If Honeycomb Andriod tablets are to take a serious dent out of the iPad's marketshare they should be priced cheaper then the iPad. A 3D camera that requires glasses doesn't interest me, just get the specs up to par without the gimmicks, release a WiFi only version, make sure the firmware stays up to date and get the price $70 or more under the lowest end iPad and I'll start getting interested. I picked up an iPad at launch, I'm still not overly thrilled with the product but I don't see any serious competition for it in terms of both specs and price. The $500+ price point for a decent tablet right now is way too much. Also, am I the only one turned off by how much Honeycomb resembles a fake OS you'd see someone use to hack an elevator or something in a mid-90's movie?
As soon as someone releases a reliable, powerful tablet that acts more like a laptop than a big phone... they're in.
The iPad two is going to blow this stuff out of the water. As the PC market showed, consumers won't pay more for better specs (and the iPad 2 will match the specs of all of these).
I've spent the last three days checking out the "latest and greatest" in Android tech at Mobile World Congress. Everything seems like a joke compared to the iPad. Even the new Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 feels like a cheap Chinese knock off you'd buy at one of those stores in New York City that sells grey market electronics and luggage. So no, not enough to beat the iPad. Not by a long shot.
Then how do you feel about the Notion Ink Adam or the Motorola Xoom? Both have the technical specs to compete with the iPad.
Here's the big disconnect between Android devices and iOS devices: An incredible amount of care has been put in to how iOS handles its basic functionality. Scrolling, tapping, all of that works absolutely fantastic on iOS. While some of these new Android devices are undoubtedly an entire magnitude faster than the iPad and iPhone 4 on paper, they feel much slower. Why? Well, it has a lot to do with how Android handles things versus how iOS handles things. In iOS, when you tap an icon, you're immediately shown the splash screen for that app. It might take a few more seconds to load something more then the splash screen, but even on iOS 1.0 with the non-3G iPhone you always had that instant responsiveness of "I tapped an icon, this is loading." On Android, there's none of that. You tap icons, and it isn't really clear if it's even doing anything. Things load a little bit later, but it's these half second lags here and there that Apple has disguised with animations that make Android feel incredibly slow and clunky, even on these new dual core devices. Another example is how scrolling works on iOS vs Android. On an iOS device, it feels like as you're swiping through pages on your home screen you have direct control over those apps moving right or left. On Android, it instead feels like you're making the swiping motion, then as a result of that gesture, the device switches pages of icons. There's this ever so small moment of hesitation that makes the whole UI feel sluggish. It's a result of the fact that the interface of iOS is entirely GPU enhanced, so scrolling is totally smooth, and all of these other things are handled on the GPU level. On Android, the CPU does all the UI rendering. This creates a similar phenomenon to the old OSX/Windows days back when even PowerPC-based Macs which were significantly slower on paper than their PC counterparts felt much faster than Windows. It's hard to explain until you've experienced it. Sure, these new devices kick ass on paper, but here's the thing: No piece of consumer electronics has ever seen mass market success because of a feature list. All of these Android devices will be no different. The real power of the iOS platform is in its software, and it was unbelievable to see Nvidia having an entire booth at this event where the showed the following games on their (current) cutting edge Tegra 2 devices: Shrek Kart, originally released on iOS 10/09 Asphalt 6, originally released on iOS 12/10 Spider Man Total Mayhem, originally released on iOS 8/10 Dungeon Defenders, orginally released 12/10 on iOS Galaxy on Fire 2, 10/10 on iOS and… *drumroll* Angry Birds, originally released in 2009 on iOS All the CPU and GPU power in the world does you no good if you don't have anything to use it on.
But the Android powered Tablet will have to go through the exact same thing the early iPod/iPad did, mainly, a lack of specifically developed apps, but that comes with the territory. I'm sure in a few years the Android app store will be comparable to Apple's -- especially since Google doesn't enforce such strict limits.
You can have all the hardware in the world, but if the software doesn't back it up its useless. And thats where the ipad has the major advantage, an already established app store that has much more variety and quality than the android store. It may be catching up but its best games remain ports of existing iOS games. And the 3D photo idea just seems too gimmicky, especially if glasses are required to view them. I'm still not sold on 3D features, even the glasses free approach of the 3DS. The only way I can see these outdoing the ipad is if it is priced well below the ipad and becomes popular to the point where developers start to develop for this over the ipad, but with the current app store domination I don't see that happening.
The difference is, when Apple was going through all of these initial growing pains, they were the only game in town. Android, WebOS, Win Phone 7, and all the other attempts at an "iOS killer" are years behind. Sure, they might catch up to Apple is now in a couple years, but by that time, how much farther ahead will Apple be? Android's lack of apps has to do largely in part because of how hilariously fractured every level of the Android ecosystem is. That's not something time can fix, as even Android developers and hardware manufacturers will admit this is a serious issue. How open Android is, actually is its greatest flaw.
I don't know what Android device you're using but mine is every bit as responsive to me as my ipod Touch. Though I'm not surprised to see you talking out of your ass when it comes to Android-you do it frequently enough to not be taken seriously.
I've spent the past four days on the floor of Mobile World Congress trying every new Android device there is. Android's sluggish UI isn't a new thing by any means, in fact, the UI not being GPU accelerated is one of the biggest complaints about the whole OS by most and openly admitted by the various hardware manufacturers at MWC. Not only that, but I had a great chat with Andy Ihnatko today who had the same observations of the various "next-gen" Android devices. Please explain how that's talking out of my ass? Although I suppose it's easier to post a snide response than attempt any kind of rebuttal... So, whatever floats your boat.
