The only Tegra 3 phone around atm is the HTC One X[1]. That seems to go for around $600 outright here in Australia. Even if this tablet is WiFi only it's a pretty amazing price point for an unsubsidized device.
Yes, before this I think the cheapest Tegra 3 tablet was the ASUS TF300 at $399/32GB and $379/16GB.
Knocking $120 off of that (16GB vs 16GB) is pretty impressive, especially since I'm not sure that a 7" screen at the same resolution is actually cheaper.
That being said, cheap is not enough. It's just a starting point. The real question is: What can Jelly Bean do on this? And is it enough to compete with the iPad and Windows tablets (not to mention inspire Android OEMs to do better)?
It's a great price point. I only wish I had a particular need for a tablet. As it is I don't even need more than a single-core for reading ebooks, watching video, or surfing (I don't play games), and here comes an inexpensive quadcore. If anything the problem to solve is improving battery life significantly, so we don't need to limit usage if we're out and about for a while.
What cool/handy things do you guys do with your tablets?
While it's true you can find decent tablets for 100€, most of them have a problem which has been a deal-breaker for me: the aspect ratio is always wrong. In portrait, circles are squished horizontally; in landscape, circles are squished vertically.
I can't understand how that can happen and the manufacturer doesn't seem to notice or care.
Maybe from music or something, but not from app sales...
a) they don't actually get 30% (they get what is left over after giving the developer 70% and then subtracting their fixed costs... small money transactions is considerable in fees, bandwidth for them is cheap but not free, etc.)
b) it is now public (due to the Oracle case) that the Android division of Google actually lost money in 2010
c) despite their massive volume, Apple's App Store makes sufficiently little profit that they don't even break it out as a separate line item on their 10-Q (instead lumping it under "music related products and services", the same category that handles both iTunes and iBooks)
To expand on #C, it is seriously my understanding that Apple manages to only barely stay in in the black on the whole App Store model: their goal is ecosystem control and a competive advantage for their hardware platform, which in turn is where they make their real money.
Looking further at Apple's business model, you get ~$170 margin per iPhone sold; I know many people who have owned 3 iPhones over the last 5 years, but absolutely no one who has purchased the $1700 in apps that would be required for even the full 30% (that Apple can't possibly be keeping all of) to make that same amount of money.
In essence, you just can't subsidize a piece of hardware like this with app sales. I mean, this is going to be ludicrously obvious if you just take the individual device: if they wanted to subsidize it by even $100, and even if they managed to keep the full 30% (and again: they can't and aren't), then the average tablet user would have to purchase >$330 in apps per tablet... that is ludicrously unlikely.
It could be a possibility that they are willing to take a loss. The greatest threat that the Kindle Fire poses to Google is the removal of Google's services.
Extremely interesting points. I wonder how the rest of the Google ecosystem factors in.
For instance, they are making what appears to be a pretty hard move into productivity apps (Docs + Gmail). This is a potentially lucrative market, although I doubt they're making much money yet.
These things seem to be able to move from the consumer space to the enterprise (a la the iPhone). So is a subsidy at this point worthwhile in the hope that widespread device adoption will drive business for the productivity offerings, in addition to music and video sales?
I really don't know. Interesting to watch, though.
How much do they make in search-related ad revenue over the life of a device?
How much is it worth to them to stop people from getting a Surface with Bing or an iPad where Google has to pay to get the default search option set to Google (and the future of the default seems uncertain)?
Search is a much more reasonable avenue, but I'm still not so certain. I've seen "$1bn/yr" quoted as Google's TAC (traffic acquisition cost) paid to Apple to be the default search provider.
However, I've also heard that that deal is tight and carefully negotiated. With hundreds of millions of iOS devices and that kind of TAC, it would then be reasonable to guess that Google's revenue, per iPhone user, on the order of dollars, maybe tens of dollars, but not hundreds of dollars.
Honestly, though, Google has never sold that many Nexus devices before... they might just want to take a loss on the whole thing to demonstrate that the device is reasonable to manufacturers, try to bootstrap the market by getting initial devices cheaply to users, or even just to make friends with Asus.
My guess is that they just want to screw Apple. Apple makes money by convincing people that they need to purchase and then replace expensive hardware. This hardware has a lot of margin in it, enough to provide outstanding customer service and to generally spend time on software improvements.
