3,484 karma · joined October 9, 2009
Of course there is, as the market has clearly shown. I suspect that there will be a market for 5", 7", 10", 12", and so on tablets. Consumer choice is good.
Yet your post seemed to posit that because the iPad has succeeded where the Tab hasn't, every decision Apple made with the iPad (in particular form factor) has been validated. That is specious reasoning.
While a slicker, more polished interface will do wonders, I do suspect that a lot of the returns right now are still network effect issues: People who get the Tab as a present and then wonder why they can't run all those cool apps that their iPad toting friends have, etc. I would expect that return rates are much higher than iPhone return rates on smartphones as well, for the same reason.
That is changing, of course. The app situation -- and the network inclusion -- is quickly improving.
The Tab only makes sense as a device significantly discounted below the iPad. That it is actually the more expensive option is just perverse.
The device is too big and too heavy. The OS far from optimal for the device. That the Galaxy Tab is a pretty marginal device, with a slew of weaknesses, in no way validates anything that Apple has done with the iPad.
The iPad is a superior device to the tab. However I, and billions of other people, haven't opted to buy it. The market waits for something that fits our needs better.
It's as if companies think it's the shape of the device matters more than the experience of using the device. I guess knowing this
What does this even mean? It sounds like some sort of iPad-owner defensive reaction to a smaller tablet. Samsung couldn't suddenly make Android tablet-ready, but as above you're drawing the wrong conclusion.
A 7" tablet with a unoptimized OS does not invalidate a 7" tablet. A tablet with an unoptimized OS does not validate every facet of a tablet with a more appropriate OS.
As one aside, and to go slightly conspiratorial, the lack of decent Android competitors to the iPad falls largely on Google's shoulders. It strongly seems like Google was of mixed emotions about tablets, desperately wanting devices bigger than a smartphone to be owned by the ChromeOS project. They ignored the market, undermined the market, and only came around after lots of delays, all while ChromeOS slowly pushed its way into the light.
Now of course the restrictions of the smartphone are a bit of a pain. I would like something larger to more enjoyably interact with, hopefully with a higher resolution, but small enough and easy enough to use that it's just some accessory sitting on a coffee table. Of course in the connected world it can also control the cable box, start DLNA streams, etc.
That's where a tablet comes into play. Preferably one in the 7-9" range.
Bizarre.
The Tab hasn't sold well simply because it's not that great of a product (largely because it came with Froyo which is decidedly not ready for the form factor), sold at a really high price. I'm an Android guy, but I had zero interest in the device (just as I have no interest in the Nexus S).
The upcoming Honeycomb devices are far more convincing, however.
"GAS" providers like TekSavvy are not DSLAM terminators -- they use Bell's final mile, plus their DSLAM, plus their Nexxia network, etc. THAT is how they are vulnerable to this sort of action.
Providers who have their own DSLAM equipment, which Bell has to host for them, have no such limits: Bell can't shape their packets, nor can they impose any pricing being the CRTC regulated last-mile charge. That has nothing to do with this recent decision.
People are pretending that we're talking about the latter when we're actually talking about the former, which is all this applies to. Did anyone ever wonder how TekSavvy -- some micro operation in Chatham -- magically became a Canada-wide DSL provider? Hint: Because they aren't.
You might have had a point a year ago. Now, sorry, your argument is tired and dated. People want something that can play a couple of games, access Facebook and Twitter, visit websites, etc. There is a lot of competition, and the iPhone is only one option.
It has no entitled right to that market, nor is it necessarily the superior option. For many users it is the inferior option, rhetoric and flag waving aside.
A lot of customers are deciding among the available smartphones and walking out of the store with a Galaxy S or some other high-end Android device (which overwhelmingly dominant Android sales, despite the continued notion that it's some sort of low-end platform). It does what they want.
And that competition is only getting fiercer. Gingerbread, plus the upcoming (meaning weeks) gauntlet of devices == Android is putting aside the training bra.
But again, let's revisit this in six months. I'm sure there will be some new angle.
Why would you expect that?
