To be honest, all of the Android tablets I've seen so far have been underwhelming (and I'm holding out for a decent one). The Galaxy Tab isn't too bad, but it's small and overpriced. The best one I've seen is the Archos 101, and that still needs work.
I'm hoping that next year sees some decent contenders.
The reason that Android tablets don't seem to be any good is that Google never intended Android to run on tablets at all. Chrome OS is the netbook and tablet OS, while Android is the phone OS.
Android's openness lets anyone put it anywhere so of course we'll see Android tablets, especially given that Chrome OS isn't officially out yet (this month, though, right?)
Anyway, yeah, next year should have a lot of Google-related free software tablets, either Chrome OS or Android.
Have you actually used it? I tried it out yesterday in Google DevFest, and it's an incredibly nifty device. The touch responsiveness is amazing and the form factor is super comfortable.
Surely this surprises no one. The tablet market was dead for years until Apple showed us all how beautiful a tablet appliance could be. It's about to get very competitive and it will play out just like smartphones. Apple blew everyone away with the iPhone, but two years later the cloners had finally honed their game and now Apple is watching themselves get nudged towards the luxury niche they're so comfortable with.
It happened with their computers. It's happening with phones. And it will happen with tablets.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. Being an industry trend setter and purveyor of luxury computing appliances is an enviable enough existence.
Aside from a robust but small market in PMPs (by companies like Archos), the "tablet" market is but an offshot of the netbook market: People just wanted to browse the web and consume media, and the iPad is Apple's entrant into that realm.
The Netbook market was all the rage until Apple decided to essentially hop on that bandwagon. Netbooks have suffered because the iPad is a decent competitor and brings some of the advantages of being a much lighter internet appliance of the sort that Andreeson really dreamed of.
Heck, you could even say that the iPad was a me-too entrant in the eReader market. While this has been largely forgotten, when the iPad was introduced the comparative focus, including by Apple, was against products like the Kindle and the Nook.
Apple blew everyone away with the iPhone, but two years later the cloners had finally honed their game and now Apple is watching themselves get nudged towards the luxury niche they're so comfortable with.
Luxury? Really?
People with McJobs have iPhones. It isn't a luxury item. Apple sells products at or below the low price end in virtually every market they touch.
They are the perfect definition of a mass-market, consumer product company.
In any case, after leveraging the huge ecosystem of iPod tie-ins and mindspace, Apple managed some good inroads into a quickly evolving smartphone market (which, it should be noted, they feared would take away from their MP3 player market). They got some good momentum, but now they're seeing vigorous competition.
Tablet market: 2% iPad, .5% everyone else, 97.5% people who will buy a tablet but haven't bought one yet. I'm not trying to be sarcastic, I really do think this is the better way to think about the market right now. A market of one credible contender is not enough to draw conclusions about what will happen when there are more. (Android will soon be credible but I'm not sure it's there yet.)
that's not much better... 2% still means upwards of 6m devices out there (assuming 300m people in the US), which isn't insignificant. Maybe it's small compared to, say, Apple's iPhone+iPod market, but I think it's fair to say that they're 'off to the races' and there's a good amount of upside opportunity to be had.
When are we going to acknowledge that distinctions like "tablet" are anachronistic in the first place?
It's all about the software platform. I'm sure the folks at Google make little philosophical distinction between the Android "tablet" software and the Android "mobile" software, for instance. Nor does Apple call its iPad OS a totally different name than it calls its iPhone OS. Other than some minor cosmetic differences, the code is 99.9% the same.
Tracking share in the "tablet" market is going to seem very silly in a few years.
Mobile devices are tied quite tightly to carriers (at least in the US). Tablets are not. I think that's probably enough of a distinction to warrant tracking them as separate markets.
Fair point, though I wonder whether those dynamics will shift in the coming years -- either for or against the carriers. What's funny is that I could see the balance of power going in either direction in the US. Either way, it'll be fascinating to watch.
Yes, you could put a resistive and a capacitive touchscreen one on top of the other. (It would have to be capacitive on the top, resistive underneath.) But although that would give you the best of both worlds in terms of capabilities, it would be the worst of both worlds in other respects.
Either sort of touchscreen has two layers of a transparent conductor. A resistive touchscreen has two "solid" layers on separate pieces of glass or plastic, with spacers between the two so they don't come into contact unless pushed. Pushing down on it with a stylus brings the two layers into contact. How does this suck? Let me count the ways. 1. Lots of layers. ITO isn't perfectly transparent, and glass/air interfaces are always going to reflect a bit even with anti-reflective coatings. So you lose transparency (by different amounts at different wavelengths too, so either you get a wrong colour balance or you lose more brightness to fix that up) and get more reflections. 2. Poor robustness. Your front sheet of glass or plastic has to be thin enough to flex, and you're flexing it all the time. That's not great. The ITO layer on the front sheet is also flexing, and that's even worse because you want it to be thin (for optical performance) but the thinner it is the more readily it cracks. 3. Thickness. Multiple layers of glass or plastic, physical spacers in between, ugh.
