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Comment by monkeyfacebag | Hacker News Reader

I don't know a lot about iPads, but that price is about $50 more than I would have naively guessed. Spec for spec, the Nexus 7 (disclosure: I own this) seems to offer more for less (yes, the screen is smaller, but the information quantity & density is actually greater). Sure, there is the value of Apple's ecosystem, but I imagine Android will catch up on this sooner or later.

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I'm guessing you didn't watch the keynote. Apple highlighted the fact that there is a severe lack of tabletized Android apps. So, an iPad app vs. what is essentially an Android phone app, the information density is actually much greater on the iPad because its app are actually designed to utilize the space.

The materials are a lot better, as well. Aluminum vs. plastic (although I don't mind the N7's build at all). The iPad's screen is a much higher quality IPS display than the N7. Of course, I'm going to expect all of this in a tablet with a $70 higher price point, comparing 16GB vis a vis.

I would have liked to see the price come in at $299, but $329 is perfectly reasonable and this will be a best seller for Apple.

(I own and use both an iPad and a Nexus 7)

> Apple highlighted the fact that there is a severe lack of tabletized Android apps.

There are two issues with this claim:

1. It's less relevant for smaller tablets like the Nexus 7

2. I haven't personally seen any lack of Android tablet apps. I have an Asus Transformer Prime, and I use a wide variety of tablet-optimized apps on a regular basis. Sure, some niche stuff is missing, but the big stuff is there already.

Edit: another point to make is that unlike iOS app development, if you use the new Fragments paradigm introduced in HC, it's very easy to make a tablet version of an existing Android phone app. You don't need to have an entirely separate app.

1. It's not less relevant. I hate using a lot of the apps on my N7 because they are obviously phone apps stretched out—and there's no thought to the tablet interface. The only ones that are even remotely good (and barely, at that) are those that tend to replicate an iOS interface in Android. (And the gmail app on the N7 is complete crap. I can't read half of the emails that I get because its view pane is too small regardless of the orientation.)

2. There are, supposedly, a few thousand large tablet apps. I've been using the N7 since it was made available in Canada and have yet to see a good app that takes advantage of the N7's size advantage over phones, but recognizes the smaller area than larger tablets.

The iPad mini will handle this much better.

Your edit, BTW, is nonsense—you have always been able to make a Universal app for iOS. The layouts remain separate, but this is where Android gets it completely wrong: app makers should be taking advantage of the sizes available and stop pretending that automatic layout actually works (we learned that it doesn't with Swing; why the hell are Android developers having to learn it all over again?).

> The layouts remain separate, but this is where Android gets it completely wrong: app makers should be taking advantage of the sizes available and stop pretending that automatic layout actually works

You've completely misunderstood my point. I'm not referring to the ability of Android apps to resize themselves. I'm referring to the ability to easily rearchitect the frontend of Android 3.0+ apps by using Fragments[0].

0: http://developer.android.com/guide/components/fragments.html

No, I haven't missed your point—I'm telling you that I haven't seen a single app that does this (I might have one or two, but I can't really tell because they're essentially all crappy looking on my N7).

If you can point to some, I'd appreciate it, because I am deeply unimpressed by Android apps in general, at least in the context of the N7.

There are a few that are better than others (TweetLanes is one), but not enough to keep me using the device as anything other than 100% video and data consumption.

> The iPad's screen is a much higher quality IPS display than the N7.

Says who? The N7 is higher-resolution and is also an IPS display. As for the plastic, at least it doesn't scratch...

This is actually not too far stretched of a claim. The panel on the n7 is generally considered to be lower quality. ppi aside.

I personally would still go with the n7, but this claim if done from a image quality aspect is probably true.

I guess we'll find out, but I got annoyed reading that a screen no one has seen is "much" higher quality than a screen that has better specs.

Well just going off history for my claims. Also note that the only spec that you are quoting is Resolution and PPI. There are many more specs to take into account, which ones matter to someone is ofc a matter of opinion.

But yes, i can fully understand your annoyance lol. Unsupported claims are just that, unsupported claims lol.

Not trolling, but what apps do you miss on the N7? All the apps I use on my phone I have on my N7. Admittedly, however, I use neither for gaming and photo apps pretty much exclusively on the phone...

i have an N7 and a Galaxy S3, I use gReader on both, which uses Fragments. on N7 you get to view the link in the same screen as the rss listing while on the phone it switches screens to view a link. The point is that you dont really need tablet specific apps for tablet display, just properly developed android apps.

also during the keynote (which i haven't watched) according to engadget some apps were demonstrated on both devices, one of them was tripadvisor, which has one of the most tablet optimized apps on android i've seen and yet according to the commenters the one shown on the keynote was a more than a year old version that wasn't tablet optimized.. bottomline its all marketing and mis-direction on apple's behalf.

the fact that apple has talked so much about N7 on their keynote which costs 130$ less than their offering is a clear sign that N7 and probably Amazon's new offerings are actually hurting them (or at least expected to hurt them)

That's nice spin but what you're essentially saying is they are price gouging based on their current market advantage. If true that is pretty short sighted. I'd love to hear what the actual reason than the high-than-expected price -- maybe it's as simple as everyone else is selling at-cost -- but I highly doubt that reason factored in at all.

> I'm guessing you didn't watch the keynote. Apple highlighted the fact that there is a severe lack of tabletized Android apps. So, an iPad app vs. what is essentially an Android phone app, the information density is actually much greater on the iPad because its app are actually designed to utilize the space.

This is the big issue for Android tablets at this time, hence why the Android team have been pushing tablet design videos and documents lately. During the press conference for iPad mini, when they were showing iPad apps side-by-side with unoptimized Android apps, I think it highlighted just how bad the situation with developers ignoring the Android tablet space, esp. since some of the apps shown put a big emphasis on high quality apps in the first place.

This is a great response. I did not watch the keynote, though as a Nexus 7 owner, I keenly feel the dearth of apps. Music creation apps, in particular, are absent from Android because of poor support for low latency audio in the SDK. Most of the time, however, I use the Nexus 7 to browse the web, in which case, I imagine it performs roughly as well as the iPad mini, except with the higher information density.

>The iPad's screen is a much higher quality IPS display than the N7.

I'm curious how you know this. I understood the Nexus 7 screen to also use IPS. What makes the one in the new iPad better?

>Of course, I'm going to expect all of this in a tablet with a $70 higher price point.

My Nexus 7 was $199. Yes, it has less storage space than the mini, but the difference between getting an Android tablet and and iPad is actually $130, not $70.

  > absent from Android because of poor support for low
  > latency audio in the SDK

I know this was the case with the previous versions of Android, but Nexus 7 is running the latest and I was under impression that this was fixed. Is it not true, or is it indeed fixed, but no apps yet?

as an owner of both a Nexus 7 and an iPhone 4S, I just can't ever imagine Android catching up in terms of app quality, most likely due to fragmentation in their ecosystem amongst peripherals and because of less stringent quality standards.

iOS is simply a more polished, user friendly environment.

I don't think the current issues with tablet apps on Android are due to fragmentation and something about Android lacking quality standards. The tools to create a robust, good looking app on Android are the same tools for all devices and the Android team at Google has done a tremendous job in creating (and still improving) developer tools to handle so many different device types.

A large part of the issue has to do with the low adoption rate of tablets to date on Android and a general lack of focus on polish for Android apps. Ultimately the developer community and business haven't gotten behind Android in the same way as iOS and the result is apps that aren't well thought out or are missing support beyond phone-type devices.

You get two cameras with the iPad Mini. Usable ones at that, it seems. The N7's (I have one too) front-facing camera is barely adequate for video calls.

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