AT&T not only was late to the Android party, they sacrificed the few meager offerings they had because the iPhone was their smartphone of choice.
If you were drawn to an Android device, it was unlikely it was at AT&T because even once they started carrying them, they carried the dregs like the Backflip. Instead you were choosing from every other carrier. If you wanted an iPhone, on the other hand, you were going to AT&T (hence why AT&T paid big dollars for the exclusivity, and it showed in their subscribership numbers).
Verizon's breakdown will be nothing like AT&T's.
Further, AT&T is suddenly in the Android game in a big, big way. I hear there's something like 20 top-flight 4G Android devices hitting AT&T in the next few months, including the leader of the pack Motorola Atrix. So from being the iPhone place, AT&T is almost switching to be an Android-dominated carrier.
I think this whole "iPhone was only on a single carrier, let's see how things change now!" thing is going to turn out quite unlike how many so desperately hope.
Samsung was a co-developer of the A4 chip, which they derived for their Hummingbird platform. You could as easily say that Apple knew what Samsung was up to.
This is categorically untrue. The iPhone 3GS was a world above virtually every Android phone at the time. The iPhone 4, when released, didn't have quite as large of a lead, but it still led the competition on virtually every spec.
And those specs didn't go unnoticed. From screen brightness to color range to processor speed to GPU performance, this is one of the reasons it was considered the #1 device. It led the spec sheet.
The iPhone 5 of course has its work cut out for it, because the competition is much more refined now and they're really in the game. But I am pretty certain that Apple is going to try their damndest to lead the spec comparisons again.
This is a futile discussion. It is an embarrassment for HN and, honestly, an embarrassment for the Canadian tech community.
Download caps are way too low, no doubt about it. Providers are protecting their own self interests by undermining businesses like Netflix, no doubt about it. However that is an entirely separate discussion.
This is not the standards for HN. It is, if anything, the antithesis of HN.
I want endless bandwidth as well, but this is absolutely the decline of this site, with "what I want" and "the way I present the world to support my bias" crowding out "what is real" and "actual fact".
Isn't that sort of tactic best left on reddit?
There ARE DSL providers that locate hardware in Bell switching centers and don't use the Nexxia network. Primus is an example. Funny thing about Primus is that they, too, are implementing UBB, but it isn't because of Bell: It's because they don't want the ultra high throughput users that are being punted from TekSavvy from all migrating to their network.
Easily? Hardly. Over an absurdly short distance from the switching station, with perfect copper, as a tech trial sure. In the real world most ADSL users find that their experience is nowhere near that.
ADSL sucks. ADSL has always sucked. It is a dead technology that is constantly simply being replaced.
We're having this discussion because Bell, due to their ILEC status, was forced into agreements that favored some businesses that pandered to, essentially, the "problem users" who were kicked off every other network. Teksavvy didn't go to ADSL because it's such a great technology. They went to it because the CRTC cleared a sweetheart deal for them.
Really? I was under the impression that Bell was just selling access to their last-mile infrastructure
Your understanding is wrong. If TekSavvy were just terminating the loop, Bell wouldn't even have the technical ability to do anything to restrict or harm them.
The situation here is that Teksavvy has access to bulk wholesale Nexxia (Bell's backbone) rates that were forced upon Bell by the CRTC. Again, this was an agreement that was established when Bell was overwhelmingly dominant in certain areas of Canada. If those wholesale rates are "fair", however, then clearly Teksavvy can just arrange with another provider to handle that service. The reason they can't, of course, is that the rates they were paying were essentially monopoly subsidized.
Twisted-pair sucks, actually, and Bell's monopoly is on dead technology. We only use it as a backup line in a worst case situation. We actually had a number of options, which is what we used for our primary line.
Though I'm not even sure what your point is.
If that were really true don't you think these ISPs would switch to those competitors with their 'competitive options' instead of waging silly lawsuits?
IT IS TRUE. Accept that as a reality, because it is reality. If bandwidth is as cheap as you claim, they WOULD use those alternatives, now wouldn't they? They have an economic model based upon basically an agreement that was punitively pushed onto Bell because of their monopoly, back when being the big telco made them the top dog.
