Why Are There So Few Honeycomb Apps? 432
Fudge Factor 3000 writes "PC World's Brent Rose investigates the reason behind the dearth of Honeycomb apps even though the OS was released in February with the release of the Xoom. One would have expected an explosion of Android tablet apps like that seen with the iPad but the Honeycomb-optimized apps remain in the low hundreds. The answer, it turns out, is not that simple. The main contributing factors appear to be the low demand for Honeycomb tablets and the difficulty in discovering Honeycomb-optimized apps in the Market. Hopefully, this will be rectified in the near future."
Rampant piracy... (Score:2)
...and platform fragmentation, perhaps?
Re:Rampant piracy... (Score:5, Interesting)
Platform fragmentation - as in, different screen sizes etc., may be an issue but I don't know how bad it really is.
I'm developing an Android app; doing it exclusively on my own device; have tried the emulator but it is so slow! Takes some 10-15 minutes just to start up, and then literally minutes to start running my app after starting it out of Eclipse. Not to mention the sluggish performance in the emulator. Searching for solutions to this problem only resulted in many hits of people with the same problem.
So while I'd love to at least test my app on the "big screen", or even smaller screens for that sake (my device is double the minimum required), the shitty emulator makes it impossible.
This I can imagine will hold back many developers to optimise their app for the tablets, as it'd require them to buy the device. And if only that emulator would work properly I'd prefer to use it instead of my device, easier!
Re:Rampant piracy... (Score:4, Interesting)
Emulator Performance is the big problem. I've tried to develop a HoneyComb app, but the emulator is so slow it's absolutely unusable. Until that's fixed, developers are far less likely to flock to the new version.
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That is something that in a way surprises me. I mean not to say Google is the greatest ever, but I do expect better from them than putting out such a poor performing emulator. Android itself performs well, their Chrome browser is also known for being speedy, then why can they not get this emulator to work at a decent speed?!
You and me have this speed problem, when I searched for possible solutions I found many other people have it, while others are using the emulator just fine (or so they claim).
Their Ecl
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That is something that in a way surprises me. I mean not to say Google is the greatest ever, but I do expect better from them than putting out such a poor performing emulator. Android itself performs well, their Chrome browser is also known for being speedy, then why can they not get this emulator to work at a decent speed?!
From the SDK Tools v9 revision history: [android.com]
Known issues with emulator performance: Because the Android emulator must simulate the ARM instruction set architecture on your computer, emulator performance is slow. We're working hard to resolve the performance issues and it will improve in future releases.
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That sounds quite daft. First of all, isn't the whole point of having a VM running applications instead of native approach if not to achieve ease of interoperability? Because N9's harmattan runs fucking circles around fastest androids on the market already while having weaker hardware, and the chief difference is that applications are run natively rather then in VM. So why isn't google working on a proper x86 version of Dalvik VM?
There's also an issue of quality of emulator. I can emulate much faster consol
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Android itself performs well, their Chrome browser is also known for being speedy
Not Honeycomb. The thing is slower than my Nexus One (considering the difference in hardware, that's insane), and browser in particular is a POS that force closes regularly and lags whenever any textbox is in focus.
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I know a guy trying to do an app in IOS and android. He says the android emulator is rubbish (and he's a java guy in his day job lol) and a big handicap, and that in comparison, the IOS one works perfectly.
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I'm developing an Android app; doing it exclusively on my own device; have tried the emulator but it is so slow! Takes some 10-15 minutes just to start up, and then literally minutes to start running my app after starting it out of Eclipse.
I set up an android dev station once out of curiosity. Ran a hello world program. My machine was mediocre, dual core intel, nothing fancy. And I didn't get this huge delay.
Maybe you should take another poke at it. I don't know what could be causing your hang prob
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As I mentioned already in the comment, some people have the problem, others not. You're apparently one of the lucky ones.
That my machine is a relative old single-processor (I guess 1.8 GHz, not sure) machine should not be a problem; the same app is running on my phone at good speed, and that's a 600 MHz ARM processor! Windows in VirtualBox is also running fine, and that definitely requires more heavy-lifting than emulating Android (after all they don't HAVE to emulate the processor, as it's all Java code,
You think the emulator is bad... (Score:2)
... just wait till your app is out in the wild, trying to run on dozens of very different devices. It aint pretty.
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It's out in the wild, but unfortunately no chance for me (yet) to see it on other devices. Yet the comments that I get on design are very positive.
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Same deal here with a Core2Duos @ 2.2+GHz on Windows 7... the emulator takes ages to start up and is slow as balls. Definitely not usable for actual application testing... :(
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They're P-Series Core2Duos, so I'd say yes. All the Virtualization options including VT-D are enabled in the BIOS...
This is one of them: http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=35569 [intel.com]
Should have everything needed?
They're both X-Series Thinkpads, which definitely don't disable the virtualization features, and Win7's XP Mode (which requires the virtualizaton features) works fine...
Re:Rampant piracy... (Score:4, Interesting)
Um, unless I'm misunderstanding you (i.e. the emulator actually executes native code, although then it's not really an emulator), this should be obvious. The emulator emulates a different instruction set (arm) on your PC (x86). Virtualisation has nothing to do with that, as that executes native code for the processor on the processor itself. As no instruction translation and emulation is needed, a virtualised OS will run much much faster (assuming no IO/mem bottlenecks, it should run as fast as the host OS).
