Google will no longer make its own tablet devices
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
They are, to be honest, pretty terrible, but for reading in the middle of the night when I can't turn on the light and use my regular Kindle, they beat using my phone.
Is it so hard or e-ink is something that is not manufactured there?
But I wouldn't try anything else on it, wouldn't want it to explode.
If you want to have a glimpse how Android team feels about Flutter, just check this year's Android Fireside and how they react to questions about JetPack Composer vs Flutter, or what should be the way to develop on Android.
Mostly political correct answers with some pauses trying to think how to best state them, and facial expressions revealing how they rather not answer it at all.
Let me make one thing very clear: nobody gives a flying fuck about Fuchsia. Nobody. It was and remains a project that people who want to do something fun go to when google thinks that they are valuable enough to keep around.
It is not the future of anything. It is not even remotely capable of doing anything serious. For fuck's sake, go look at the code - it is all out in the open! The scheduler is a JOKE. SMP support too. Power management is nonexistent. Driver support? HAHA!
The most important part about message-passing microkernels? The tuning for the message-passing. None of that is anywhere to be seen either...
Oh, and app support.. Where is that? Yeah, one could go the chromeos way and try to make an android compatibility layer - it is very hard and never 100% compatible, and relies on having a linux kernel. And then why bother with a new OS? Or one could go the microsoft way and pay app developers to write apps for the new SDK. How did that go for windows phone? Or one could make a VM and run android in it, but then why bother with a new kernel anyways, if everything will be in a linux vm? Linux runs just fine on hardware as is.
Basically a group of people did all the fun parts of writing an OS and did not do all of the boring hard-to-get-right pieces.
I have no idea why the whole world keeps thinking Fuchsia is serious, when they can see the code all along and note that it is a joke.
https://9to5google.com/2019/01/22/google-fuchsia-poaches-mac...
But yeah my impression is that it isn't meant to replace Andrdoid, but that they want to use it in places where a full Android doesn't make sense, like in their smart display devices or other future categories. Or maybe it's really just a retainer project for engineers.
Another reason people think it's real is that there was a lot of press a couple of years ago about something called "Andromeda" that was meant to combine Android and ChromeOS into one project. This was then supposedly shelved in favor of Fuchsia:
https://www.vox.com/2016/10/3/13149670/google-new-os-androme... https://twitter.com/hallstephenj/status/871456529160863745
But you'd probably know more about that than me :)
It seems to me they're trying to not fall into the same trap as Microsoft did trying to protect their dominance with one OS over all other innovation.
That said, the Android team really seems to hate the flutter team ( Jake Wharton lol) also the main flutter guys all come from chrome like Ian Hickson so if there was bad blood from chromeOs that will stay.
Personally I hope Flutter succeeds because I really hate the Android sdk. Fuchsia just seems like something they're experimenting with and putting into smart clocks or whatever.
I believe, that if they were both going into the same direction, maybe Longhorn would have successes, instead of having the detour of rebuilding its ideas in COM, going through multiple iterations of it (WinRT, UAP, UWP) and then complaining that most devs use the .NET projections anyway.
What I dislike in Flutter is its dependency in Dart, yet another eco-system starting from scratch, just to save a programming language, kind of.
As an Android developer I am kind of wary of how they push Kotlin for Android. I'm sure it is good, and I enjoy learning a new languages, but I already have a code base that I am worried they are going to make me rewrite.
Basically Web apps packaged in such a way that native APIs can also be exposed as browser APIs.
The Chrome/ChromeOS teams started with it, and Microsoft adopted them to UWP as well.
Safari also kind of support them.
https://developers.google.com/web/progressive-web-apps/
https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/pwa
Plenty of talks at Google IO and BUILD.
For example extension methods or suspend functions.
Hence why there is a guide on how to write Java friendly APIs from Kotlin.
Jetpack Compose is an interesting story, looks like it sprung into existence as response to Flutter, without any concrete ideas on how tooling should look like and total disregard for the ongoing efforts to sell constraint and motion layout editing on the graphical tooling to android devs still using the old layouts.
Having watched all SwiftUI tooling related talks, and from experience how Android Studio has evolved, I don't have great hopes that by Google IO 2020 we will see demos at the same level as WWDC 2019 SwiftUI ones.
I know they're not great now, but perhaps foldables will kill tablets all together?
It may actually be a smart move to unbloat the product lines a little.
I felt the same way about my MacBook Air. It's been my constant companion since 2011 to a dozen countries and dozens more cities. Love that machine.
This past April my wife bought me an iPad. The last three trips I took were with the 'Pad instead of the Air. I'm really surprised how useful that little thing is.
I feel like I can go back to a feature phone now.
Learning how to type a text again using the numpad was painful, but after a few weeks I was back up to speed.
No Facebook, Slack, Email. Not even a browser. No distractions.
When I'm out with my kids, I'm with my kids. When I'm working, I'm at my desk with a real computer.
My rest social media including whatsapp in another device.