Adding a capacitive sensor to this will make the optical quality even worse because you'll need more ITO layers. What's more, the capacitive sensor will have to be on the top (I think trying to do capacitive sensing through the conductive layers of a resistive sensor is a non-starter), which means those ITO layers are also flexing when you push on them, for extra-bad robustness. And you'll probably need to space them away from the resistive sensor underneath a bit, making the sensor assembly even thicker, though perhaps there are ways around that.
Perhaps you could combine one layer of the capacitive sensor with one layer of the resistive one, but that seems tricky. A typical capacitive touchscreen uses two layers of patterned conductors, with lots of gaps in (so much so that although there are two layers, over most of the display only one is present, at least in the designs I know about -- it's been a few years since I was in the business, so technology may have moved on). A typical resistive touchscreen uses two solid layers, and putting gaps in them will make it completely fail to work. I wouldn't want to rule out the possibility of combining them, but it would be tricky.
Well. Actually, there's another design of capacitive touchscreen which uses a single solid conducting layer a bit like one layer of a resistive sensor. It's much harder to get good accuracy that way, but I've seen sensors of that design of tablet size and larger. You might well be able to combine that with a resistive design, but I bet the accuracy would be poor.
(And, incidentally, using a resistive sensor with a stylus "for fine input" doesn't seem like such a great idea to me, for the same reason: it's difficult to get really good accuracy from a resistive sensor.)
There's another simpler approach: use just a capacitive sensor, and a conductive stylus. That has some accuracy problems of its own, especially if the sensor wasn't designed with stylus use in mind, and it won't enable you to use the device while wearing gloves or a wetsuit or whatever, but it seems likely to be a much better compromise than stacking one sensor on top of another.
A thousand or a million people using tablets to do their 'INDIVIDUAL' thing is not at all impressive.
What would be impressive would be a thousand or a million people using tablets to work collaboratively together toward accomplishing something beneficial for everyone in the group.
From this perspective Apple has utterly failed us even as it has succeeded spectacularly for the people who work at Apple and who have Apple shares to sell to others who hope to be able to sell those shares to yet others for a greater amount of money.
I think making computing more accessible to thousands or millions of people is kinda impressive, and could foster the collaboration you're looking for.
"A thousand or a million people using [product X] to do their 'INDIVIDUAL' thing is not at all impressive.
What would be impressive would be a thousand or a million people using [product X] to work collaboratively together toward accomplishing something beneficial for everyone in the group.
From this perspective [company Y] has utterly failed us even as it has succeeded spectacularly for the people who work at [company Y] and who have [company Y] shares to sell to others who hope to be able to sell those shares to yet others for a greater amount of money."
It seems that by these measures you would be disappointed with any combination of product X and company Y producing it. 'Cars' and 'Ford', 'Android Phones' and 'Google', etc.. So, what was your point again?
"Tablets" use pens as input: the iPad is a "pad". Some may claim that "tablet" is a generic term for this form factor of device, but the correct term would be "slate". Please note that Apple never uses the term "tablet" to describe this device: not because they are being "different", but because they really don't sell a "tablet".
Yeah: people are redefining the term "tablet" in order to allow for market comparisons between the iPad and Tablet PCs. As far as I can tell, the iPad exists in a different market segment than true tablets: it isn't fun, however, unless you can define the world in terms of conflict.
(As another example, people are now trying to compare the $1300 (due to memory and CPU upgrades) 11" MacBook Air I just bought to the $250 HP mini (bought on a lark when my ThinkPad X61 failed during a conference), as if they were /directly/ competing for the same users.)
Is this counting Windows? In 2008 there were 1.3 million Windows tablets sold. Not sure of 2009/2010 data. But even at 1M that puts them at much larger than 5%.
30 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 81.9 ms ] threadI'm hoping that next year sees some decent contenders.
Android's openness lets anyone put it anywhere so of course we'll see Android tablets, especially given that Chrome OS isn't officially out yet (this month, though, right?)
Anyway, yeah, next year should have a lot of Google-related free software tablets, either Chrome OS or Android.
The reason most of the Android tablets I've seen so far have been rubbish is that they've had resistive screens and slow processors.
It happened with their computers. It's happening with phones. And it will happen with tablets.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. Being an industry trend setter and purveyor of luxury computing appliances is an enviable enough existence.
Aside from a robust but small market in PMPs (by companies like Archos), the "tablet" market is but an offshot of the netbook market: People just wanted to browse the web and consume media, and the iPad is Apple's entrant into that realm.
The Netbook market was all the rage until Apple decided to essentially hop on that bandwagon. Netbooks have suffered because the iPad is a decent competitor and brings some of the advantages of being a much lighter internet appliance of the sort that Andreeson really dreamed of.
Heck, you could even say that the iPad was a me-too entrant in the eReader market. While this has been largely forgotten, when the iPad was introduced the comparative focus, including by Apple, was against products like the Kindle and the Nook.
