared to the look and feel of iOS it's very different which can turn people off.
Just throwing one last thing out there: I think this is less about Android vs iPad and more about Google vs Amazon vs Barnes & Noble.
tl;dr - Marketing matters more than the price in the long run and Google/Android has never been entirely good at this.
Do you have a source for that 40% claim? IDC on 3 May 2012 says Apple's share is 68.2% — and: “Amazon, which stormed into the market in 4Q11 to grab second place with 16.8% of the market on shipment of 4.8 million units, saw its share decline significantly in the first quarter to just over 4%, falling to third place as a result.”
I don't think it's clear that customers disappointed in the holiday season's cheap Android tablets are going to fall for this year's crop of cheap Android tablets. Price point matters and it will sustain a category for a time, but it's not everything; see also netbooks.
I don't think it's clear that customers disappointed in the holiday season's cheap Android tablets are going to fall for this year's crop of cheap Android tablets. Price point matters and it will sustain a category for a time, but it's not everything; see also netbooks.
What I see when I Google it is that Android may (or may not) have hit 40% over the holiday quarter, but nosedived in 1Q2012.
How many of those tablets were Amazon or Barnes & Noble? I ask this because despite it being an Android OS underneath I think they offer completely different experiences to the end user than a Prime, Tab or the Nexus 7. Thus my comment of it being less Android vs iPad and more Google vs Amazon.
It doesn't quite work that way. The competition between the two will allow them to surpass the iPad together since the market is so small. That's why even the disappointing New iPad sales were able to take a chunk of the market back. Most of us simply can't afford a tablet. 93 percent of us are still using windows machines for everything.
That's twice you've called third-gen iPad sales “disappointing.” Really? 12 million units in 1Q12, up 151 percent year-over-year, and taking back that market share that Android eroded in 4Q12. That's disappointing? What exactly were your expectations?
What's amusing to me is you keep referring to "disappointing New iPad sales" but keep implying that I need to view all Android tablets as one in the terms of gain and sales. By that logic it shouldn't matter how well the iPad 3rd gen sold, what matters is total iPad sales.
That was written three days after the product launched. Their evidence for “disappointing sales” was that some Apple Stores didn't run out of product on launch day. Not convinced.
I just had it stuck in my head. I never see anybody with the new ipad. It's always the 2. And honestly? I like the iPad2 a lot more. I've considered trading for one. The 3 just doesn't seem powerful enough for the screen. I collect gadgets, but I won't keep one that's disappointing. I have about 300 bucks in the iOS ecosystem I'm not using at the moment while the new pad sits there. So it's either wait for them to put a proper processor in a new new ipad, or get the 2. The Bloons TD4 bug at around level 100 that locks it up solid? That never happened on the ipad2.
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