I'm not cheering on anything but reality. You have ignored or sidestepped every reality I have presented, and keep up with this ridiculous illusion that Bell has any ounce of a provider monopoly in Canada.
The case here is that these small ISPs are not only terminating the loop, they're also using Bell's pipes beyond the termination, with contracts that were enforced when Bell really was a bonafide monopoly. There are actually a lot of competitive options when you're looking for bulk bandwidth, will Bell being a small, small player.
As to Bell being a monopoly, that's a bit laughable of a concept now. I haven't used any Bell services for personal use in well over a decade, despite being in the center of Bell territory.
As to Canada's situation, it regularly ranks in the top tier of broadband penetration and broadband speeds. It sounds like you're the one using your anecdote inappropriately, because actual metrics refute you.
They'd gladly put their own infrastructure in to the ground, only they're not allowed to.
You're conflating issues. Because of the in-the-ground angle, companies are allowed to terminate twisted-pairs at the switching station, providing their own voice or data services. We recently hooked up a business backup high-speed ADSL line, the line provided by Bell, with the data provided by Cogent. Our primary data service, by the way, is provided by the electric company who have a distribution network of fiber.
What is changing is if Bogent terminated that line, but instead of providing their own infrastructure they simply leached off of Bell's. That was put in during the "Soviet style" control.
Again, this is all a bunch of people inventing a reality where they can have their free lunch. It is a tiny percentage of people making a loud noise, trying to burn it all down to get their way. I'll happily endure the down-arrows while a rallying mob tries to construct some ridiculous perception of reality.
Your complaint is that some rural area has poor service. Is that not the case around the globe?
I've had high-speed cable service since long before it was available in most urban centers in the US (much less the rest of the world), including when I lived in a mid-sized town. Here in a suburb of Toronto I've had top-notch, leading-the-bandwidth (15Mbps around the clock) high speed for a low cost for almost a decade.
I think our situation is quite good, actually. Broadband penetration is very high, average caps are competitive with the world, and bandwidth numbers lean very high on the curve.
There is so much misinformation about this whole situation (not helped by people making "incremental cost" calculations that assume that the infrastructure for infinite bandwidth is already in place): The best is the other post where someone talks about it being Soviet-style central control. The humorous aspect is that CRTC is essentially unwinding that central control, put in place back when Bell was the big, untouchable monopoly. It was then that many of the "unlimited cap" companies were basically given leave to leach off of Bell in the name of competition.
Bell is far from alone in providing bulk bandwidth in Canada. If the economics are so straightforward, clearly Teksavvy and the like will just run a Cogent or the like to their distribution. If they don't, ask yourself why not.
Ultimately this is a lot of people up in arms because they want their free lunch.
Recall that the last freedom exercise was to try to suppress Gene Simmons' right to free speech (however stupid his opinions might be) by a DDOS on his servers, with all of the collateral damage that entails.
Why? Because there is intense, endless competition in the Android space, with dozens of companies kicking and screaming to get on top of the pile. The pace of change on the hardware side has been blistering (less so on the software side, though Google is the critical impediment there) because of that. It is an evolutionary ecosystem.
The iPhone side of course adapts to competition, but with just a single vendor and a single set of interests, it does so much more slowly.
When the 3GS came out it was, by far, the top of the herd. When the 4 came out it was tight, but it was a bit above the best of the Android pack. With the iPhone 5...I'm not so sure. I don't know what they could reasonably do to catch up to the ridiculously equipped devices coming out now.
Again, Android is now mainstream. The iPhone is now mainstream. Any delusions that denizens of places like HN are the typical sort of buyer are terribly far off reality.
The average buyer has no such desire to hoist the flag. And every time Android comes up the anecdotes appear about how everyone anyone knows with an Android is so disappointed and just can't wait until the day that they can trade it in for an iPhone, etc. Which of course is garbage, but there it is.
Android as a mainstream platform has gotten dramatically better. Aside from improvements in the versions, the application ecosystem is what is really improving perceptions of the device. It is less common now that Android users feel like they have some sort of knock-off device, finding themselves left out of the application game.