In the world of PC's, there are tons of competitors figuring out how to drive the price down, but then they don't bother to compete on design. Companies like Dell make almost no money per computer: the margins in that industry don't exist.
So, I contend that if Google occasionally does some "charity" work, maintaining an OS (at a loss) an then partnering with the currently best-scaled lower-margin device manufacturer to inject some reasonable design, they can gut Apple's business "where it hurts", even though they probably get almost no money from it themselves.
This is advantageous to Google as it allows them to keep an advantage over Apple in those negations over TAC, or make it less enticing for Apple to spend a bunch of time attempting to rebuild thigs like Maps.
Put differently: Google doesn't need this market: they have an already bootstrapped and epic profit model. This doesn't need to make them money directly, or even tangentially: it just needs to give them an advantage somehow, somewhere, that can be leveraged to make money.
it is seriously my understanding that Apple manages to only barely stay in in the black on the whole App Store model
This is the elephant in the room of app store hype. It's just not that big a market and for every Angry Birds and Instapaper there are 1000 people breaking even. And it's only going to get worse.
And for every one of them, there are 1000 9-5 employees of some IT department releasing apps in their spare time, where it becomes harder to quantify terms such as "profit" and "loss" :)
There is a big price difference with the iPad and it's "just" a bigger iPod Touch (it per-dates the iPad). There also aren't many Touch competitors at that price point, it's aggressive (the iPhone is almost identical plus $10-20 of hardware for radios, but is 3x the price).
If this tablet is a commercial failure with such great specs at such a reasonable price, this does not bode well for Android as a Tablet OS.
I have been developing for Android full time 2 years. I am waiting for some indication that Android is doing well on tablets and there is a return on investment (ROI) optimizing for this platform / form factor combination. So far that ROI has not been there for me.
As a young, much newer Android developer I would be interested in your opinion on the ROI of developing for Android phones, specifically supporting lots of devices.
Please never consider such characteristics (number of cores or their frequencies) as an advantage when buying any mobile gadgets. Mobile technology varies highly and such characteristics are usually can't be easily compared between different hardware vendors (e.g. two 400mhz GPUs might have completely different performance profile.) I don't know what kind of hardware they have there but it might be anything — from a plenty of slower cores to having many specialized cores. Also a lot depends on software and it's integration with hardware. Do test real devices and measure real-life performance. That's the only way to tell if there is any improvement whatsoever.
I would expand this to say don't just compare speed across brands on PC either- if you compare a quad core Intel to a quad core AMD, you'll see quite a difference. It's all about how those cycles are used!
I wasn't trying to make a baseline strength comparison, I was more curious about where the 12 figure came from. I was under the impression that Tegra 3 was a quad or dual core gpu ( turns out according to http://www.nvidia.com/object/tegra-superchip.html its an 8 core gpu ).
Very different architectures. Anandtech did some performance comparisons of Tegra3 to the new iPad's PowerVR SGX543MP4 which show the PowerVR delivering better performance with "fewer" cores and far lower frequency:
What constitutes a GPU "core" is anything but well defined. Heck, people argue about whether the FX-8150 has 8 or 4 cores, but if we were to use NVidia's methodology we'd probably call it 16 or 32 cores. Who knows how Apple counts "cores" in their GPUs.
"Details are scarce on Jelly Bean, but the slides tell us that Google will handle operating system updates from now on, which could address the fragmentation problem."
This is the most interesting line in that article for me. Please let it be true.
I suspect it refers to the Nexus Tablet. I really can't see Google offering to maintain manufacturer specific Android front-ends like Samsung TouchWiz, and I can't see manufacturers dropping them for 'vanilla' Android.
Device drivers are the big issue, just look at how long it took Google to get ICS on the Nexus S 4G and at anyone trying to port Cyanogenmod over to a new device. I can't ever see Google providing updates for all devices, it would be way too time consuming and costly.
Device drivers are Linux device drivers, while not the most stable, that interface is quite mature and people have been mantaining device drivers for a decade. In my experience UI code gets messy much faster and easier than lower level.
No, there is no way Google is providing updates for hundreds of devices.
