Never mind the iPad – where are the full-time Android tablet users? | Hacker News Reader

Never mind the iPad – where are the full-time Android tablet users?

medium.com

18 pointspritambarhate25 comments

> You should also totally sign up for my daily mailing list of interesting links. See how I got that in there with no annoying modals?

Except for you didn't because you decided to publish on Medium which has annoying as hell popup modals. No I don't want a Medium account, I'm never going to post there and I never going to pay for their shit curated content.

Android is absolutely dead on Tablets, Google never gave much of a damn about the form factor with utterly piss-poor UI optimization for larger displays, everything went downhill from Honeycomb.

With a software experience like that it's not surprising that OEM's never went all in on decent hardware.

I was in that boat. I've even try to keep the nexus 7 going, but it just becomes unusable.

Got rid of mine a long time ago, and even the cheapest of the iPad mini worked better with more apps.

I switched to a cherry trail Windows tablet with 4 gig of RAM and a 1200p IPS display, I got it on sale for £75 so it was an absolute steal. I got Fedora running on it quite nicely but nothing on Linux is remotely comfortable on a touch screen so I had to go back to Windows 10.

That's not the real reason, though I'm sure it's a factor. The real reason is that Android is lower in the market and thus their customer base tend to purchase one and only one device. Apple is more expensive and their customer base has more disposable income to spend on devices. (And since they have more disposable income, Apple is more inclined to provide a better tablet experience).

It's all about the benjamins. Google would invest in tablets if android users spent money on them.

The arrival of the phablet, in my case a Galaxy Note 1, 2 and 4 ended the use of my iPad.

Add to this how Android can generally be bent to do more than an iPhone or iPad (ie, Tasker), and it's hard to leave. Despite having mostly Apple, my current Android Phablet (A pixel xl) is hard to replace. The xs max looks to be the first comparable.

Android tablets are going the way of Chrome OS.

From a flexibility perspective, both the surface and android tablets optionally support a mouse. iPad goes out of its way to remove mouse support.

The pixel slate hardware is likely to eventually support other operating systems (Ubuntu, Windows?) as well.

I've had Android tablets, Windows tablets, and iPads. Of all of them, only my iPad has really earned a place in my computing life; it's done so so well in fact that I sold my MacBook Pro almost a year ago and haven't had a laptop of my own since. I do have an MBP issued by my employer, but I rarely use it for anything personal and when I do it's nothing more than light web browsing.

Android tablets are "good enough", especially for web browsing. I'd go as far as to say they're better for that purpose because they allow you to fully integrate a third-party browser. They fall short when it comes to app selection and integration across different devices, though. I often tether my MBP to my iPad via BlueTooth, and it's completely painless. That's not easy to set up on Android, and even when I've done so in the past, the battery life suffered significantly and the connection failed often for no discernible reason.

Windows tablets are better than Android IMO, but they suffer badly from lack of UI support. Even today, neither Firefox nor Chrome support touch interactions are well as Edge - and Edge isn't great. Trying to use programs designed for use with a keyboard and mouse on a tablet is painful at best. It's a nice idea, and I'd be willing to try a new Surface device, but as of about a year ago they just weren't worth the cost to me.

For me, iPads hit the sweet spot - they're fast, have good battery life, integrate well with my MBP, and have the best selection of apps. The browser support is really the only complaint I have about iOS, and it's not a deal-killer for me. Safari is a good browser.

There's no question that iPad is the king of tablets.

Whether the iPad be the primary or secondary device for someone personally or professionally is the question I just went thru. I continue to need a laptop for work and would use it less if I could (accepting the tradeoffs) use a mouse with iPad since it remains a touch-first device.

The surface pro is nice too, but as you said you have to optimize for touch, or not at all. I'd love to have MacOS that supports updates on the surface pro as a daily driver.

Ooc, What categories/types of apps do you run personally and maybe work related through your iPad?

