The Smartphone Wars: Mystery of the Android tablets | Hacker News Reader

The Smartphone Wars: Mystery of the Android tablets

esr.ibiblio.org

29 pointssrl29 comments

Here. That is... I'm someone that bought an android tablet... though I don't really fit the hypothesis of this piece. I got an Asus Transformer Prime (so not the low end) at the end of last month and like it a great deal. Being able to "tear the screen off the laptop I'm using"... I didn't realize I've been wanting to do that for years now, until I could.

But I guess I could answer the questions posed by the piece nonetheless, who I, an android tablet buyer, am and what I use it for. I'm an average Ph.D. student in a technical discipline. So I've only very little disposable income for fun gadgets, which I can augment a bit when I have a belief that they will also be useful. Thus why I waited till android tablets got better enough and went for one designed to work very well with a keyboard.

What I use it for... well, what people I know seem to use their iPads for... email, light browsing online, and reading books/pdfs offline. Games... well, I'm hooked on Spirit right now, so maybe I should say playing one game over and over. :-) Other coffeehouse computing sort of stuff... drawing diagrams and typing up what I need to on the go. The touch-to-sound delay seems to preclude good musical instruments, but I've always been more of a drum machines, synths, and sequencers kind of guy, so I've been playing with those. I keep meaning to put a python interpreter on here, but that darn dissertation work and all.

I had kinda hoped to make this my main computing machine. But really, that was a silly hope given the various stuff I use/want. The full laptop still earns its place/weight in my backpack. I guess I'm just not a one OS kind of guy, and heck, no need to be limited to just one anyway, right tool for each job and all that.

"Tearing the screen off of the laptop you're using" is cool, but, for me, the killer feature of my Transformer is "touching the screen of the laptop you're using" (and having it respond, of course). It is so natural and intuitive that for weeks after I started using my Transformer with its keyboard dock I found myself touching the screens of my laptops and desktop expecting something to happen (or catching myself just before I touched the screen).

I now firmly believe that in "the future" laptops will just have touchscreens. I also think that change is likely to happen far faster than most people would expect.

I have the original Transformer and love it. I don't ue it as often as I used to now that I also got an Android phone, but it is still very useful. The keyboard that prolongs the battery life, fast typing and even the trackpad are all useful. I am surprised that they don't sell more of them. It is wifi only but I am able to set up a wifi connection to my phone when I am on the road.

Have you found any good sequencers synths? I'd love to be able to track on the go.

Commandar beat me to it, so far Caustic is top of my heap. I wish all the knobs were script-able though. For a straight-forward drum machine Electrum Drum is not bad.

Caustic is a pretty nifty app. I've only dabbled with it a bit, though. Was worth the couple of bucks I paid for it, anyway.

Even though the ipad is 'easier' for a majority of use cases (well, as easy, Android is pretty damn user friendly also!), the fact is that Apple outright disallow anything outside of what they've dreamed up

Yesterday my fiance wanted to watch a film on her ipod and had realised the process would involve converting files (size and movie type), getting it into itunes, and the 'syncing' which is a pain. On Android you literally just drag it across the cable and the thing plays almost any format, or use a torrent client to get it straight from the web onto your phone

Using voip was a pain for a while. Making mobile AP's. Using apps from other markets (or your own apps), even just watching flash or adding a bit of personalisation to the UI

People are realising that Android is actually better, because it's just a shiny most of the time, but when it's time to do something the designers haven't thought up it might be slightly more difficult, but it's possible on Android and probably impossible on iOS

(plus I really think Apple is earning bad rep over those patents lawsuits. Consumers do understand / appreciate choice, even Apple fanbois, and they view it as the evil act that it is even if they don't get all riled up over it)

As others said there are enough Apps (like Cinexplayer) who play all kinds of video formats. And transcoding to MP4/h.264 with iTunes may be a hazzle, but that will ensure that the file will be played with hardware acceleration.

@Patent lawsuits It is everyone vs everyone. Apple has to pay Nokia a hefty licensing sum, they are currently sued by Motorola, Microsoft is getting big money from every company which uses Android, Google sells strategic patents to other HTC, so they can make for them the dirty stuff. And nevertheless in the end all will make business together. I am sceptic against people taking sides in that.