Apple blew everyone away with the iPhone, but two years later the cloners had finally honed their game and now Apple is watching themselves get nudged towards the luxury niche they're so comfortable with.
Luxury? Really?
People with McJobs have iPhones. It isn't a luxury item. Apple sells products at or below the low price end in virtually every market they touch.
They are the perfect definition of a mass-market, consumer product company.
In any case, after leveraging the huge ecosystem of iPod tie-ins and mindspace, Apple managed some good inroads into a quickly evolving smartphone market (which, it should be noted, they feared would take away from their MP3 player market). They got some good momentum, but now they're seeing vigorous competition.
"Tablet Market: 95% iPad, 5% Everyone Else; Things Will Change in Q4 2010"
It's all about the software platform. I'm sure the folks at Google make little philosophical distinction between the Android "tablet" software and the Android "mobile" software, for instance. Nor does Apple call its iPad OS a totally different name than it calls its iPhone OS. Other than some minor cosmetic differences, the code is 99.9% the same.
Tracking share in the "tablet" market is going to seem very silly in a few years.
Wow.
Then you get the best of both worlds, and could use a stylus for fine input, and your finger for navigation, etc.
Either sort of touchscreen has two layers of a transparent conductor. A resistive touchscreen has two "solid" layers on separate pieces of glass or plastic, with spacers between the two so they don't come into contact unless pushed. Pushing down on it with a stylus brings the two layers into contact. How does this suck? Let me count the ways. 1. Lots of layers. ITO isn't perfectly transparent, and glass/air interfaces are always going to reflect a bit even with anti-reflective coatings. So you lose transparency (by different amounts at different wavelengths too, so either you get a wrong colour balance or you lose more brightness to fix that up) and get more reflections. 2. Poor robustness. Your front sheet of glass or plastic has to be thin enough to flex, and you're flexing it all the time. That's not great. The ITO layer on the front sheet is also flexing, and that's even worse because you want it to be thin (for optical performance) but the thinner it is the more readily it cracks. 3. Thickness. Multiple layers of glass or plastic, physical spacers in between, ugh.
Adding a capacitive sensor to this will make the optical quality even worse because you'll need more ITO layers. What's more, the capacitive sensor will have to be on the top (I think trying to do capacitive sensing through the conductive layers of a resistive sensor is a non-starter), which means those ITO layers are also flexing when you push on them, for extra-bad robustness. And you'll probably need to space them away from the resistive sensor underneath a bit, making the sensor assembly even thicker, though perhaps there are ways around that.
Perhaps you could combine one layer of the capacitive sensor with one layer of the resistive one, but that seems tricky. A typical capacitive touchscreen uses two layers of patterned conductors, with lots of gaps in (so much so that although there are two layers, over most of the display only one is present, at least in the designs I know about -- it's been a few years since I was in the business, so technology may have moved on). A typical resistive touchscreen uses two solid layers, and putting gaps in them will make it completely fail to work. I wouldn't want to rule out the possibility of combining them, but it would be tricky.
Well. Actually, there's another design of capacitive touchscreen which uses a single solid conducting layer a bit like one layer of a resistive sensor. It's much harder to get good accuracy that way, but I've seen sensors of that design of tablet size and larger. You might well be able to combine that with a resistive design, but I bet the accuracy would be poor.
(And, incidentally, using a resistive sensor with a stylus "for fine input" doesn't seem like such a great idea to me, for the same reason: it's difficult to get really good accuracy from a resistive sensor.)
There's another simpler approach: use just a capacitive sensor, and a conductive stylus. That has some accuracy problems of its own, especially if the sensor wasn't designed with stylus use in mind, and it won't enable you to use the device while wearing gloves or a wetsuit or whatever, but it seems likely to be a much better compromise than stacking one sensor on top of another.
What would be impressive would be a thousand or a million people using tablets to work collaboratively together toward accomplishing something beneficial for everyone in the group.
From this perspective Apple has utterly failed us even as it has succeeded spectacularly for the people who work at Apple and who have Apple shares to sell to others who hope to be able to sell those shares to yet others for a greater amount of money.
What would be impressive would be a thousand or a million people using [product X] to work collaboratively together toward accomplishing something beneficial for everyone in the group.
From this perspective [company Y] has utterly failed us even as it has succeeded spectacularly for the people who work at [company Y] and who have [company Y] shares to sell to others who hope to be able to sell those shares to yet others for a greater amount of money."
It seems that by these measures you would be disappointed with any combination of product X and company Y producing it. 'Cars' and 'Ford', 'Android Phones' and 'Google', etc.. So, what was your point again?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tablet_computer
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tablet_computer...
(As another example, people are now trying to compare the $1300 (due to memory and CPU upgrades) 11" MacBook Air I just bought to the $250 HP mini (bought on a lark when my ThinkPad X61 failed during a conference), as if they were /directly/ competing for the same users.)