You have a 1.8GHz x86 processor, well I can tell you that it's highly unlikely to be able to run at anywhere near 600MHz arm speed. If you're lucky it will emulate about 200Mhz arm. Emulation is hard to do, and it's no surprise that it's that slow.
Emulation != Virtualisation. They are very very different beasts. You can't say "Or, my machine can run X on virtualbox really fast, so I should be able to emulate a totally different processor just as fast". Different systems entirely.
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The whole Android system itself is platform independent - you can install Android on an Intel netbook (I have seen netbooks in the shops that are dual booting Android and Windows). So why emulate an ARM processor? Totally doesn't make sense.
What you're emulating here is an operating environment, where the underlying hardware is actually irrelevant: you pretend to have a GPS (the developer can actually tell the GPS which coordinates to send to the app in the emulator, or to not have a fix, etc) , a WiFi con
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The whole Android system itself is platform independent - you can install Android on an Intel netbook (I have seen netbooks in the shops that are dual booting Android and Windows). So why emulate an ARM processor? Totally doesn't make sense.
Android is platform independent only if you stick to Java/Dalvik. However, pretty much all games, and many other serious apps, use native libraries written in C/C++, calling them via JNI. For many games, most of the code is in fact in C, with only the event loop in Java. At that point, you need to decide on some architecture for those binaries - which, in practice, is invariably ARM. Hence why the emulator needs to emulate ARM.
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Apple gets round the problem by compiling code for x86 in order to run it in their iOS Simulator. Is there any reason that Google couldn't do the same?
For instance, does the increased freedom given to Android developers relative to iOS make it a more difficult thing to implement?
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Last time I checked the emulator for Android was just qemu [qemu.org]. If you don't know what you're talking about, look it up.
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That's not how the iOS one works. It compiles native x86 code to run in the iOS Similator. As a result, the simulator is radically faster than on real hardware (desktop cpu + loads of ram available).
Why can't they do the same for Android?
Because Google has zero experience developing for embedded devices; while Apple has decades, and knows how to do development on its own hardware. Google has none of that experience, and I submit, really doesn't care to.
Google's approach to Android has been to push it out to as many carriers and phone/tablet makers as possible, as fast as possible; so that they would abandon whatever platform/OS they were targeting, and shed their expertise and experience in same. That way, they would be locked-into the An
Re:Rampant piracy... (Score:5, Informative)
Platform fragmentation from the hardware side isn't the huge issue it's made to be. Anyone who has developed desktop software shouldn't have a huge issue having to target a variety of devices! There are problems that you have to think about very small screens, as well as portrait/landscape display, but it's really not that bad IMHO.
From the software side, on the other hand, it's a right pain. Honeycomb adds the concept of a "Fragment", which is a re-usable UI grouping, so on a tablet you might put three next to each other left to right, but on a phone you display each Fragment as a single screen by itself. However, as no phone runs Honeycomb, this is basically useless; you have to write a Fragment based UI to make effective use of a tablet, and an Activity (or whatever) based UI for phones, so you have two UI layers. Once Ice Cream Sandwich comes out and phones start having Fragments, that will start solving this.
Samsung is probably more at fault (Score:3)
I'm sure there are some people out there not outraged by the fact the the second they invested in a ta
Why should there be more? (Score:2)
How many are waiting until Google gets it act together with Honeycomb and comes out with Ice Cream Sandwich?
How many just don't have Honeycomb devices?
How many are protesting that there has been no Honeycomb source release by Google?
How many Honeycomb apps were expected?
Why should there be more? (Score:2)
Apple used the same trick with the Ipad by including the number of Ipod applications that would run on the Ipad without modification. Why does Google not get this free ride.
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Almost all applications that run on 2.x also run on 3.0 because it's the same JVM.
Careful, or Oracle is going to quote you in its case against Google...
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Where's the evidence...or are you simply trolling?
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B) Most of Android devs
C) The one's that are protesting don't develop for android at all
D) Higher rate of development was expected, but existing apps scale better than expected so people just don't bother....
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You're not the mass target market for the likes of Apple or Samsung. Archos make tablets that allow you to install anything you want.
Re:Why should there be more? (Score:5, Insightful)
How many of us are holding off getting a tablet until we can easily bypass Android (of any flavour) and just load whatever distribution we want?
Hundreds, maybe even somewhere in the low thousands. And this is exactly the sort of reason there are so few Honeycomb apps: there's just not that much demand for Android tablets.
On the tablet, Android has to compete on a level playing field with the iPad. People don't particularly want Android. They don't particularly *like* Android. Not on the whole. But people *do* want iPads.
On the phone, the situation is pretty much the same, except that there are external factors involved. Specifically, carrier choice, service plans, and subsidies. Also, pretty much everyone is getting a phone, while not everyone is getting a tablet. These combine to give Android an artificial boost in apparent demand. I say "apparent demand", because the sales of Android phones don't really show the demand for Android specifically.