I've ordered Google's Pixel Slate (core i7 CPU, 16 GB RAM, 256 GB SSD). Unlike iPad it can switch from tablet to a full blown desktop mode - it has pretty much standard keyboard with "Esc" key and mouse track pad. Slate supports Chrome OS, Android and lately Linux native apps - come to think of it I don't think there's a device out there that supports more apps out of the box.

There is such a device: Microsoft Surface.

The device you purchased is $1800, which puts it even beyond the iPad Pro. Are there any Android tablets that compete in this market?

Are you saying that out of the box Surface supports more apps than Chrome OS, Android and Linux apps combined? Slate is expensive, but to people like me - top of the line specs, the best screen there is and support for all those apps is worth it.

If I had to speculate I'd say that Google is phasing out Android from tablets in favor of Chrome OS to have the best of both worlds.

I would argue the fact, that today’s surface run pretty much unfettered windows 10 gives them more useful software than Chrome Os, Android, and Linux. Who cares about the Android and Chrome Os apps when they are mostly social networks, media consumption, or badly ported phone apps, and when you can literally install and run in compatibility mode pretty much any software ever written for windows.

Android tablet productivity apps are really bad. So are Linux desktop apps, on tablets.

ChromeOS nominally runs Android apps but not well. For example Firefox on ChromeOS can't resize windows, scroll properly, etc. You can't honestly be lusting at the Android ecosystem on a $1800 device.

ChromeOS will no doubt improve here but surely you don't believe in the "more apps!" argument today.

With a couple of tweaks I have WSL and Hyper-V on my Surface and I am super happy with this setup. I’m a switcher from MBP. Best of all worlds really, excellent hardware (screen/keyboard/battery-wise), runs anything I need. Can’t see myself going back to Mac. Nor attempting to do Real Work on Android!

Why did you buy a tablet to run WSL and Hyper-V, instead of a traditional laptop?

A Surface is a traditional laptop, just one with a removable keyboard which is handy for various scenarios. Basically it’s a laptop and tablet in one and covers the use cases of both. If I need serious power I push that workload up to Azure.

Hmm, are you perhaps referring to the Surface Book? The Surface requires a stand even with the keyboard attached, making it awkward to use in your lap, etc.

There is also now the Surface laptop (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/surface-laptop-1st-gen/90f...)

I'm an Apple fanboy for sure but I've used my fair share of Android tablets both personally and at work. It's been my experience that the app-scene on Android tablet is practically nonexistent compared to iPad and when comparing 2 tablets (1 iPad/1 Android) priced/dated about the same the iPad hardware holds up much better and feels more responsive.

I used to be one: https://bergie.iki.fi/blog/working-on-android-2017/

Nowadays using an iPad Pro instead. While there are some software limitations, the hardware is much nicer than what you can get with Android or Chrome OS.

The marketing for Android tablets is such that most people associate it with sub-$100 7-inch screens with awful quality, suitable only for keeping a 5-year old entertained.

That's actually not all that off-base. Aside from Samsung and Huawei, I don't think there are any recognized companies even building large, high-res Android tabs with Pen support. And even Samsung seems to be doing it ceremonially to compete with the Surface Pro and iPad Pro, both of which I'd guess sell far better than the Galaxy S3 tablet.

Even so, I doubt there would have been a movement towards using Android tabs as full laptop replacements. I'm an Android user and at no point did I think I wanted to use it for work; I got a Surface Pro, which is much more suited to that task.

You forgot about Amazon. They are by far the dominant player in the Android tablet space.

Amazon tablets run their own brand of Android with their own app store, do they not? Maybe things have changed since the original Fire tablets launched. I don't know how dominant those tabs are outside the US. In any case, I didn't mention Amazon as the Fire line these days is more of a way to lock people into their ecosystem of Prime video and music, rather than a "do whatever you want" style tablet.

It is possible to install the Google App Store on a Fire, and does not require rooting it, but it is a pain and most people wouldn't bother. I agree that they really are just to lock people into the Amazon ecosystem.

You can pry my Google Nexus 7 (2013) with the nice 1920x1200 screen out of my cold, Marshmallowy hands. It will be a sad day when that thing dies.

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