HTC Working on Android Tablet | Hacker News Reader

HTC Working on Android Tablet

anythingbutipad.com

28 pointsborisk15 comments

"an HTC representative let slip"

Do PR people really let things 'slip'? To let something slip is usually indicative of an accidental giveaway. If a PR person tells a tablet-oriented site that HTC are working on a tablet too, surely this is a regular announcement without any useful or interesting details?

At the very least, HTC could have bought a blogger to circulate rumours or pointed a trade magazine to 'expose' an order from a supplier's factory. It's this attention to detail that put Apple ahead of the crowd!

I've been holding off and holding off, waiting for a decent iPad competitor to come along and it seems that there could be a few in 6 months or so - Notion Ink's Adam looks very nice and I am sure that HTC's tablet will be pretty too. However, Apple have shipped, the thing works and it has a reasonable software ecosystem. I can actually go to a shop and buy one.

Since I actually want a tablet-like device, I can't really think of any reason not to buy an iPad right now. Why has it taken so long for competitors to provide an alternative?

I don't think manufacturers were quite prepared for just how high of a bar Apple was going to set with the iPad. I personally refuse to buy Apple iOS products on my own principles, but the hardware always looks amazing without sacrificing quality. Combined with the fact that nobody was even certain that the iPad would even exist when it was announced, I think manufacturers weren't really taking the tablet market seriously until they realized just how much of a hit the iPad was. I'll bet most companies weren't even investing more than a gee-whiz in tablet technology until then, either, just due to the complexities of development.

It's a funny site name: 'Anything but iPad'.

In a german newspaper interview[1], a random analyst said that the iPad already has become the standard to which any new device will be compared.

This site confirms that theory. Or is a brilliant parody of it. I'm not quite sure.

[1] = http://www.derbund.ch/digital/computer/Apples-Rivalen-muesse...

I think the site name is a reference to 'Anything But iPod'[1], which has been around since 2005.

[1] http://www.anythingbutipod.com/

I'm as non-Apple-fan as they get, but this is honestly why I really, REALLY admire Apple - they only announce products that are ready to ship, and steer clear of "We're working on this, stay prepared for our awesomeness to blow you out of the water! Coming soon to cinemas near you!"

To be fair, that's easier to do when there's nothing else like whatever it is you're working on. People (me included) are waiting for Android tablets right now. There was nobody working for a tablet before the iPad, so Apple didn't have to say "we're working on this, don't buy the competitor's thing yet".

Wow! That's a pretty bias view!

If you remember there were a lot of rumours of the iPad coming out. In part it was because of a lot of people, including many Wall Street guys, felt Apple HAD to compete with the netbook-mania by releasing their own netbook.

Apple sticked to its gun then. It could have used such a line just as well: "No, netbook are crap compared to our awesome tablet that we're working right now: stay tuned". Did they? Nope.

You even had Microsoft and others (remember the Techcrunch's tablet) being announced long before they were ready, and even then Apple didn't change its stance.

I'm not saying that Apple is just a genius or something: it's probably as much arrogance as it is a passion to be different (and not just copy some other ideas). But to say that Apple didn't have to say anything, it's partial recollection.

There was no good tablet before Apple's, mainly because there was no good OS. PC OSes are a bad fit for tablets, so it has to be either iOS or Android. I'm very surprised Google is going with ChromeOS on its tablet, I hope they make it easy to install Android.

In hindsight I agree. But back in those days: a) most people didn't believe that, and b) the Linux community was developing distributions for tablets. And anyway the famous (in those days) techcrunch's tablet was not going to use any PC OS.

Anyway, the only point I was replying to was that Apple did have a lot of pressure back in those days to come out with their netbook or with something that covered the same niche, and some people even suggested that Apple should have lost in the tablet market because there were already a few offers around or soon to be.

In other words I was not discussion what made the iPad a success (if it deserved it, or any of those more hot topics). Simply that it's not true that Apple was not under pressure to present _something_, which is the point the OP was saying.

Well yeah, the media does that for them for free.

If anyone is going to get this right it will be HTC.

It'll be interesting to see if people take up Android tablets the way they have with Android phones. My experience with the iPad suggests that a tablet is like a traditional computer in that the experience is dependent on the availability of quality apps. Right now, the Android Market is easily the weakest aspect of Android.

not all that surprising.

what caught my eye was the 5.1 channel smartphone audio remark - how much storage space do they anticipate smartphones having by the time that is released? multichannel audio is pretty huge, spacewise

Since you can fit several full-length movies on an iPad (16-64GB storage space), adding 5.1 channel audio won't be much of a problem.

Put it all in the cloud!

Only partly facetious.

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