China Rips Off The iPad With The iPed
kotaku.com
kotaku.com
Android will take the whole of the Chinese and Indian smartphone market by default, unless something else comes along which is more open, versatile and easy to implement. The markets are sufficiently price sensitive that $7 extra for a WinMob license is a dealbreaker, let alone the vast premium the likes of Jobs or Kallasvuo charge. They have peculiar demands that western manufacturers just aren't attuned to - when have you ever seen a Nokia or a Motorola with dual sim card slots?
Western hardware companies should be sweating about their local markets too, but not because of the threat of generic clones - there's a much bigger scare on the horizon and it looks suspiciously like HTC. They have gone from generic manufacturer to big brand in a few short years off the back of WinMob and Android; There is a tide of companies seeking to do exactly the same thing.
Mohandas Gandhi said "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.". I hope we all get our enjoyment while the joke is still funny.
The only weakness compared to the iPhone is the quality of apps, but that is quickly changing.
Android's clever design of intents + back button behavior gives the mobile device a far more weblike (in a good way) experience when using apps.
I can see waiting if there's some particular feature you like (additional front camera maybe?) but otherwise you seem to be getting the same core hardware, so why wait? There will be a new "generation" of Android hardware soon enough and you want to enjoy your phone before it gets totally outdated.
One of my disappointments when first getting an Android phone was that the apps trended toward being uglier and more buggy than on iPhone, but even in the last three months that's changed big-time. 3.3.1 strikes again?
They had a nice session at I/O where they decomposed the UI design elements behind the new official Twitter app (although if you have an Evo right now you may well have been in that same room with me). I don't use Twitter much at all, but I still found myself spending 20 minutes playing with the app in awe at how well put together it is.
I hope that apps like that provide some sold examples to get developers to think a bit more about design and user experience. The new features in 2.2 hopefully should help as well.
Just because Eric Raymond cast himself as the Gandhi of the OSS movement and used that quote doesn't mean we should copy him.
Despite his appearance in their ad campaign I don't see many Apple fans considering themselves ignored or laughed at, nor using that as justification for their assured future victory if they are. On the other hand it seems to fit the Christensen disruptive model very well: "The reason big new things sneak by incumbents is that the next big thing always starts out being dismissed as a “toy.”
Before the iPod dominated the market, before Apple's re-ascent to glory was completely undeniable, Mac users were _always_ the butt of jokes.
If I were to credit anyone, I'd maybe credit Jon Hall, who used it in his speeches when he was promoting Linux at DEC.
For example, in a casino perseverance is not a good quality unless you cheat (the more you play the more you loose). On the other hand a startup founder might benefit from having this property ("You have to be willing to keep trying new things and refuse to die." http://startup2startup.com/2008/11/25/paulgraham-ycombinator... ).
Apple is successful in large part because of attention to detail; this thing can't even seem to decide whether it's an iPed or an APad. And it's not really a clone in any sense: it's only a 7" screen, yet apparently still heavier than the (arguably already too heavy) iPad. Really, what are the chances it's great at $100 when most people were surprised Apple was able to get the iPad (perhaps manufactured at the same factory) down to $500?
Be excited about the future potential of Android tablets using cheap commodity hardware, sure, but I don't see anything exciting about this particular device from what little info is here. What an example of not getting why the iPad is successful.
China is a country. Some folks in China did something.
Unless said folks are govt, "China" didn't do anything.
No, of course not.
[Edit] Well, it seems like there may be some unsupported (by Google) Android-x86 work going on, so maybe it's possible:
I wonder if the fact that Android software runs in a JIT-compiled runtime mean that binaries for Android-ARM are compatible with Android-x86. [/Edit]
China is a world's factory. With disregard for copyright and intellectual property its hard to see when their own people will get motivation to invent and develop technologies.
Not to say that the US didn't do it, or that Japan was also well known in the 70's for much the same thing, but to say that it is only because China has "more people" and more "probability" is misleading. The practice is widespread and encouraged, not just by their culture, but also indirectly by their government.
Must be the most innovative discovery of all times
That's because they weren't taught in our textbooks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_inventions
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_and_technolo...