Have you ever wondered why there are no Android music players? Google places some limits on them, but as you are all so quick to point out, *anyone* can just take Android (pre 3.0, which is not suited for small screens anyway) and make their own version. If consumers actually *did* want Android, surely there'd be some demand, right?
But there isn't. And that's all right.
This brings up something the stereotypical slashdot Android nerd should come to understand. It's sage advice from your hated icon of evil, Steve Jobs. Paraphrased, you need to get over this notion that for Android to win, Apple/iOS has to lose. Android, like Linux, isn't terribly well designed for general consumption. Its strengths are very geek-centric. You should be happy that Android has found a viable market from which to offer hardware and software that meets your wishes. Macs don't have the market share MS has in the PC market, but they are more than strong enough to stick around providing me with the sort of computer I want. In the end, that's all that matters, right?
So, maybe if you guys come to accept that, you won't be stuck with this distorted view of Android, and you'll be happy with it how it really is, and not scratch your heads wondering why it's not something it will never be. Just like me (and tens of millions of others) with Macs, or you guys, with hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of Linux PCs, or even the hundred million Android phones and hundreds of thousands (again, *maybe* millions) of Android tablets, you can realize that what you have is pretty damned good for you, right now as it currently is.
Isn't that good enough? Isn't that what you really want? A toy, a geek toy, to play around with? You can call it a tool if you'd prefer, but if you're going to call an iPad a toy, at least be consistent about it.
Re:Why should there be more? (Score:4, Insightful)
Have you ever wondered why there are no Android music players? Google places some limits on them, but as you are all so quick to point out, *anyone* can just take Android (pre 3.0, which is not suited for small screens anyway) and make their own version. If consumers actually *did* want Android, surely there'd be some demand, right?
It's not 'some limits', it restricts access to the Market. Of course nobody wants Android if they have no apps to run on it. How many would want iOS without the App Store?
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It's not 'some limits', it restricts access to the Market. Of course nobody wants Android if they have no apps to run on it. How many would want iOS without the App Store?
It's Android, you can just download apps from the developer, or use whatever store you want. Amazon has one. That's what you guys keep harping on about.
Or is this only a benefit of Android when used to put down Apple's security model for iOS which only allows apps signed from the App Store, except on devices connected to developers or enterprises?
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I know that, you know that, but do most people? And are most apps actually available outside of the Market?
It's a benefit of Android, for those who know about it and are willing to try it, so probably a small part of the population.
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Just so we're clear, you're saying that the reason Android music players haven't taken off is that people don't know where to buy apps?
I agree side-loading/rooting/etc. is an Android benefit that isn't broadly appealing, but if people actually wanted Android, the stores would follow (like Amazon's appstore).
Remember, the iPod touch launched before the App Store did.
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I held out getting a smartphone for a long, long time. like, until now. so, there *are* people that are both smartphoneless and/or phoneless.
the data fees turned me off. I found my way to work it out, though. pay as you go and local wifi gets me by on a non-contract (no lock-in, very important for me) non-data (they can't force it when its a-la-carte) and I only make voice calls when I want. mostly its in airplane mode when I'm near wifi; and my carrier (tmobile) finally gives the ability to turn off a
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I bet it's a big higher than that. Even so though, I doubt that is the problem. I believe that android is just outclassed by iOS. While on phones it's not so noticeable on the tablets it's glaringly obvious. I personally want a tablet that I can just load a linux distro like Ubuntu or Slax on but most people just want what works and for most that seems to be iOS. Love 'em or hate 'em but Apple is leading the pack here. With the price point about equal they're going to rule.
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Just what is it that makes iOS so glaringly obviously better? I mean in real, quantifiable ways, not the usual fiction.
Re:Why should there be more? (Score:5, Interesting)
Take it from someone who owned two Honeycomb tablets (Xoom and Transformer), and now also an iPad 2: Honeycomb is unstable and buggy. Force closes are the norm. Music app crashes when playing any MP3 from one of the albums that I have. The whole thing is pretty slow - even swiping screens with icons left and right is slow, especially if you rotate the tablet from its "normal" orientation (landscape, camera near the top). On some websites - most notably, Slashdot when posting a comment - it's so horrendously slow as to be unusable, which is why I had to resort to Opera Mobile specifically for the sake of those websites; but it has its own problems.
In comparison, iPad is pretty limited in what it can do, but in practice I've found that 90% of the time I spend in the browser anyway, and the remaining is split between mail, games and books, all of which are available on both platforms (and good games in particular are more abundant on iPad - it has Civilization, a StarCraft clone, several good shooters etc). And on iPad, these all are silky smooth, so it ends up being the tablet of choice. That, and its battery life - it's 1 hour more even as far as specs go, but both Honeycomb tablets - and particularly Transformer - seem to leak it faster when sleeping.
That said, I'm still keeping Transformer around, hoping for one of the two things: either Google fixes responsiveness and stability issues in Ice Cream Sandwich (earlier I was hoping for 3.1, but it turned out to be a meh kind of update), or else we finally get a full-fledged Linux distro that can be installed on the thing - and then I'll get a nifty Linux tablet/netbook with loads of battery time (thanks to the keyboard dock). My overall feeling is that the latter is more likely at this moment...
