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Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

(scratches head) Android isn't the only other other option for controlling a tablet. I know desktop Windows and Linux are unsuitable from a UI point of view, but there's plenty of middleware around to bridge touchscreens to software, and there are plenty of self-contained UI paradigms: game consoles rarely use the desktop metaphor.

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.

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Few dedicated software companies can even compete with Apple. I mean, at the moment it's just Apple and Google in the smartphone space, and Google's barely competitive despite Apple only having one phone on one provider. To assume Asus can somehow just will a brilliant new software platform into existence to compete with Apple's in a matter of months makes no sense to me.

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.

I see your point, but disagree about the 'matter of months' part; we were discussing the Apple tablet here last year, iPhones have been out for a few years (as have some other niche multitouch products), and the tablet + stylus concept has been on the market for a decade. So I had expected other players to offer up something even if it was only to stake a claim on behalf of their brands.

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.

I don't know why the above was downed, but I tryed upvoting it, an I'm not sure I succeeded from my phone. (Takes more than one to raise from 0?)

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.

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