They will be shipping kernel updates, however; they'll just include upstream changes from the likes of Nvidia, TI, and Samsung (although the latter doesn't like to give back very much).
I think that was more down to 4.0.3 not being stable than anything else. Even the T-mobile Nexus S had that OTA pulled after 2 weeks, so made no sense to push it out to the 4G.
It would be better with a rear facing camera. After originally not caring I have found that kids and grand parents both loved being able to take pictures and email them. The number of times I have ever used the front facing camera can be summarized with, demonstrating photo booth apps.
See, and I'm the opposite. I never use the back camera on my tablet (too low quality, no flash), but I frequently video chat with friends and family with the front camera.
Also, I'm not too sure the lack of a back camera would be a deal breaker for most people -- the Fire's sold pretty dang well without one.
If the price point is correct, this puts it in direct competition with the Kindle Fire, which has sold reasonably well (despite being a rather mediocre device).
Oh look! It's an iPad clone. At least Microsoft tried something different with the Surface FUDevice. Google just seem to have outsourced their industrial design to Apple.
Funny story, I was at Sam's Club the other day checking out the tablets and I noticed two important things.
First, the iPad is always out front - highly visible and ready to play with. People are always stepping up and using it. The android tablets (including the Kindle Fire) were around back.
Second, a customer was playing with a 10" Android tablet and his wife came over. He commented to her something like "I like the tablet over there better" and he pointed to the Kindle Fire. The hardware is obviously not as good on the Fire, but the UI/UX and form factor seem to suit non-geeks a lot better than Android 4.0.
Also, my mother-in-law just got a Kindle Fire and loves it.
A couple data points don't mean much, but it's always interesting to see how normal people view and use these devices.
I've also seen a ASUS Transformer in the wild. The woman who owned it had just received it and didn't really know what she was going to do with it. She didn't buy the keyboard. She seemed happy with it though.
This is what Google should have done a year and a half ago.
Totally different from the iPad (size/price) and well differentiated in the consumer's mind.
Instead they went with a lot of "mee-too" expensive 10.1" tablets that have been utter failures. For avg. consumers the thought process was "Its not an iPad, has less Apps, and is COSTLIER????"
At this price point and not having the "cheap crap" label is going to drive a LOT of sales (in my opinion). Unfortunately "Android Tablet" has gotten a slightly bad rap by now...
What are you talking about? This is Google's first Nexus tablet, not only that but there have always been Android tablets at that size, even before Google had a tablet ready OS(Honeycomb), like the original Galaxy Tab http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_Tab
and the Nook Color, just to name a couple.
Google threw their weight behind a bunch of 10.1 tablets before this [1],[2]. Both these were priced higher than the iPad at launch.
I Never said there was a previous "Nexus" branded tablet or that there were no 7" Androids at all.
Isn't a 7 inch tablet kind of redundant when most Android phones are 4.5-5 inches these days? It doesn't seem like an extra 2-2.5 inches is going to make a big difference especially when you are running the exact same applications scaled up a bit. I believe this is one of the reasons the iPad has been so successful since Apple draws a clear line between a small phone and a large tablet. Consumers can immediately see the benefit of a larger device. When you're dealing with 2-2.5 inches even $200 seems hard to justify. That's about $100 an inch!
4.5 - 5" phones are still pretty new, and they're still not remotely the majority of units being sold. Not to mention lots of folks out there have 1-2 year old phones they're not about to replace (and may not want a 5" screen.)
At least for reading, a 7" device like the Kindle Fire is a huge improvement over a 4" phone screen, much more than the simple size difference would indicate. At similar (smallish) font sizes, I can get about 5-7 words across the screen on a phone, whereas I can get 9-12 words on a 7" device.
For books, news and movies, a size increase of about 75% is a big deal.
I am inclined to think 7 inch will be a let down. Not much different from other big phones. A 10 inch is the least. The 7 inch tablet really has to die IMO. I am looking for a tablet and will get one but never a 7inch. My phone is already almost 4 inches. I don't need a mildly bigger phone. I need a nice big screen which is a joy to watch videos or use flipboard on.
Because you don't want it, it needs to die? So you "need a nice big screen", good for you; I don't. The seven inch tablet is great for me. I'm in the over forty crowd and my iPhone is hard to use accurately with my fingers, to the point of frustration. I need something to use as my pocket computer that's easier than my smart phone, allows me to configure it to my convenience, allows me to insert portable storage, uses standard ports, such as USB, and to change the battery when it wears.