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Do you drive a Ferrari to go to the corner store? Why not, after all it is MUCH better engineered than a Honda! And bass amps? WTF? With bass you have VERY low frequencies that are frankly a royal bitch to reproduce without distortion, especially 5 strings so my amp is nearly $2000. Would I have bought a cheaper one if it didn't muddy up on the low A note? yes but since it wasn't suitable for purpose I had to go with the more expensive.
But, you could get a bass rig that didn't cost $2k and still would reproduce that 27.5 Hz low A bass note. (And I submit your amp does it fine; but I'll bet quite a bit that the speakers and cabinet don't make it down to the fundamental within -3dBspl. 27 Hz is quite low for musical-instrument speakers and cabinet designs. Most of the people on TalkBass are face-palming stupid, BTW).
And it is THAT, that right there, where you are fucking up. Did you catch it? Suitable for purpose. These folks aren't watching 1080p video, hell they ain't even watching 720 or even 480. They aren't wanting to, in no particular order...watch movies, listen to their album collections, do video conferencing, or play FPS games.
And of course, you have a stranglehold on the App Store sales figures to know that? I submit you are talking out your (b)ass;
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The people who vote with their wallet say you are wrong.
Facts is Facts.
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I could spend hours replying inline to your arguments,
But I can't so, this ad hominem attack will have to do...
but another slashdotter summed it all by pointing at your login name.
Add it that your post is factless
I said "Please tell me why anyone in their right mind would buy a Xoom? It costs more than an iPad, doesn't have very many apps (the point of the article), has shorter battery life, slow-ass graphics, etc. The list goes on and on." That doesn't sound "factless" to me. And it was an interrogatory; which you dismiss on the basis of my Username?!? Riiiiight. That's a compelling response...
and you reference "people" that you have no statistics about.
The only reference to the word "people" comes in this sentence: "I'm sure that when you show people your Xoom, that you carefully avoid the rough edges on Android, and take care not to mention stuff like the nonfunctional SD slot."
That was simply making a presumption. Tell me I'm wrong, and that you make sure to point out the Xoom's non-functional SD slot, the dearth of apps, the inadequate GPU, the low battery life, the fact that it actually costs a bit more than an iPad. C'mon, tell me I'm wrong. Show me that my "statistics" are incorrect.
We probably do not revolve around that same 'people' according to what you say.
I actually don't "revolve around" anyone. I do actual research, and form my own opinions.
Keep telling yourself that. And keep telling yourself you didn't make a mistake.
So far I am just fine, thank you.
I'm sure you are. It's amazing the lengths most people will go to to justify a bad decision...
Well. The answer is simple. (Score:2)
Google does and can not force honeycomb actively onto the devices. Right now the majority of devices is not Honeycomb. So i would not program for Honeycomb. I am not even sure i would test on Honeycomb. The facilities which pre-Honeycomb Android offers are quite enough for nearly all application i can imagine.
And if we talk about "tablet-specific" well there are application which make use of the older tablets.
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Right now the majority of devices is not Honeycomb. So i would not program for Honeycomb.
The vast majority of devices is iOS. I'm specifically talking about tablets here, but this is also true of the aggregate of iOS and Android devices across all form factors as well (and is even true for just phones, although I wouldn't use the word "vast", although iOS's lead in phones is still in the double-digits).
Re:Well. The answer is simple. (Score:5, Informative)
There is not a shortage of Honeycomb applications. The vast majority of 2.x Applications will run on 3.0 with no trouble. Some of the UI's are not made for 10" screens but that does not make the applications difficult to use at all. The TFA is just trolling for page hits (it's ComputerWorld, did you expect anything different).
Although I think Google does need to work on a resolution independent API for Android, the reported "dearth of applications" is vastly overblown for the reasons mentioned above. I've got a Honeycomb based Acer Iconia Tab and have got more applications on it then my HTC Desire Z (runs 2.3), but the ones I use most often are the inbuilt Google applications (Gmail, browser, Maps, Navigation) with the exception of flash (which absolutely flies but that's because it's connected to fast DSL via WiFi).
Probably WYSE would be the most used application that is not from Google but the web browser on Honeycomb is good enough that it eliminates the need for a lot of applications..
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It's always the same, "we don't need tablet apps as phone apps look good" which isn't true. If you wanted to see the same phone app bigger you could just hold the phone closer to your face :)
If Apple's iPad was like that people would be pointing the finger and laughing. But because Android has the problem people say "It's okay, we don't need that".
This reminds me of Canon and Nikon camera fans. For years Nikon fans would say "we don't need full frame sensors" because Canon had them and Nikon didn't. As soon
Re:Well. The answer is simple. (Score:5, Informative)
You should understand that there is a difference between how iPhone apps look on iPad, and how Android 2.x apps look on Honeycomb. On iOS, the app is not resized to fit the screen - at best, you can bitmap-scale it 2x, which looks ugly as hell. On Android, the UI designed using standard layouts is dynamic and reflowable, and so it actually resizes to fit. You don't end up with 2x-sized buttons and text and so on. You might end up with a lot of unused space, though, but that depends on the app. Some look meh, but surprisingly many end up looking very good. Most file managers, for example.
