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Comment by igorgue | Hacker News Reader

"5 years ahead of all competitors."

I like your future guessing skills :-). I don't think I have clue what's going to happen next month.

How long would it take a company, even of Google's size, to create a handheld android device that competes with game handhelds? How long would it take to create a tablet that is as successful as the iPad? How long would it take to create a platform and store and get all the deals with the music industry, movie industry, book publishers, attract video game developers and more that could beat Wal-mart? All that isn't happening in a month...

I think 5 years is actually pretty generous considering it took Apple about 10 years (while they control both the hardware and software side making it much easier) and everyone else can see the path that worked.

To answer your first two questions, it would take many years. But unless you're privy to insider information from a lot of different companies, you can't rule out that all those devices are several years into their development already. I would be shocked if there aren't at least a couple Android tablets that have been under development for more than a year. As for your third question (how long to line up the content providers): not very long at all. Once Apple has paved the way, it is much easier to get those same media companies to give the same deal to a competing device, since those media companies don't like Apple having that much control over their content i the first place.

I don't know if we're going to be using handheld devices like the iPad 5 years from now.

I don't want to make fun of you or anybody but trying to predict the future, seems to be something everyone fails.

People fears to say "I don't know" it's kinda like religion, lol.

I disagree, we can use the past to inform the future so it's not the same as religion. I think it's a much better bet to say that devices like the iPad will be more popular 5 years from now than to bet that they're going away. Sure it's silly to put specific numbers to it, but we can estimate the broad strokes to a better than chance accuracy.

Don't predict the future. Bet on the future. If you want to have the mobile skills that will be in demand two or even five years from now, pick what that will be and invest in learning them. You can always hedge by dabbling in the other platform.

For me, I am learning iOS first and Android later (Actively pursuing and coding iOS projects and monitoring the latest flavor-of-the-month Android state-of-the-art and evolving best-in-class Android apps with interest)

@igorgue: Not trying to predict the future just stating how long it would take to catch up to present products/platforms based on how long it took Apple to create them. The nature of this question was speculative and I was basing it on some current present facts. I don't know for sure but that is the way it seems, this whole topic is about predicting the future.

So you don't think handheld devices like the iPod Touch, DS, PSP will be around in the future? iPad aside if you don't think people will use larger screen flat devices in the future.

I thought we were having a discussion not just joining the religion of 'I don't know', how fun is that? Ok then the probability of people carrying personal media, creative, entertainment, gaming devices is probably going to go up rather than down. But I don't know for sure...

I just don't know, that's my opinion, maybe we're going to be using something like Futurama's eyePhone.

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