They are being sold a lot on ebay etc. too. Refurbished and cheap, if you are willing to wait for the package.
I use C3-00 and non of it's (primitive) smart features. It's still a dumb phone.
One of my daughters loves drawing and ‘painting’ on the iPad, I got Procreate for her and she spends hours on it. She complains she’s started tapping to undo when she’s sketching on paper.
iPad can do all the above, plus much better web browsing, reddit, video/youtube viewing, photo editing, email and writing in general (with Apple Smartkeyboard), etc. It works with touch, pencil and keyboard and just feels like my personal device.
Why not something like Galaxy Note? Or one of 7 inch phones if pencil is optional?
As far as the Galaxy Note. Android still sucks as a tablet OS.
What would convince me away would have been something like the Huawei Mate X foldable, before the US had to go all ...
The multimedia (audio, graphics, 3D) story on Android is really bad.
Half backed APIs, no Android Studio tooling, command line tools and github project dumps without proper documentation.
Basically every upscale school district runs a fleet of them. That's ton of iPads.
Edit: And I say this as someone who's developed software for the education space in a way that necessitates knowing what tech stack schools have.
I used Chromebooks in high school and they were quite nice, but they didn't completely evolve my relationship with education. They were tools and not much more than that. Certainly not part of an education revolution. Definitely useful for writing papers though. I imagine districts that bought iPads are content with them as well.
After owning a few older iPads and Nexus tablets, I haven't used them in years, instead preferring to do content consumption on my phone or TV and anything more on a full PC. Most people say they even prefer to do basic shit like shopping on PCs - easier to comparison shop, bigger screens, more capable machines and user interfaces. This situation isn't going to improve for tablets, they're trying to hit on a niche that's quite limited.
a) the phone displays are getting wider; with widening of the aspect ratio, the diagonal is rising faster than the surface of the display.
b) the ratio of screen to body rises (you are getting smaller bezels).
That means in practice, that for example the 5,2" Sony Xperia Z5 (with ~70% screen to body ratio, 16:9 display aspect ratio) is 1,5 mm narrower and 4 mm shorter than 6,1" Samsung Galaxy S10 (~88% screen to body ratio, 19:9 aspect ratio). Subjectively, thanks to the rounded corners of the S10, it feels smaller than Z5.
Based on the screen diagonal, you would not say that you are going to have such impression, the difference is 0,9" after all.
As you say the battle now is on to eliminate bezels. From what I can tell the final station on that journey is a screen of about 6.5" to 6.75".
its not really "top of the line" anymore, but the fact that its light on the wallet (~$250) is another major benefit
For a 3.3" smartphone check this https://liliputing.com/2019/06/palms-tiny-smartphone-now-ava...
This is Google failing, not the lack of a market.
I still have some iPad 2's floating around, which have the same issue, albeit on a longer scale. Can no longer update the OS, most new apps won't install as they target a different OS, it _seems_ to be getting more sluggish over time (though there was a clear performance drop between two of the major OS versions - I think it was 6 to 7). It's a shame as it's still a useful and nice piece of hardware.
If it's a 2013 WiFi version (a mostly great device): https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Google_Nexus_7_2013_(asus...
Google made a decision to stop selling cheap tablets.
It's fast, light and very well manufactured.
Though I got back into NES games, not DOS (yet!)
I also don't feel it was light by any means. It weights almost a full 3 lbs with the keyboard attached. That's heavier than the Dell XPS 13 and much heavier than a Surface Pro 6.
Within 3 years they were all unusably slow. Kept them going for a little while with some device resets, but eventually we just all had to give up on them. The family has been on iPads ever since and even the oldest of the bunch still run great (much thanks to iOS 12's perf improvements).
That's the whole story on how I got sold on Apple hardware.
There's not really a good option left for Android tablets sadly, so looks like my next one will be the surface go.
I don't want a phablet so it is difficult for me to combine my phone device with my media consumption device.
It's an absolute shame Google failed to follow up on this device - very disappointing.
Please make a follow up to the Nexus 9.
It's not confusing at all. "It's a laptop and it can run android apps". It doesn't get any simpler. It's harder to explain to people why you can't run android apps on, say, a windows laptop.
I think the big issue for most people and chromeOS is that $400 laptops suck no matter which OS they run. A 12" macbook with the same specs (256GB SSD, 8GB RAM, i5 Y-series processor) runs $1400, has no touchscreen/tablet mode, no pen capability, a bad keyboard, one less USB-C port (a big deal for me), and (surprisingly) a smaller, worse trackpad.
Software has gotten radically better recently. I run chromeOS for my browser, Android for a few apps, and Crostini/Debian 9 for the rest and development. My big complaint is that Crostini isn't GPU accelerated at the moment (they have it working in nightly, so it's coming later this year).
The best part is how seamless it is to run 3 different OS's in one computer at the same time. Android (and Debian) are full installs, so no emulation issues. Instead, chromeOS basically hands off a frame buffer for them to fill (along with relevant IO events they are allowed to see). An Android or Debian apps act just like any other native window on the system while still providing a high level of security.