My point was that the phones are moving closer to the 7 inch mark. There is now just about 2 inch difference b/w a high end phone and a tablet. So if you need a 7 inch tablet, in most cases a 5 inch galaxy note will suffice. Except maybe a USB port, but there are micro usb to USB converters out there that are tiny. The 7 inch model does not make sense because there isn't much to differentiate b/w a 5' phone and a 7' tablet. What can be seen on 7' tablet can most certainly be seen on phone, best example being desktop websites. They will look very similar on a 5' and a 7' screen. 10' will make a difference though, both because of screen size and higher resolution.
It has a 138% larger screen area than the Galaxy Nexus (4.65") and 222% larger area than the Nexus S (4"). I don't believe calling it mildly bigger is accurate.
If this thing wasn't running Android, maybe it would be a viable product. But since it is, and judging by all of the current Android slates, I don't think it'll get anywhere
As I look at these Nexus Tab specs, my first-gen Nook Color is looking very feeble by comparison. I've been running CM9 (ICS) nightlies on the Nook, and the hardware just barely manages. I'd love to grab a powerhouse 7" tab at that kind of price point (~$200).
ICS is on less than 10% of devices, and already they're moving on to Jelly Bean? The rumor is that Google will handle OS updates to address the fragmentation problem, but that will be hard to do when you update your OS with less than 10% of devices using ICS, and over 60% of devices STILL using Gingerbread.
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 72.8 ms ] threadThe performance is not at Tegra3 level, but they provide smooth scrolling and browsing. A cheap google tablet in this segment is a very tempting buy.
The only Tegra 3 phone around atm is the HTC One X[1]. That seems to go for around $600 outright here in Australia. Even if this tablet is WiFi only it's a pretty amazing price point for an unsubsidized device.
[1] http://www.nvidia.com/object/tegra-superphones.html
Knocking $120 off of that (16GB vs 16GB) is pretty impressive, especially since I'm not sure that a 7" screen at the same resolution is actually cheaper.
That being said, cheap is not enough. It's just a starting point. The real question is: What can Jelly Bean do on this? And is it enough to compete with the iPad and Windows tablets (not to mention inspire Android OEMs to do better)?
What cool/handy things do you guys do with your tablets?
I can't understand how that can happen and the manufacturer doesn't seem to notice or care.
a) they don't actually get 30% (they get what is left over after giving the developer 70% and then subtracting their fixed costs... small money transactions is considerable in fees, bandwidth for them is cheap but not free, etc.)
b) it is now public (due to the Oracle case) that the Android division of Google actually lost money in 2010
c) despite their massive volume, Apple's App Store makes sufficiently little profit that they don't even break it out as a separate line item on their 10-Q (instead lumping it under "music related products and services", the same category that handles both iTunes and iBooks)
To expand on #C, it is seriously my understanding that Apple manages to only barely stay in in the black on the whole App Store model: their goal is ecosystem control and a competive advantage for their hardware platform, which in turn is where they make their real money.
Looking further at Apple's business model, you get ~$170 margin per iPhone sold; I know many people who have owned 3 iPhones over the last 5 years, but absolutely no one who has purchased the $1700 in apps that would be required for even the full 30% (that Apple can't possibly be keeping all of) to make that same amount of money.
In essence, you just can't subsidize a piece of hardware like this with app sales. I mean, this is going to be ludicrously obvious if you just take the individual device: if they wanted to subsidize it by even $100, and even if they managed to keep the full 30% (and again: they can't and aren't), then the average tablet user would have to purchase >$330 in apps per tablet... that is ludicrously unlikely.
I guess there'll be some kind of catch..
For instance, they are making what appears to be a pretty hard move into productivity apps (Docs + Gmail). This is a potentially lucrative market, although I doubt they're making much money yet.
These things seem to be able to move from the consumer space to the enterprise (a la the iPhone). So is a subsidy at this point worthwhile in the hope that widespread device adoption will drive business for the productivity offerings, in addition to music and video sales?
I really don't know. Interesting to watch, though.