It should also be pointed out that you have to use iTunes to drag MKV files etc. onto the iPad, but you don't need to add them to iTunes and sync them from there.

iOS apps can accept and offer file drag&drop and this bypasses the iTunes library. It's still not as easy as having a folder pop up on the desktop, though.

>Yesterday my fiance wanted to watch a film on her ipod and had realised the process would involve converting files (size and movie type), getting it into itunes, and the 'syncing' which is a pain.

There are apps that allow you to stream from your computer and play video files besides h.264. You just can't torrent unless you jailbreak.

>(plus I really think Apple is earning bad rep over those patents lawsuits. Consumers do understand / appreciate choice, even Apple fanbois, and they view it as the evil act that it is even if they don't get all riled up over it)

I don't think consumers are aware of this at all. I don't think they aware either about the recent controversies with Google which carries far more significance for them.

For what it's worth, I have a 10.1 Tab. I use it to play a couple games that work better on tablets than on phones, surf the internet in places a laptop is inconvenient, a couple neat art/drawing programs, read comic books and PDFs, watch a couple movies, and because of the stunning battery life listen to google music or streaming radio when I'm in the kitchen cooking.

There's probably half a dozen other uses for it, but those are the majority cases.

But it's not like there's a huge difference in my use cases from my friends who have iPads. I just happen to like how Android does it's thing better than how iOS does it's thing. I feel like I'm using a proper portable computer rather than an appliance. But I can see how plenty of other people prefer the appliance.

I also like the price point on apps, between Amazon for daily free apps and just the regular old Google Market for free apps, I've pretty much not had to pay for anything on my table (and I don't pirate apps for it either).

This article presents a ridiculous amount of 'evidence' without any sign as to where it has been drawn from - I dont think this lends it any credibility.

I'm not sure the conclusions are earth shattering either. I dont think that it comes as a shock to most that people buy tablets mainly for basic web browsing and social networking, and that they will buy something cheaper if it does effectively the same thing...

> I dont think that it comes as a shock to most that people buy tablets mainly for basic web browsing and social networking

I hate exactly these two activities on my iPad, I type too much on Facebook and I use the keyboard a lot even when browsing. (cmd+L, tab, cmd+F, ...) - To me it seems natural that people would read eBooks and play games.

Nothing beats (or would beat) hard data.

> The mystery is this: Who has been buying the general-purpose Android tablets, and for what uses?

The few (German) Android fans I know go download console emulators or are trying to use their tablets to stream movies from shady websites using Flash. This makes it completely acceptable to have a terrible tablet app selection and works fine without ever paying $$$ on the Android market.

I know this is only anecdotal, but Android is clearly better for these activities. I can only watch some DVDs I ripped myself on my iPad because I got the VLC app during its short airtime on the App Store. :(

>I can only watch some DVDs I ripped myself on my iPad because I got the VLC app during its short airtime on the App Store. :(

DVD you rip can be played in the default app on iPad. No need for VLC.

There are plenty of App Store apps that allows AVI, MKV, and even .fla videos. I use Cinexplayer. Another iOS app was free this week that plays all kinds of media files.

My local Best Buy used to have the Apple products (iMac, iPod, iPad, etc.) all by themselves, off to the side. The other tablets were about 40 feet away, with dozens of models of laptop computers in between.

Now all the tablets are in the same area, with the iPad very near the Asus, Sony, Samsung and other tablets. I might enter an aisle and have an iPad on my right and a Samsung Galaxy Tab on my left. Someone might go to Best Buy to buy an iPad, see something cheaper, and buy that instead?

Anecdotally, I have a friend who works at a Staples and she said that many of the people who bought a RIM Playbook returned it. I guess that means you should look at usage numbers, not sales figures.

Does that mean Apple has dropped the requirement that their products require a set off sales area with certain specs? It's been a very long time since I've been in a best buy, but Microcenter still has this configuration and I know it used to be non-negotiable.

I'm extremely skeptical about the long term growth of tablets.

Personally, I have an Android 10in (Asus Transformer). After 6 months, I use it way less than either my laptop or my phone.

If I'm around the house I usually want the laptop. Even watching videos in bed is better with the laptop because I don't have to hold on to it.

