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Comment by blinkingled | Hacker News Reader

Umm no - most existing Android apps work and look good on the Xoom. Better than the iPhone apps looked on the iPad. I gave it to my wife who has an iPod touch and she has yet to complain about lack of apps - I found most of what is needed for her. So lack of apps is not really a burning problem.

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You're seriously trying to claim that blown up android phone apps, many of which don't even rescale properly, are competition to the dedicated iPad designs?

Have you looked at iPad apps lately? Even if you don't include iMove and GarageBand that were just announced, how about OmniGraffle, Sketchbook, Inkpad, the Korg Apps, Reeder, Osmos, iWork, etc.

A more interesting benchmark would be "time spent in each app". Sure, there are eight trillion apps for the iPad. But I bet most people spend 95% of their time in the browser (or an ebook reader), and the other 5% of their time in the email app.

Guess what, you can do that with a 386 laptop from 1995. Apple's success comes from convincing people, through marketing, that they want to do that on an iPad and not on something else.

I think that's probably true for some parts of the user base - particularly the more tech savvy - it's effectively true for me - I'll concede twitter and reeder as not much more than an extension of the browser or an ebook reader.

However I think you're underestimating how many non-tech savvy users find appliance-like apps much easier to understand than the web. Yesterday my wife borrowed my iPad to use with her mother to look at furniture on Craigslist.

She got me to buy a $2 craigslist app that I'd never dream of buying for myself which turned the iPad into a light-table of photos of stuff for sale linked to a map. Suddenly her mother could use Craigslist. At a certain point the screen blanked and she had a moment of panic of not knowing what to do - but then she realized there was only one button to press and everything was ok again.

That 386 laptop from 1995, or for that matter an iMac from 2011 requires a vastly more developed mental model in order to do anything. Even if most people can eventually learn this, it's work, whereas the ease of the app model on the iPad makes it relaxing and fun.

The apps matter a lot.

Is there any reason this Craiglist app couldn't be a web app?

Who'd pay $2 to use a reskinned Craigslist on the web?

From a technical standpoint, probably not. But those we apps don't exist today, and people are buying tablets now based on what apps can do for them.

I wouldn't try browsing with a 386 laptop. I highly doubt you could still buy one in '95. Funny as historical comparisons are, some accuracy would be appreciated.

I agree "time spent in each app" is a better benchmark. In the event that Apple held an event in April 2010 announcing, among other things, iAds it was announced that the average user spends 30 minutes a day in apps. Again, this is the average user. I spend far more time than that, and I would also say that I probably spend, at least, 90% of my time in non-Apple apps.

Apps matter. More than any other consideration, including brand.

"Guess what, you can do that with a 386 laptop from 1995. Apple's success comes from convincing people, through marketing, that they want to do that on an iPad and not on something else."

Ah, the old meme that people are just brainwashed by marketing into being happy with their Apple products, complete with made-up "95%" statistics.

"Guess what, you can do that with a 386 laptop from 1995"

Then why do I want to do that on a 2011 Android clone tablet that costs more than the baseline Apple one (as of 3/2/11 more than $100 more)?

"Apple's success comes from convincing people, through marketing, that they want to do that on an iPad and not on something else."

They convince people that the things that they normally did on their desktop or notebook propped on their lap, they can now do on the couch curled up leaning against the arm of their favorite chair, perhaps with the TV on, as they pinch and zoom and tap and slide freely around a large, bright touchscreen instead of a tiny glidepad.

Where did I claim that? The existing apps do work so there is no lack of apps to start with and Honeycomb has been out for only few weeks - it won't be long before more tablet optimized apps appear.

Right - I said in my original comment that the situation would change over the year, but for now an average user would be silly to buy a Xoom and only have blown up phone apps and hope that stuff they like gets developed in future, when they can buy an iPad 2 and have great dedicated apps today.

for now an average user would be silly to buy a Xoom and only have blown up phone apps

"Blown up phone apps" are much better on Android than the pixel doubling that the iPad does for iPhone apps. Android apps aren't hardcoded for a specific resolution, so most of them work well on tablets even without being specifically designed to.

But that's irrelevant because people aren't using pixel doubled apps on the iPad. They are using specially designed apps.

Are you seriously claiming that apps developed for android phones are as good as the dedicated iPad apps?

That's not true. Ipad apps are usually gratuitously more expensive and if you buy them, you won't be able to use the app on your iPhone and iPod too. For most apps I stick with the standard version. Mind you, I only use my iPad rarely, usually for distraction on plane journeys; not recharged more than once a month.

So you're saying that people who buy iPads buy mostly iPhone apps to run pixel doubled in order to save money?

No, I'm saying that I personally have bought relatively few apps that are specific to the iPad, and where there was a choice between an iPad and an iPhone app, the difference was not often compelling enough to get me to both pay extra and forego access to the same app on other devices. The killer app category for the iPad in my experience is distractions and games, and they don't lose much being scaled up.

Are you seriously claiming that apps developed for android phones are as good as the dedicated iPad apps?

In many cases, yes. Especially fullscreen games; Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja and several others look as if they were designed specifically for my Nook Color, even though they weren't.

I think the Apple mind control conspiracy theory stuff is a bit outdated these days. You can 'convince' a small number of people to choose one product over another for superficial reasons through clever marketing but that's not a very good explanation when you're talking about tens of millions of people. If Apple had these secret mind control talents they would have 'convinced' people not to buy Android phones or Windows PCs. For now it just happens that they have a big head start and consumers simply don't know (or care) about the alternatives yet or just aren't sold on them.

I think Art Rage 2 is the killer app, so far

> You're seriously trying to claim that blown up android phone apps, many of which don't even rescale properly, are competition to the dedicated iPad designs?

I believe the parent is trying to claim that blown up android phone apps on Xoom are no worse than blown up iPhone apps were when the iPad first came out.

Which is irrelevant because when the iPad came out there are more than 3,000 dedicated apps, many of them from household brands, and there was no competition.

I'm not saying the Android tablets aren't competitive with how the iPad was at launch. I'm asking why a regular consumer would choose an unproven tablet with a tiny number of apps over a proven tablet with 65,000 apps today.

Well because Apps aren't everything and not everyone needs the Sketchbook app for example.

> So lack of apps is not really a burning problem.

The converse of above statement is a richer ecosystem is not really an advantage or incentive for developers!

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