How much is it worth to them to stop people from getting a Surface with Bing or an iPad where Google has to pay to get the default search option set to Google (and the future of the default seems uncertain)?
However, I've also heard that that deal is tight and carefully negotiated. With hundreds of millions of iOS devices and that kind of TAC, it would then be reasonable to guess that Google's revenue, per iPhone user, on the order of dollars, maybe tens of dollars, but not hundreds of dollars.
Honestly, though, Google has never sold that many Nexus devices before... they might just want to take a loss on the whole thing to demonstrate that the device is reasonable to manufacturers, try to bootstrap the market by getting initial devices cheaply to users, or even just to make friends with Asus.
My guess is that they just want to screw Apple. Apple makes money by convincing people that they need to purchase and then replace expensive hardware. This hardware has a lot of margin in it, enough to provide outstanding customer service and to generally spend time on software improvements.
In the world of PC's, there are tons of competitors figuring out how to drive the price down, but then they don't bother to compete on design. Companies like Dell make almost no money per computer: the margins in that industry don't exist.
So, I contend that if Google occasionally does some "charity" work, maintaining an OS (at a loss) an then partnering with the currently best-scaled lower-margin device manufacturer to inject some reasonable design, they can gut Apple's business "where it hurts", even though they probably get almost no money from it themselves.
This is advantageous to Google as it allows them to keep an advantage over Apple in those negations over TAC, or make it less enticing for Apple to spend a bunch of time attempting to rebuild thigs like Maps.
Put differently: Google doesn't need this market: they have an already bootstrapped and epic profit model. This doesn't need to make them money directly, or even tangentially: it just needs to give them an advantage somehow, somewhere, that can be leveraged to make money.
This is the elephant in the room of app store hype. It's just not that big a market and for every Angry Birds and Instapaper there are 1000 people breaking even. And it's only going to get worse.
This is still pure rumor, though.
I have been developing for Android full time 2 years. I am waiting for some indication that Android is doing well on tablets and there is a return on investment (ROI) optimizing for this platform / form factor combination. So far that ROI has not been there for me.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5663/analysis-of-the-new-apple...
It's marketed as a small tablet, not a big phone (similar to Amazons Kindle Fire).
This is the most interesting line in that article for me. Please let it be true.
This is of course assuming the problem is really a technical one and the carriers/manufacturers care at all about supporting last year's devices.
No, there is no way Google is providing updates for hundreds of devices.
Also, I'm not too sure the lack of a back camera would be a deal breaker for most people -- the Fire's sold pretty dang well without one.
First, the iPad is always out front - highly visible and ready to play with. People are always stepping up and using it. The android tablets (including the Kindle Fire) were around back.
Second, a customer was playing with a 10" Android tablet and his wife came over. He commented to her something like "I like the tablet over there better" and he pointed to the Kindle Fire. The hardware is obviously not as good on the Fire, but the UI/UX and form factor seem to suit non-geeks a lot better than Android 4.0.
Also, my mother-in-law just got a Kindle Fire and loves it.
A couple data points don't mean much, but it's always interesting to see how normal people view and use these devices.
At this price point and not having the "cheap crap" label is going to drive a LOT of sales (in my opinion). Unfortunately "Android Tablet" has gotten a slightly bad rap by now...
[1] http://www.engadget.com/2011/05/10/samsung-galaxy-tab-10-1-l...
[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Xoom
At least for reading, a 7" device like the Kindle Fire is a huge improvement over a 4" phone screen, much more than the simple size difference would indicate. At similar (smallish) font sizes, I can get about 5-7 words across the screen on a phone, whereas I can get 9-12 words on a 7" device.
For books, news and movies, a size increase of about 75% is a big deal.
Because you don't want it, it needs to die? So you "need a nice big screen", good for you; I don't. The seven inch tablet is great for me. I'm in the over forty crowd and my iPhone is hard to use accurately with my fingers, to the point of frustration. I need something to use as my pocket computer that's easier than my smart phone, allows me to configure it to my convenience, allows me to insert portable storage, uses standard ports, such as USB, and to change the battery when it wears.
http://www.displaywars.com/4,65-inch-16x9-vs-7-inch-16x10 http://www.displaywars.com/4-inch-16x9-vs-7-inch-16x10
http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html