RANT - Android Tablets run about 12 months behind current technology

buckwheat.phd

Member
Feb 11, 2012
2
0
Ipad3 is about to hit, and it'll have at least a 2000x1500 display. The little 4.5" android phones now have 1280x800 displays and look fabulous - plus the new ones announced at the show in January. The little 11" Macbook Air (I know, a different monster) boasts a 1400x900 display - and that was 2 years ago. And they'll get a tech refresh in April that will likely come close to doubling that. As my boss told me -- "It's all about the screen, stupid".

Half of the current run Tablets have soldered in batteries, half don't even have an SD slot. Those that do use Micro SDs and not the full SDs - which are 3x in capacity and much cheaper. The file systems are archaic, and most don't even use journaling.

Most tablets are stuck on 1GB of usable OS ram, some only 512M - circa 2007. Most come out of the factory "locked" so we can't even improve them ourselves. Any improvements are laughingly done by some pretty smart anonymous developers that are doing your job - something you should have done on the drawing board in the first place. (Give HTC an A+ for unlocking the majority of their equipment - despite the threats from ATT and Verizon lawyers). Some of the tablets are locked into cell companies contracts, and most make pitiful phones anyway.

Most are stuck on cell phone processors, with cell phone graphics chips, cell phone IO controllers, and cell phone memory controllers. None have SDDrives (Ipad3 will blow us away with those too in April - watch).

Some are narrowed down to one vendors files types for reading, and reluctantly include other reading s/w (pdfs etc) as if someone twisted their arms. And non-native formats are ALWAYS just awful on these machines (Nooks, Fires etc).

None have Linux as a base, although with enough trouble we can do it ourselves sans the majority of broken functionality (drivers don't work, bugs, lags, bluetooth, batteries etc). And most can't run in the little 1GB of RAM put in these devices anyway.

These manufacturers just don't get it. They're all about to get their collective butts kicked with the new Ipad, and they'll sit back and scratch their heads saying "Why, we didn't know you customers wanted hi-res displays - nobody told us that - it's not our fault".

Ok guys, and that includes you, Samsung. And you, Asus. And Sony and LG and HTC and all the others. You're in for the azz-kicking of your life and you were warned. You're stuck in your closed-door 3x5 room in Communist China, and your products are all ball-and-chained. Jobs was slick enough to make the China-US thing work, and it took $billions to pay off the gov'ts and build production facilities. He made it look easy - but that certainly doesn't mean just anybody can copy that same manufacturing model and make it work as well as Apple did.

It'll take you about 6 months to even come to terms with your incompetence, re-design this mess, and production is another few months after after testing. In the meantime, iPad3 will dominate for the majority of 2012. So maybe next Christmas we'll see some decent Android tablets, or at least the announcements.

Problem is, is you're terrified. You're afraid to do anything similar to what Steve did. You're scared you'll be fired next day. You have neither the capital nor the balls, nor the competence to produce decent equipment. So if I were you I'd just give it up until October - that'll give you ~1/2 year of humility to get your act together. In the meantime, please don't put out yet ANOTHER 1024x768 tablet with promises of OS upgrades someday on the shelves with fanfare. Besides, the Samsung Note cellphone makes a much better Tablet than anything you've produced to date
 

Tom T

Senior Member
Feb 18, 2011
1,632
191
Interesting rant, but to point out a few things

1- Asus already has a quad core tablet with a screen resolution higher than the current iPad.
2 - How much ram do you think the iPad has? My netbook only has 1 gig of ram. The beauty of Linux is that it can run on the most meager of hardware.
3- Already announced by Acer, Asus and others are quad core machines with true hd screen resolution and will probably hit around the same time as the iPad 3
4- If Linux is your interest why buy an Android tablet? Just announced is a nice looking Linux tablet with 7" screen for about $280. Dual Usb ports included.
5- Innovation wise Android gives users choice, something Apple can't claim. One example is a quad core 7" tablet by Asus for an amazing $250...lets see Apple top that.
6- Look at Amazon, for $200 they offer a device with most of the functionality of the iPad that most people can actually afford. Rumour has it they are forging ahead with competitive devices that, by all accounts, will be far more affordable than the iPad.

