Honeycomb Has A Fighting Chance Against The iPad
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
But I think the most important thing is that Apple has retail stores, whereas phones are sold by the carriers.
Possibly because that's exactly what happened with Android phones? Some of the early Android phones (G1, Hero, etc) were pretty buggy, slow, and kind of wonky. The original Droid was decent, then the N1 came out and was seriously competitive. And there's been basically a string of steadily improving models since then.
It seems reasonable to assume the Android tablet market will proceed similarly.
At any rate, when it comes time to drop $500+ on a tablet, why would anyone choose the one with lots of bugs, performance issues, and few apps?
Your question "When it comes time to drop 500+ on a tablet" is itself rather meaningless. A year from now you'll have Ice Cream Sandwich (or Jello or whatever) on $200 netbooks with detachable keyboards, 7" slates, 8.5" tablets with pop-under keyboards, and even iPad 3-like 10" tablets. And maybe a few other products we can't yet see.
Using Android requires a continuous effort to search for workarounds
My N1 and my wife's have both been rock solid.
And by Cisco VPN, do you mean IPSEC? Or Cisco's proprietary SSL VPN?
Perhaps what you're missing (and what the whole Apple philosophy misses) is that there may never be a "single" iPad competitor that is better than the iPad in every respect and yet Android may "win" all the same, because each different model offers something different to someone who values that.
Perhaps you like having an SD card slot. Perhaps you like to plug in a (real) keyboard with a trackpad. Perhaps ultra light weight is your thing. Perhaps you just have to have a real HDMI port. Perhaps you're a 3D junky. Perhaps 9.7inches is just too big - or too small, for you. Perhaps a stylus does it for you. Whatever it is, if there is a segment of consumers who lust after it, there will an Android tablet featuring that. If everyone's killer feature is different then Apple's single-model, uniform approach will never be able to win. In this sense I strongly suspect that Apple is quite happy not winning and knows that they're far better off maximizing profit on 25% of the market that really does all want the same thing rather than trying to cater to the long tail of consumer desires. Let's face it, when it's a choice between profit and market share, Apple always picks profit.
However, in the case of tablet, I strongly feel that the challenger is NOT android. Android works well on a phone, but a tablet is a different experience and it needs certain design elements which, frankly, Google has not proven capable of doing.
I have no doubt the challenger will be linux based, but it seems more likely that the it will be someone with a design and usability bent rather than technical-only acumen.
However, all of the challengers could be undone if they cannot play well with quality apps. Getting developers to your platform is absolutely key.
widgets & hardware support via USB come to mind immediately, but there is much more.
Live widgets on home screens are great. They give you interactivity and live updates without having to enter an app. So things like weather, news, calendars, etc.
The home screen in general is a lot more accessible to developers. E.g. I can add a shortcut to a contact on my homescreen that, when I tap it, opens up a small modal dialogue with quick access to phone calls, texts, emails, etc. I can alternatively add a shortcut that directly dials the contact with the first tap.
Another thing that I really like about Android over iOS is that developers have a lot more access to the settings of the phone than in iOS. This allows apps like Locale, which lets you set different contexts depending on different parameters such as location, time, battery level, orientation, etc. This allows me to set my phone to vibrate and turn off wifi when I leave the house for example. I no longer have to remember to set my phone to silent or any other such nonsense.
I fully acknowledge that there are many things iOS does better than Android, but these are the reasons that some people prefer Android, and they're for the most part just as true about tablets as phones.