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seems simple (Score:4, Insightful)
The main contributing factors appear to be the low demand for Honeycomb tablets and the difficulty in discovering Honeycomb-optimized apps in the Market. Hopefully, this will be rectified in the near future.
Seems simple to me. I went to Best Buy this weekend, and the number of competing, often incompatible tablets, is enough to drive someone to give up and just buy an iPad. Not only the Xoom and the Galaxy tab, but also HP's latest webOS tab, and Blackberry's Playbook, and a number of other random ones. It was hard to figure out (especially standing in the store) what the differences were. I can easily see why someone would go for the iPad after seeing all that, since it has some name recognition.
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Also note that the Galaxy Tab doesn't run Honeycomb (yet).
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>>I went to Best Buy this weekend, and the number of competing, often incompatible tablets, is enough to drive someone to give up and just buy an iPad
Yeah. I still don't see a reason for a tablet for myself, but I'm going to be expected to use one next year, so I went into Best Buy and flipped through their cheat sheet on Android tablets. Beyond knowing screen sizes, it doesn't really tell me anything I needed to know, other than the market is really fragmented. Like you, I was temped to just buy an i
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Or Asus Transformer. But that only makes sense to get if you also get the dock.
Re:seems simple (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a strange argument.
The market for smartphones is fragmented, yet most people don't seem to have a problem deciding which one to buy.
Fragmantation may be a problem from the technical perspective of a developer, but for consumers it means that they have a lot of choices, which is a good thing.
Re:seems simple (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm curious to get the input from you or someone else that has done the necessary research on Android tablets as to which the "best one" is supposed to be.
The best one is the one that does the most things you would like to do, in a stable manner.
Right now, for most people, that would be the iPad. Apple has their shit together, and that just cannot be said of ANY Android tablet maker or even Google, at this point in time. They just passed something like 100,000 iPad-specific Apps in their store. I have friends who are anti-establishment types (big Android fans), who have published an iPad app, and won't even consider producing an Android version. As new developers, they want to be paid, and pragmatism is a very good idea.
Sorry, but until Google steps up and blesses a reference standard like a Nexus Tab or something, the Android tablet market won't have any "best" tablet. Until Google steps up with a real tablet SDK and a good emulator, the hurried and shoddy Android tablets will always take a back seat to the iPad.
On a side note, the history of Android and iOS devices should be considered when looking at this market disparity. Apple started with the tablet first, and shrunk it down into a phone. Sure, the iPhone preceded the iPad to market by three years, but the tablet touch interface was being developed for the better part of a decade before it was shrunk down for the phone. In both iPad and iPhone/iPod renditions, the devices were clean-sheet from the ground up. Apple got it right on the tablet, and then worked to get it right on the phone. The delay in releasing the iPad was most-likely due to needing the silicon to catch-up, so that the user experience wouldn't suck. Apple has fast emulators for both the iPad and the iPhone, and targeting either device with a common codebase is very easy.
Android, on the other hand, started out using the Microsoft Windows Mobile reference platform for hardware. The initial designs (pre-iPhone) looked much closer to Blackberries, than the now-omnipresent iPhone/Touch form factor. The first Androids were hobbled by their MS-designed roots with goofy memory management, and all Android manufacturers are still paying Microsoft for the privilege of using their crappy design. Android tablets grew out of this, with the added technical problem that any manufacturer could do whatever the hell they wanted to do. Until Honeycomb, all Android tablets used ugly (fragile) hacks to scale up phone interfaces. From Google's own admission, they did the same for Honeycomb, and won't be releasing the source because of it. Hopefully, they will eventually get it right.
-- Len
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Sorry, but until Google steps up and blesses a reference standard like a Nexus Tab or something, the Android tablet market won't have any "best" tablet.
Actually, the Honeycomb tablet market is much less fragmented than Android phone market. So far as I know, all devices have screen resolution of 1280x800, for example. All are built on Tegra2, and have 1Gb RAM. And Google seems to be unwilling to let manufacturers mod the OS significantly - from what I heard, Asus had trouble even trying to replace the stock (ugly!) icons for Back and Home buttons on the status bar.
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you go online, you search around and then learn that the 'nook color' is a hackable for $200. fully rootable and unrootable if need be, via uSD card. (I plan to get one myself, actually).
THIS is the de-facto android tablet, from all I can tell, out in the real world.
get one and play with it. check the 'coupons' sites that talk about sales and stores and deals and stuff (many of them out there, I don't want to say which to go to, the all steal the 'deals' from each other and repost anyway...). the deals
Because of contentment of scale (Score:2)
If you look at past responses on Slashdot, many here seem fine with UI that is simply scaled up to whatever size screen is presented.
Apple made a case to developers that the UI should be re-thought for something the size of a tablet - a sentiment I agree with. The iPhone supports just as many auto-scaling abilities as does Android, but the simply truth is that something the size of an iPad cries out for a different UI layout, not just windows that grow larger. You hold a tablet differently than a phone fo
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Apple made a case to developers that the UI should be re-thought for something the size of a tablet - a sentiment I agree with. The iPhone supports just as many auto-scaling abilities as does Android, but the simply truth is that something the size of an iPad cries out for a different UI layout, not just windows that grow larger. You hold a tablet differently than a phone for one thing, so control positions should be re-thought. Having a whole screen slide over ala a navigation controller on an iPhone makes no sense on something with a huge screen, or at least looks goofy.