Personnaly I see a very bright future for Android tablets.

Sent from a Gibson using Tapatalk - heavy metal edition
 

Kackalakin

Member
Feb 11, 2012
33
0
Nice to know but Tom T told you the brilliance of android devices.

Sent from my Full Android on S5PV210 using Android Tablet Forum
 

idontknow

Alternate ATF App Tester
Jan 13, 2011
2,102
175
I agree with this part:- the Samsung note cellphone makes a better Tablet than what you have produced so far-:)

Samsung Galaxy Note
 

buckwheat.phd

Member
Feb 11, 2012
2
0
Good insight guys - the point being that once again Apple has whipped the majority of open source into submission. Once again. And it's just as pointless this time as it has been in the past. This didn't HAVE to happen. The show in Jan should have be way ahead of Apple's power curve and beat them at their own game. That was the Android opportunity. Instead, we got things like a Razr with a bigger battery, and a boatload of maybe type announcements.


Announcements like OS upgrades - the Achilles heel of Android offerings. "Buy this now and we promise to upgrade it next week - we promise - ok"? Sign here.


Somebody mentioned on another forum that some decent quads were supposed to hit the streets around iPad3 time, I sure hope so. But my point is that now Android may be WAY behind, quad, duos, 8x or even matrixed memory. It's hard enough competing with Apple daily, much less when the judges let the Apple horses out of the gate 4 months ahead of all the rest.


A Quad? Well, cool. But what kind of quad? How about Intel? How about RISC? How about 6 or 7A batteries? How about USB3? How about flexible screens? How about firewire or even a fiber standard? But our bragging points over the holidays were these dockable semi-keyboard dual unit thingies multi-part gadgets, sigh.


Actually my point was despite Apple's reign on this whole market we Androiders' have got the best people. We've got the best engineers. The best scientists. We've got the best coders. But it's aggravating that whenever we get a head of steam, we kick our feet on the table, light up a cigar and sure enough - 6 months later Apple sneaks in the back door and forecloses on us. With all the legal fanfare and international press due such an event. These little Androids are just too good to be tossed under the bus because of no-vision like this.


You know, now that we're playing around way up in the jetstream with the big boys, we're now flying into a 200kt headwind here. Not that Apple is already enough of a headache. But NOW we've got the dam cellphone companies so tangled in greed that some feel we may as well just land till the wind dies down. Oh boy, we've got LTE with 2GB caps, with entire rooms full of cellphone company staffers (mostly in India) writing code to catch us busting limits. It's nuts.


In any event, let's don't strut around thinking that since we Android-ers are much more realistic and even sharper than the iPod crowd, that we've naturally got the lead. We don't. Blame it on Google for not policing Android maybe. Or maybe the platforms. Or the manufactures' them selves. Blame isn't the point - the point is they're about to kick our azzes again regardless of fault
 

gurgle

Super Moderator
Staff member
Aug 6, 2010
1,463
131
I find your Android Rant about as disjointed as your argument. I would like to disassemble your points, but would only incur more invective. You talk a good game but you do not seem to understand chipset and technology. The ARM is a RISC. Intel is a different design. What I fail to grasp is whether you are just wanting to use this to promote an IPAD model or to denigrate the Android architecture. Tom T covers most of my points and I would like to ask you which model you see with these advance features anywhere on any system or platform except on some Alpha demo at CES or similar.
Bottom line, Android has gone from a basic version to the sophistication of ICS in a 18 month window. Unless you consider some of the incremental changes, iOS5 is only marginally different than iOS4 which was a dramatic difference from iOS3 which was a doubles time window to Android.
 

Tom T

Senior Member
Feb 18, 2011
1,632
191
I agree with this part:- the Samsung note cellphone makes a better Tablet than what you have produced so far-:)

Samsung Galaxy Note

I'm sure that is a completely unbiased evaluation :)

Sent from my GT-P6210 using Android Tablet Forum
 
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