Comment by muhfuhkuh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by muhfuhkuh | Hacker News Reader

Because it's really hard to make a market-reactive product that is more powerful and featureful than the preceding product it is catching up to clone.

Apple just happened to have caught the entire planet with it's pants down when they introduced the i-Devices. I mean, look at what Google was working on[1] after Apple introduced the original iPhone. Google was chasing the market leader in style and interface at the time (Blackberry). When Apple introduced iPhone 3G, all bets were off and Google went back to the drawing board.

iPod Touch is introduced, and the only real competitor that comes to the fore is Microsoft, with the Zune (RIP) brand that mimics the Touch to no end and barely does anything better (yes, I'm taking the soon-to-be-dead Zune Pass into account).

Now it's tablets, and again, the rest of the industry reacts. I'm certainly surprised MS hasn't tried to hook up with a HW vendor to make a Phone 7 tablet.

Apple is on a hot streak. First with seriously consumer-friendly smartphones, then with software and media ecosystems, now with disruptive computing platforms.

It'll eventually run out of steam, but will the rest of the industry kill itself trying to keep up in the meantime?

[1] http://news.cnet.com/2300-1037_3-6230132.html

This is marketing 101: create an original position, a USP. [1] What's going on now, is a bunch of suits and managers who want to ride on Jobs' coattails and build me-too products for a market they don't actually understand one bit.

The fervor over subscriptions should be a key to these idiots that there is a strong market for an actually open device: instead they're taking the main competitor, an open source project even, and making it functionally more closed than iOS to an average user. Apple is hammering away at the middle-road consumer, and Google's OS is not only positioned as "me too, but also everything!", it's being filtered through handset manufacturers who have their own agendas, which run counter to what Android suggests to be.

My suggestion? Google builds a durable tablet for academics and scientists to research in the field with. Because of Android's open nature, it would be trivial to open up an entire ecosystem of sensors and data loggers that would integrate. The best gift I ever got for my father was a kill-a-watt, there's a huge, untapped consumer market for data collection and processing.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positioning_(marketing)#Product...

Because of Android's open nature, it would be trivial to open up an entire ecosystem of sensors and data loggers that would integrate

I think it would be easy for Apple to match this: they can just add a USB host port to the iPad and allow apps to talk to connected devices. Almost everything today is USB-based.

Apple just does a little step at a time instead of completely opening the barn door as the first step.

Agreed. I don't see why Apple would reject apps that connect to external sensors. There are already many such apps that use Bluetooth (eg Wakemate) or the headphone jack (eg Square), although getting approved to link up with the bottom port is supposedly a pain. If you want to take advantage of the closed nature of Apple's platform, you have to push the kind of apps they don't like. So far, that's mostly just home screen customizations and pirated games, I guess. Google Voice was looking like a killer app not-available-on-iOS but Apple backed off of that one.

>I don't see why Apple would reject apps that connect to external sensors.

They don't: http://itunes.apple.com/app/audiotools/id325307477?mt=8

> Google builds a durable tablet for academics and scientists to research in the field with. Because of Android's open nature, it would be trivial to open up an entire ecosystem of sensors and data loggers that would integrate.

Apple has kinda done this via the dock connector. For example I just bought one of these to turn my iPod touch into a sound level meter: http://www.studiosixdigital.com/iphone_measurement_micropho....

The bad news is that it's not compatible with the iPad or newest iPhone/iPod touch so possibly Apple is removing the external interface capability.

edit: there are also ODBII interfaces although I don't know if they work with the newest iDevices

Exactly, about the shutout. Remember the project that siphoned juice from the audio jack to power sensors? That would probably be a no-go. I'm thinking about jailbreaking my iPod just to experiment with that project.

The dock connector is actually pretty good for providing power and basic connectivity-up-to-a-USB-port, but I'm betting it would be shut down by App Store rules. Which is a shame, because Cocoa is probably one of the best frameworks for a researcher or hobbyist to build in.

Which is where Google would come in: they could provide a great API for building out sensor platforms, not only in WiFi and Bluetooth, but also whatever 2.4ghz home-rolled or XBee modules people are using.

Beyond a superficial "touchable screen", most of Apple's tablet competitors have been heavily influenced WebOS - watch the PlayBook and TouchPad in action and you'll see navigation and multitasking are almost identical, as is the gestures used to control the device (swiping a card up to close the app). Meanwhile, the guy behind WebOS is the same guy behind Honeycomb, which also borrows the task manager and (don't know which came first) notifications.

But it just isn't cool to say the tablet makers are copying webOS or have their own guts (Android notification system, while nothing like webOS is still distinct and lot better designed for example) - people just love being told that everything interesting in the universe is copied from Apple :)

Whether you like Apple or not they are the only ones shipping a decent tablet right now.

I'm more excited about HP's webOS stuff than iPhone 5 or iPad 2.

True, but for me, the decent tablet Apple ships isn't nearly enough. I need Flash, decent multitasking, USB port, normal file system access and more so a standalone device not tied to my computer in any way shape or form.

To that end Xoom is looking great and may be webOS will beat it in most key departments, but I can buy Xoom like next week.

webOS looks great. Summer will be here before you know it.

Interesting, of course, that the multitasking UI was copied from the original iPhone Mobile Safari UI. :)

But of course original iPhone Mobile Safari never went anywhere near the word multitasking but that aside - correct me if I am mistaken but original iPhone Mobile Safari did not use a card system - i.e. you could not swipe up the Safari windows to dismiss them or anything which is the most innovative feature of the webOS multitasking. Just showing mini windows side by side that can be closed using a X button - that was done long time before iPhone.

Also, remember this good observation in the OP:

"Apple has the tablet component market sewn up. An entrepreneur I talked to in China described the difficulty he still has buying touchscreens that are worth a darn. The real reason most of the current tablets are 7 inches? Because Apple bought up all of the 10-inch capacitive touchscreen stock and if they didn’t then they drove the price too high for smaller orders. There is no way to dabble in the market without paying a premium."

Agree. It's harder than it seems.

There's tons of things to consider with hardware related products. Imagine all the conditions: from software, to users, people with disabilities, hardware conditions, if it heats up, if the environment is too humid, too cold, if it gets dropped, and so on.

This things take time. If a tablet pops up today it doesn't mean it was built in 3 months by a handfull of hackers and redbull, there's tons of work behind. Apple just happend to execute really, really well on it.

I am also surprised why MS at least doesn't talk about WP7 tablet. Nobody wants Win7 tablet with desktop software, so the only option left is that Win8 will natively support tablets, but then, what about apps?

I think WP7 has one big problem for apps, unlike iOS and Android, it doesn't do OpenGL ES. I think this is going to make it an issue to port.

I have HP Slate. It's "Win7 tablet with desktop software" which is exactly what I wanted.

That's great, it probably requires a stylus and gets less than 5 hours of battery life... go you.

It allows a stylus... probably!

After resetting Windows Mobile development they had their hands full just getting WP7 out on phones, and it's still missing features like a decent web browser which are already pretty bad on a phone but would be crippling on a tablet. It would probably take them another year to do a reasonable port, at which point it's not that far from the release of Windows 8 anyway.

Windows XP Tablet Edition shipped in 2001.

When apple announced the iPad, it was near completion. Thats why it shipped soon. There was no pre-ipad were gonna make it but wont ship it till 5 yrs later release. That is the benefit of being first.

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