From what I can tell, that's what the whole "fragments [android.com]" thing that Google is trying to introduce into android is about. It seems to me like the ability to make separate sections and display more if the screen size allows. Like instead of getting a list of articles, selecting one, then viewing it, it could just have the list on the left and the viewing on the right if the screen was larger (a tablet) while still using separate ones for small screens (a phone).
iOS *does not* have the same scaling (Score:3)
Your above post is totally misguided. IOS has no auto-scaling reflow capabilities whatsoever. This is a combination of the strange habit of many iPhone apps not using the standard iOS GUI toolkit, and iOS taking shortcuts.
As a result, for the vast majority of iPhone apps, running them on an iPad results in an ugly pixelated mess.
This is not true for Android tablets * at all *, because Android frameworks and applications are designed from the ground up to work on many resolutions, not just one "golden" resol
No Tablets because of no apps because of... (Score:4, Insightful)
This seems like the worlds longest circular argument. The iPad had similar problems when it was released, but people bought it despite not knowing what the killer app was and because people bought it developers developed for it.
There are no Honeycomb apps, because there is a lack of Honeycomb tablets in the market. I don't know a single person with one, yet every second friend has an iPad regardless if they have a iPhone or an Android phone.
People aren't buying the tablets because reviews are negative usually always on account of a lack of apps for it.
And round we go again.
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The iPad had similar problems when it was released
Horse poopies. The iPad ran most of the 200,000+ iPhone apps. On iPad Day One there where over 1000 iPad apps, there are now over 100,000. The 'roid platform needs to get a move on.
Market is still garbage (Score:5, Interesting)
I posted almost 6 months ago complaining about searching in the market app. In the meantime, none of my complaints have been addressed. Given that Google is still primarily a search engine with a bunch of OSs, browsers, apps and features designed to steer people towards their search engine, I would have expected them to implement a better Market app.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2042754&cid=35526684 [slashdot.org]
My final point still stands. Google does not want users to be able to easily differentiate between poor apps and high quality apps since they still won't allow you to sort results by number of downloads, rating, and a few other criteria I can think of. In the case of honeycomb I guess it's working against them.
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I posted almost 6 months ago complaining about searching in the market app. In the meantime, none of my complaints have been addressed.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2042754&cid=35526684 [slashdot.org]
Q: is /. a branch of Google's support? Otherwise I can't understand how would you expect Google to address your complains.
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Point taken. There is way to sort apps by popularity but it's not easy to understand what it means: it's not the number of downloads, it's not the rating. Is it what's been hot in the last N days? If it were, by which definition of hotness? Oddly (as we're speaking of Google) looking for something in the market is more a matter of discovery (browsing the "also viewed" and "also installed" lists) than one of search. I even enjoy that but it's a little time consuming.
If I may add a complaint, I'd like to see
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The number one thing I wanted as soon as I tried the market search was the ability to filter on the security permissions.
I was looking for an offline bible reader (for my wife)... yet it was basically impossible to find one that didn't demand internet access, local disk access (is there a permission for an app-level storage folder only?), even access to your contacts and phone logs. I can't help but feel that this situation persists because there is no means of filtering apps that demand excessive permissio
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Storage access is going to be required to store data on the SD card, and since the SD card is FAT formatted and doesn't have a permissions structure like the internal memory does, there's no way to restrict which files the app accesses once it has SD access.
Personally I wish Android SD cards had always just been formatted EXT4 or something but that would make mounting the drive on Windows for mass file moving trickier.
No need (Score:4, Interesting)
Android has been written from the ground up to support different resolutions / dpi. There is no need to write "honeycomb" specific UIs, because well written apps would have already moved things around for a higher resolution, lower DPI screen. Honeycomb brought "fragments" (reusable parts of the UI) to make it easier for developers to switch between screen types, and "Renderscript" (easier to make fancy looking UI)
Most of the apps that I use on my phone work well on a 10" screen, and some even reformat themselves (adding a side bar with commonly used controls, etc.). There are a few crappy apps that decide to use fixed pixel coordinates so they don't work (they are either uninstalled, or I email the dev about it and they fix it).
Factoring the above in: why would you reprogram to use HC when your app is already doing the same thing? That's why most of the HC apps are *NEW* apps taking advantage of fragments, etc., and not ones that have been scrapped and redesigned for HC. If you use HC features, you need to use reflection / second code path for Gingerbread / non-tablet devices support -- adding extra work.
Apps for the i-series devices had NO provision for higher resolution displays (most were using 320x480 or whatever the original res is), and therefore must have applications rewritten to take advantage of higher resolutions (blowing up 320x480 @ 3.5" to 1024x768 @ 10" = blur city. 800x480+ @ 4" to 10" is ok). Your options as a dev were either: your app looks like garbage (and therefore lower ratings), or your rewrite it (and count towards the "number of tablet apps").
TL;DR: Good Android apps already support higher res / lower DPI tablets without needing to depend on Honeycomb specific features. As such, it doesn't count towards "honeycomb apps".