My big complaint is that some compute-intensive things like running a full test suite takes some time, but that's simply an artifact of the fanless, Y-series form factor (and I still have the option of SSHing into my desktop). I'm not a big fan of the new, unified settings and notifications (I preferred them separate), but it's not a huge issue. I'd like multiple desktops, but those are supposedly already in nightly too.
Overall, I'm not sad to leave my Macbook Pro sitting on the shelf.
Even those that do run on x86 are not really PC-compatible. Sure, sometimes you can open them up and unlock firmware write access, and make them usable in that way. But it's just too much of a hassle when you can just pick up a cheap x86 device that will run so much better.
> ...is that $400 laptops suck no matter which OS they run.
They really don't. Sure, ChromeOS is a bit better than the privacy-invasive, ad-infested dumpster fire that is Windows 10, but there's no comparison with something that's running a proper OS! Just make sure that the hardware components are supported, be wary of devices using bottom-of-the-barrel eMMC as their main storage (this is ubiquitous on Chromebooks, BTW! A lightweight linux distribution can ease the pain, though) and you're set.
I really don't know why people would want to run anything besides Linux or Mac OS X nowadays. Even Android and iOS/iPadOS don't really give you anything UX-wise; recent versions of GNOME 3 have matched it quite nicely. (You really have to appreciate the GNOME designers' foresight here! They bet big on making their UX touch- and mobile-ready, and that bet will bring very clear payoffs now that performances woes are being resolved.)
On one I cracked the screen (still works!, sorta) and on the other the USB jack broke (broke it even more trying to solder in a replacement).
Inexpensive and rootable. Can you root an iPad?
I think sleek chromebooks or large phones are the better way forward.
Google really doesn't get game development.
While Apple and Microsoft make frameworks, IDE tooling, and talk studios language, Google makes PR talks about their cloud services, does some intro level talks about middleware and shows how to do 3D with bare bones FOSS libraries and CLI tooling.
Stadia will surely fail if that is all they have to offer to game studios.
Because only they understand that the killer feature of tablet is being the new laptops, and not just bigger phones.
Also for hobby development on the go, iOS or Windows stack are more fun to use than the whole Studio + J++ + NDK maintained as 20% project.
Too big to put in your pocket, and not nearly as productive as a laptop with a keyboard. They were fine as a toy or purely entertainment device for someone in the backseat of a car, but mostly a dead-end as far as tech advancements go.
The ChromeOS hybrid laptop-tablets are absolutely terrible - both the software and the hardware are miserable to use. I wish Google would just release a refreshed version of the Nexus 9. It's really all I want in a tablet.
AKA the idea that the firmware/os/drivers are all bundled together and hacked to work on a given device simply doesn't scale. Its employment for engineers because very security patch, every upstream refactor, requires all those closed source patches to be rebased on the latest version. This might work ok if the underlying technology (linux) didn't change their driver APIs at the drop of the hat, or the device manufactures didn't play throw darts at the soup of ARM interconnects, ram controllers, and devices, everytime they spun a new generation of phones/tablets/chromebooks.
Apple can get away with the monolithic model because they have a half dozen fairly similar devices to support. There are android manufactures which have released more devices in the last 6 months.
Yah, google is trying to fix that, but without a hard line in the sand with respect to pushing non-core OS/driver functionality into standardized runtime firmware APIs (think powermgmt) and locking down the driver API (userspace or otherwise) and assuring that it takes a long time for API's to be replaced/upgraded/deprecated. The hardware/upgrade story will continue to be a mess.
I believe the only reason they didn't do this out of the gate is because device manufacturers wouldn't have signed on for it. Android is establish enough at this point that it's not like many device manufacturers could really step back from it at this point.
Treble is a strong step in this direction - but they need to take it farther, open up customization APIs and drop the garbage manufacturers pump into devices. The way Treble is right now it only benefits power users who have their devices rooted - who could update without the manufacturers permission anyways.
I wonder if their only hesitation at this point is the mess they're making with ChromeOS and all their other garbage... I think the Android roof was the right one to bet on, massive numbers of users with primary devices running it, but I fear they've done significant damage with their other offerings.
Because the uptake from IO to IO has been diminishing, as Android is already good enough for the purpose of selling phones, so most OEMs aren't even bothering with Treble (Android 7+) for new devices, other than flagship ones.
So Google is now forced to do exactly that if they want OEM to actually care about new versions.
The Pixel C was so much better: Beautiful screen, built like a tank, everything felt solid and relatively light weight, Android performed excellent on it and with Nougat it was even usable as a true productivity device because of multi tasking. I loved the Pixel C. When I tried to upgrade it to an iPad Pro due to it having reached its EOL, I returned the iPad Pro after a couple of days and kept using the Pixel X, until Google announced the Pixelbook. Then I managed to sell the Pixel C for about 300€ because it still looked prestine and the person who bought it brought it another 2 years of use thanks to some after market Android image.
I ended up selling mine after little use.