Camera manufacture started as either junk, or as cheaper copies of German (Leica) bodies and lenses.
Car manufacture was in one case initially intertwined with licensed designs from the UK.
In both these cases, Japan grew to become the leader in cameras and amongst the leaders in automobiles.
The interesting thing is whether China can do the same thing with computers, but as software has such a cultural dependence, I highly doubt it. Aside from Matz, has Japan even produced any really notable software or operating systems?
Ruby
The NES, the MSX, The FM-Towns, Sega Master System, Megadrive, Dreamcast, the SNES, Mario, Contra, Starfox, Golden Axe, Thunderblade, Outrun, The PSP, The Playstation, PS2, PS3.
That's just in one industry (gaming). Of all of those the only ones that weren't significant out of Japan were the FM-Towns and MSX. The MSX was the biggest single threat to 8-bit computers in the early to mid 80s not because of it's power, but because it was a licenced standard (with OS software admittedly written by Microsoft, thank goodness they never got a hold on the OS market!)
And marketing, only one country is known to do well. And one company, specially.
It is not a lack of motivation. This device was built ground up itself.
Where?
How soon till a proper reviewer can get their hands on this and put it through some paces? Engadget, how about putting that checkbook journalism to some good use?
First butterflies are already here: http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.39169
However, one has to keep in mind that the CPUs currently in these devices are very underpowered(instead of 600mhz ARM actually clocking in at 300mhz).
User experience is very unPad like to say the least..
I am puzzled though, why they do not go for more powerful CPUs as the price difference should be only a few $.
Apple has more important things to bother about. Like innovating, the iPad mini, for instance.
Did for me, though.
And of course this appears much more of a physical/appearance clone than anything. I'd like to see some 3rd party reviews of durability and battery life and so on.
In the end, it is no different than cars and other consumer goods. Some people appreciate a product with real design and innovation, and some just want the cheapest thing possible in a given form factor. I think there are markets for both.
They probably know more about how the ipad is made than most people at apple if they have the insider connections where it is being built.
Since schematics printed on paper, in a binder, etc are relatively easy to smuggle out of the factory (or make a duplicate for), it's most likely that the knockoffs use the manufacturing schematics at some point in their production.
Bunny has a great post of the types of schematics available in shen zhen.
I have an Android phone, and though I like the Sprint service better than AT&T's, compared to an iPhone using the phone itself is an exercise in clunkiness and awkwardness.
I just flashed it to 2.1 (itself an exercise in unnecessary foldirol) and it feels somewhat smoother, but not Apple-smooth.
Apple is happy owning a small market share while obtain a higher price for its items.
90% usability may be a good deal, but only for the 20% of people who put the effort in to find benefit from the technology. Everyone else would have spent less, but gained less as well -- as they ignore large swaths of features, spending only enough cognitive time to use one or two core applications.
E.g. Note the incredible flexibility and power of desktop PCs and how that's been almost completely ignored by 90% of users, who barely know enough to do email and the web.
And that's a particular issue in the case of a mobile, secondary-computing device such as tablets, where having the functionality isn't anywhere near as important as actually improving the experience of using those functions.
i.e. They have passable email on their desktop and/or phone, so you need more than passable email to sell a tablet. If 'almost' having good usability was good enough, we'd have been hip-deep in windows tablets for the last decade and Palm PDAs before that.
What do you mean "wants to be", isn't it that already? Heck, for every phone maker that isn't Apple or doing production for Apple, iPhone OS isn't even an option anyway. So really, it wants to be the low-cost alternative to the future Microsoft option and in-house OS's that phone manufacturers have. If you mean from the phone user's perspective, then Android phones and iPhones seem to be at price parity (and this competition has been fantastic no matter which phone you end up picking, btw), but feel free to run some numbers if you want (last I did it was a wash depending more on how you wrote the rules of the comparison than anything else).
How long have you had the Android phone? Switching OS's can grate on one's trained expectations even when the two are equivalent in usability. It can take a while before you can really compare them honestly (or for cognitive dissonance to do its work, as the case may be).