Price, polish, brand! (Score:5, Interesting)
The Honeycomb tablets currently in the market are expensive, many even more expensive than an iPad and yet less polished.
Trying to break into a market against a well-established player, when your product is more expensive, has less marketing and is lower in quality isn't going to work
I myself have some really nice ideas for Honeycomb, tablet optimized apps but am holding off from developing them until the platform gets some traction.
It might very well be that Honeycomb is this beautiful, hard-working, honey-making bee of the mobile OS world, but if hardware makers persist in sticking it on top of turds and hopping it sells, Apple is going to dominate the tablet market for the next 20 years.
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The Honeycomb tablets currently in the market are expensive, many even more expensive than an iPad and yet less polished.
No..??!! You serious? [pcworld.com]
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I bought an ASUS tablet which was $200 less than the iPad with the same specs,
I find very little missing. Two very big advantages, does not require iTunes and can sync with multiple computers. One more thing, it plays Flash which for me was never a selling point but my wife loves it.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I second this post. I can't say enough good things about the ASUS Transformer. The tablet rocks especially when you consider how much cheaper and open than the iPad it is. Not many people are talking about it here, I guess its still a secret with not as much publicity as the Zoom.
The Android OS right now is pretty close to iOS. Its a little less polished, and does suffer from the occasional bug, but for the price you're gaining flexibility.
Comes down to such mundane but important things (Score:4, Insightful)
I went to Best Buy and on display were the Xoom, the new Galaxy Tab 10.1, and the iPad 2.
Scrolling around, web browsing, and other things, the 2 android tabs were choppy. iPad was smooth as silk.
Looking at the shell, the 2 android tabs have a lot going on. That's confusing. iPad is just a bunch of icons, but I get it.
The iPad 2 was way nicer to hold than the Xoom, though the Galaxy was, IMO, the iPad's equal in this regard.
Overall, the iPad 2 just feels like a refined device, and the Android tabs feel like, well, a Microsoft solution.
iPad 2 wins, and therefore gets the developers.
STARTLING THEORY (Score:2)
Perhaps they're obscured from view... in some sort of "Hideout" for Honeycomb-related things.
Pay for devs (Score:3)
Its not like google lacks cash.
Why not just commission say 500 apps at 10k each to jumpstart the eco system?
The market issue is unbelievable esp for as company specialised in search
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dunno, but MS is going from scratch (and arguably image handicap, everyone hates windows even non geeks as they associate it with work)
Android would be building from established momentum, 500x10k = 5 million. Go large and go 5000 @ 50 million. Heck double the pay. Whats 100 million to google if it says grabs 10% market share? The #1 complaint against android tablets is lack of apps, its chicken and egg, so throw cash at it.
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The developers of those would certainly find this "amusing".
Also, few good apps actually come out of such efforts in the end. Maybe 5 of 500.
See Windows Phone....
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Be smart, have it as some sort of competition with voting, judges, I dunno make some semi interactive system work. Hey turn it into a spectacle, whatever. I'm not saying hand out 20k to any half a--sed effort. Throw in another million or five for the vetting process if you have to, as long as it isn't a stalinist central command directed effort (in which case it would yes probably suck).
That is such a straw man argument.
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Be smart, have it as some sort of competition with voting, judges, I dunno make some semi interactive system work.
You mean, like the Apple AppStore?
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Why not? I don't care if apple does it or not. If its a good idea they should do it. Enjoy trolling
Explosion. (Score:3)
"One would have expected an explosion of Android tablet apps like that seen with the iPad"
If as many or more Honeycomb-running tablets were being sold, then yes, one might have expected that. Aside from that, there seem to be the issues cited in other comments, to the effect that it's hard to find apps in the marketplace, the emulator runs slowly, and not every Honeycomb tablet has the same technical specifications. So it seems like making this explosion of Android tablet apps may be harder than making them for the iPad, while serving a smaller audience.
Who expected this explosion and why? What reason does anyone have to think these issues are being rectified?
Java (Score:2)
Most PC apps are C ... Android is Java, which is not suitable for a PC. The reason iOS has so many apps is that it is a desktop class system with native C, so you can easily port Mac, Windows, Unix, and game console code. If iOS had no C, iMovie and GarageBand and Keynote and many other PC apps would not be running there yet. They are there already because they did not have to be rewritten.
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You can use C and C++ in Android apps for two years now [android.com]. In fact, most Android games are 99% C++. And did you think all those file browsers with SMB support implemented it from scratch? They just link to libsamba.
It's the carriers and manufacturers (Score:3)
The carriers don't like generic firmwares. Not only do they like to disable useful features, they also have to take a long time to negotiate deals bundling bloatware on devices. This makes them slow on the uptake for device software and even more slow on upgrades which often never happen to encourage people to buy new devices and extend their contracts.
Manufacturers also want people to buy new devices as well, so there is less incentive for new software on old devices.
Easy (Score:3)
1.6-devices are still being sold in stores.
The only few tablets being sold with Honeycomb are more expensive than the iPad 2. As much as I prefer Android over iOS, if you ignore politics, lock-ins, etc for a little while, iPad 2 is simply the better product for 95% of the population right now, because it has the apps and its UI is quite polished, AND it's cheaper than less polished tablets with less apps.
