Apple sells 3 million iPads in 80 days
ipadwatcher.com
ipadwatcher.com
there are a lot of commercial possibilities going unexploited at present. I'm already seeing iPads deployed commercially; at the mall the other day, I saw someone using one to take consumer surveys, and I noticed over a year ago that 7-11 stores use (older) tablets for inventory management. As a pure consumer device, tablets - preferably slightly larger ones - are just begging for deployment as a family boardgame platform.
Pretty crappy way to tag along on another companies research and marketing.
I just want a damn tablet with android with decent specs. I don't care if it's flat like a pancake. Make it 720p with a front facing camera and at least 32gb of flash memory. Then ew nvidia chip and BLAM, I'll buy it so will all the real computer users. :)
There are considerably fewer “real computer users” than non computer users.
Let's face it: “real computer users” are a niche.
It looks like a big ipod touch (which means people are rapidly familiar with it), but it feels very differently.
And of course, even if it were just a big ipod touch none of Apple's (potential) competitors in the field have such a platform.
http://www.ipmart.com/main/product/APad,China,iPad,,7,0,Inch...
(More background information: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,702119,00...)
Several channels that are covering the Word Cup (in Brazil that is almost all of them :-) have the hosts reading information off iPads.
Apple added a number of new APIs and UI extensions in order to make the iPhone OS suitable for a large screen. Until Google does the same with Android we'll be stuck with nothing but big Android cell phones.
What do you think is missing, or to say it another way, why is the iPad not just a big cell phone (minus the ability to make calls)?.
I'll put it this way: The iPad would not be a compelling device if it merely ran iPhone software at a higher resolution.
Hardware-wise, the iPad is nothing but an iPod Touch with a giant screen and a giant battery. Software-wise, it's everything but an iPod or iPhone; the use cases are very different. A touch-surface that's 5 times larger than an iPhone enables a much richer and more sophisticated UI, and this is evident in the iPad SDK, Apple's iPad software, and the successful 3rd-party iPad software.
Google needs to define their tablet HIG, they need to update their SDK to implement their HIG, they need to update their built-in apps to take advantage of the new SDK, and they need to get their 3rd party developers on board. All of this takes time, and I would not expect it to take shape before the spring or summer of 2011 (they're still "feverishly working" to get Android 2.2 out the door). Anything less will result in a product that's not as compelling as the iPad.
That said, I have no doubt that manufacturers will try to sell Android tablets before the Android OS is ready, and I have every confidence that those tablets will fail in the marketplace. But eventually there will be compelling Android tablets.
Having to update Android apps to take full advantage of newer form factors, is entirely different from having to fix Android itself to work with different form factors, and even if the apps are not updated they'll probably still generally work better than iPhone apps on iPads because of Android's inherent multiplicity of devices.
Not the exact same thing, I know, but waving the Nintendo Wii controller around feels a lot closer to interacting with a touchscreen than it does my desktop, and there's a vast pool of UI design knowledge in the gaming market. Not instantly accessible to likes of us, but companies like Asus and their technology partners have the resources, developer infrastructure and motivation to open up alternative platforms.
The hardware companies have always depended on the software companies for things to run on their devices, and right now the software companies just don't have anything to compete with the iPad.
In other words, not to be compete or beat with apple technically in the short term, but to deny them marketing hegemony. Perhaps they'd rather wait for the initial iPad thunder to subside, than risk being tagged as 'a poor second best' in the first lap of the race. I suppose it depends on whether one feels engineering or brand positioning is the biggest determinant of long-term success.
Could someone explain what stuck out in the above?
Insta-edit: I see it's -1 now, and I don't have that strength yet, so it wasn't a mis-click.
A generic constrained board is interesting.
> Real artists ship, dabblers create concept products
> But there does appear to be a weak correlation between a company’s ability to churn out concept products and its ability to design, manufacture and profitably sell products based on those.
http://counternotions.com/2008/08/12/concept-products/
Cached: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?oe=UTF-8&hl...
Did you read the article? The article is not about the relative minor success of Windows-based tablets; it is about how the lack of constraints on price (how much it will cost to manufacture) and manufacturing (how you will make it on a mass scale) can make prototype concepts alluringly too easy.
For example, Apple had to develop state-of-the-art manufacturing technology to produce the Aluminum unibody MacBook.
So this was not an example of them creating a concept product. Right? That was the point I was making. However valid and insightful the article you linked to may be, it doesn't seem to address this specific case and neither does the video.
According to the video, Ives said the unibody is fabricated from an extruded piece of aluminum, then CNC'd using various jigs and fixtures. He then states how the most difficult part of the process was "developing" the various jigs and fixtures to produce the desired final results.
But he goes into no detail regarding this aspect.
Why do you consider this "state-of-the-art"? CNCing aluminum extrusions in jigs and fixtures in nothing new.
I was actually disappointed when a saw a unibody being manufactured and thought, "They're milling these?"
So, I really don't believe that other manufacturers barrier to entry in the tablet space is lack of CNC capabilities (but maybe fixture design?).
Android has been out for years now. They could have seen the tide coming and released a tablet running it way before apple. But they didn't. They just seem to want to leech of apple's market research.
This is an operating system which received a strong negative reaction from many in the (non-Microsoft-worshiping) tech press. It just goes to show you how out of touch many of them are with what really excites users.
7 sold 90 million licenses in its first 4 months.
The iPhone 3GS sold 1 million units in 3 days. (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/03/ipad_sales_top_one_m...)