And at 4.0 they would likely merge.
It's the same strategy that virtually every maker is following now. It's building out a platform, and its what you have to do to compete now.
I get the impression that Honeycomb isn't going to be coming to phones.
Their introductory video specifically says "built entirely for tablets". I don't know what the credibility of it is, but there was the rumor that the next iteration will be 2.4 and will be for handsets. Such a versioning strategy makes sense.
Obviously they would share considerable amounts of code. The "shell" is just a replaceable process.
Google certainly aren't doing well at pleasing their current customers
It's clear that Google and its open handset partnership is perilously understaffed right now, and they need to cut the umbilical going to whoever is screwing up this opportunity.
Android, I think, succeeded far beyond Google's dreams (originally tablets and PMPs were a no-go, but they've become a primary focus), but it seems to be moving far too slowly. A bunch of stuff they promised for 2.2 still isn't there in 2.3, and is only rumored for 3.0. They need to seriously pick up the pace.
No I'm not. I'm strongly disagreeing with that point.
The consumer who walks out of the store with an iPhone could just as likely have walked out with a Galaxy S, and vice versa. The applications angle of Android is very heavily promoted, so creating a caricature of a consumer that only wants to casually use it isn't valid.
What that means is nearly an order of magnitude difference in app purchasers.
What data is that derived from? It's worth noting that the iPhone is very strongly skewing towards free apps as well.
As an aside, where did the "1.3M" come from? Apple's recently quarterlies put the daily iOS device sales in the 350,000 range.
This maybe was true 6 months ago. It isn't true now. Android buyers today are the mainstream, many of whom are paying as much for their handset, and as much on their contract, as the iPhone equivalent. They are competitive choices, and there is no longer any clear demographic difference between buyers.
You don't sell 300,000+ handsets a day targeting the geek demographic. My brother and his girlfriend, who I thought were the pinnacle of the iPhone demographic, I was recently shocked to find got a HTC Desire Z and a Galaxy S, despite their other household devices being an iPad and an iPod Touch. I had no part in that decision as I keep my evangelism in the online world.
As an Android buyer I've only purchased three applications in my history with the devices: WeatherBug Pro, a top-rated racing game that I then returned, and NFL's Game Center.
Am I cheap? Quite the opposite: My steam catalog is stuffed to the gills, and all of my music is legally owned (on top of a rdio subscription).
I want to spend money on Android apps. I want Angry Birds to have a pay version so I don't have to worry about my kids accidentally clicking on ads during play.
So why don't I spend more?
Not only is the market app terrible (the lack of decent heuristics being the biggest deficiency), as a long-time Android booster I will openly say that the majority of Android applications suck just as strongly. It's getting better, but in general it's still quite a gamble if you're getting something decent or not, and I can't imagine the 15 minute window has improved confidence levels.
It isn't always the app's fault, either. The racing game I mentioned seemed decent enough, but the constant garbage collection of the platform made it a pause-filled, unpleasant experience. This, of course, is one of the things that the slow-to-come 2.3 release (remember when the purpose of buying the Nexus One was supposedly fast releases?) aims to solve.
I actually felt guilty returning that app because it wasn't really the fault of the app's developers, but it made it unplayable.
The NFL application I only bought after actually seeing it on the NFL.com webpage. I had found it in the market search previously, but didn't buy it because there is no guarantee that "NFL Enterprises" is actually NFL Enterprises, or if it's some guy calling himself that. The Market also needs, optionally, something like Authenticode/vendor verification. I would not in a million years trust a purported bank application independently discovered on the Android market because there are zero guarantees.
To link myself, I talk about the market here - http://blog.yafla.com/Android_22_Engravings_and_the_Google_N..., the core takeaway being that the Market needs the ability to link a third-party rating authority. The biggest incentive for people to go through the buying process is the comfort that what they're getting is worth it. The current user review system offers no such confidence, usually offering up nothing but petty grievances and obvious shill accounts of the author's friends.
I'll take the Android model over the Apple model any day of the week, but there is an even better medium that would be ideal.