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> Can we please stop to give stupid nick names for software projects?
But then I couldn't talk about us needing an Ice Cream Sandwich strategy...
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Spoken like yet another "I have never used a tablet" sourpuss, replaying the same broken record about the glories of netbooks. But the net is flowing over with stories of people who have found that once they got one, the uses and benefits became apparent.
A netbook lacks a touch screen, and is uncomfortable and impractical to use when you need to hold it (e.g. standing on a commuter train). So, it fails to cover even two advantages of a tablet. Aren't you just really afraid of change? And that is why you sco
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For each example you could throw at me of those people, I could counter it with an example of people that consider them to be overpriced gimmicks. And the very fact that they are not selling well outside of iPad suggest that only the fanbois want them.
I've always wondered about this. How is it that there were only enough fanbois to garner Apple 3-5% of the PC market, but enough to get 70%+ of the MP3 player market, enough to move Apple past companies with much more experience in handsets in the smartphone market segment, and now to sell millions of tablets?
In the last (calendar) quarter of 2009, Apple sold 3.3 million computers-- their best quarter ever at the time. In that same quarter they sold 8.7M iPhones.
Where did Apple, a company with such a vanish
Re:Here's The Real Reason (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes. You're right. The millions upon millions of iPad users all over the world are all Apple fanboys with no capabilities of thinking in an individual capacity. The iPad is a failure just waiting to happen and netbooks will still come back and take over.
You keep telling yourself that. Please. Run with it.
When iPads came out, they created a new (or reinvigorated and old and dead) market. There was uncertainty in its capabilities outside of iHaters calling it an "oversized iPod Touch". Now, two years later the iPad has had a large penetration in vertical markets where before there were none for a tablet. Back then, perhaps it was correct to say that it is not meant to replace laptops or netbooks. Now though is a different story. I lost track of how many friends and colleagues that were looking for a new home computer or a laptop decided to buy an iPad instead. There is a huge, huge market for people that don't need the capabilities of a laptop/desktop PC and all the headaches that go with keeping one running. Tech-heads, geeks, and nerds hate that idea as Apple's model pretty much obliterates their definition of what computing should be like. I say it's about damn time. We've had decades of what was essentially garbage PC's devoid of any user-friendliness for the Joe-consumer. I think it's great that Apple saw how the PC-folks were screwing everything up and decided to make "computers" that hides the computer part from the user and just let's them use it like a toaster. Good for them.
It's the haters that try to convince everyone until they're blue in the face that the only "real" tablet is one that can be rooted. I can tell you right now that that kind of logic guarantees you'll lose 99% of your potential consumer base.
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You've proven his point:
"You do realise that if you're not possessed of the patience to learn how to use a computer by trial-and-error yourself, you can go to things called "computer courses" don't you? Billions of people around the world seem very happy using PCs, I would suggest a tiny percentage of them are PC nerds and an even tinier percentage have purchased iPads. And I suspect most of them still use PCs."
People shouldn't have to take a training course to learn how to use a PC. They don't typically n
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I even remember clearly on here about 18 months ago when the fanbois were justifying their buying iPads and themselves saying that they are not designed to replace laptops or netbooks - therefore a tablet is still one more portable device you have to carry with you because there is no single device that does everything most people need to do.
I think you've got that wrong. The Apple fanbois were claiming that iPads were the new wave and were a replacement for laptops, netbooks, and even quite possibly desktops. The concept was that iPads would drastically alter the very face of computing.
I would think it's a much more reasonable to look at tablets as a different interface for specific tasks. That is - tablets are ideal interfaces for consumption of media. If your use of a laptop is largely watching videos and updating your social messagin
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The main factor is that no one has a Xoom, while iPhone and iPad have major markets.
Just FYI (not commenting on your entire post): Xoom is not the only one featuring HoneyComb. See asus eee pad transformer [pcworld.com] rumors has it to have the same price tag as iPad (or $100 lower if only with 16 GB).
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We're waiting for an explosion.....of Honycomb devices.
What do you mean? Weak batteries again? Or do you think HoneyComb will be chosen as a vector for a terrorist attack?
(peace, brother, just kidding)
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This does not surprise me. There is simply not enough actual hardware out there. I mean, more then enough idea's and prototypes. But nothing actually being sold in the stores or even online.
And I'm not talking about the absurdly priced Samsung type tablets, but normally priced GOOD hardware for around $300 through $400 range.
Show me good hardware that will run honeycomb now and one or two future versions for $350 and I'm aboard.
eee pad transformer [pcworld.com]. Granted, $399, a bit over your $350 bid.
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Guess I'll have to wait until Samsung and Asus release their new tablets and hope, they actually hit the shelves.
Rumors has that Asus had released [pcworld.com] theirs. So, you only have to hope now.
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My take is that starting with the iTunes/iPod combo Apple attracted the people that were more willing to pay for digital goods. Most of those good customers are gravitating around Apple's products now. Google and other companies might be able to steal some of them to their business but it will take time and a lot of skill.
Regardless of my assumption being right or wrong, I believe that making money out of apps (even iOS ones) is not any easier than making money in any other business. What I do is look for a