If I'm away from home, or just need to do something quick, 95% of the time I'll use my phone.

My dream solution is one of the new tablet phones, and it should be arriving any day now.

If you have kids, there is no mystery at all.

The more tablets you have, the more chance you have something charged, ready and nearby when a kid needs distracting.

My prediction is that everybody will buy these tablets for their teen kids. Kind of hard to break. Easy to use. Heaps of free games. Easier to maintain than a PC. etc etc.

From the linked Business Week article:

Neil Mawston, Executive Director at Strategy Analytics, added, “Android captured a record 39 percent share of global tablet shipments in Q4 2011, rising from 29 percent a year earlier. Global Android tablet shipments tripled annually to 10.5 million units.”

And from the article:

Somebody is buying them.

No… not necessarily. And that won't stop some analyst from getting on the megaphone and try to make their case that their predictions are awesome and coming true. There are a lot of self-fulfilling prophecies in finance so they are paid to cheer-lead.

Repeat after me: Shipment != Sale

I think this is just the tablet manufacturers stuffing the retail channel.

The author addresses that in the article:

"There’s a lot of talk of “channel-stuffing” which ignores a salient fact: electronics retailers aren’t in business for their health. Carrying inventory costs money, and non-performing product categories aren’t cut a lot of slack these days."

And it makes sense. While there is probably some degree of channel stuffing going on, retail stores are not going to keep buying tablets that aren't selling at all because they'll just lose money.

I see that in the article and I don't agree that it makes sense. The whole article is premised on an analyst who reports numbers of 'shipments' (compared to Apple 'shipments' which are actually sales numbers). The simplest explanation is channel stuffing so I think he has to come up with a good explanation why it isn't. He is saying 50% of android is probably nook and/or kindle and he's trying to find the other 50%...

What they can’t do in the absence of actual sell-through is induce the retailer to dramatically increase his exposure. Android retailers have been doing that.

Where does he get that from? Couldn't another explanation for the rise in shipments year-over-year be that more retailers are getting into the game? These are global numbers and the market is expanding. Retailers don't make that much margin on iPads so they really want to have some other tablets on hand to put up next to the iPad.

One datapoint he talks about is the HP touchpad. Last year news reports said Best Buy took delivery of almost 300,000 units and sold less than 10%. That counts as 300k units shipped. So right there we have one great example of channel stuffing going on... and keep in mind that the retail stores aren't buying the tablets. BestBuy didn't take a bath on that, they push the loss back onto HP. Why not take shipment of the next 300k duds from HP or Motorola or wherever? Having inventory is bad for a company, but it's not so bad if you can charge it back to the manufacturer if it doesn't sell.

I'm just saying I think channel stuffing is the simplest solution to the missing tablets problem. I'm not going to worry about where the tablets are going until I see someone quoting the sales figures.

Keeping in mind that Amazon has never released sales figures (apart from "its selling well") for any version of the Kindle so basically they are pulling numbers out of the air for that. Samsung stopped reporting their sales numbers "due to competitive issues" last summer so once again they are pulling numbers out of the air for that. Until the Android vendors man up and report actual sales then any comparison is meaningless.

Meanwhile we have at least 2 cases of manufactures taking baths on their tablet stocks (RIM and HP) after the stuffing the channel, Occams Razor would suggest that is the simplest reason.

Keep in mind also that Raymond cherry picks his data to fit his model and has been strangely silent on the decline of Android's market share in Q4 last year.

For that matter, in my opinion, he isn't really talking about the traditional electronics retail channel anyway. To me, the big "mystery of the Android tablets is the crappy junk you find on sale at drugstores, Bed, Bath & Beyond and who knows where else.

I can't think of any reason to buy that junk, but they do keep stocking them and getting newer models (from fly-by-night companies that would go bankrupt if they evem thought about channel stuffing), so someone must be buying them. Is there just an endless supply of people willing and interested in trying out a $99 piece of junk?

And the junk does keep getting better. There was a time, pre-iPad, when the baseline was Cupcake or worse. Now it is Froyo or Gingerbread, with ICS on the horizon...

I'll give you that. I think that is happening a significant amount too. I would even go so far as to speculate that a small but significant (and a much, much smaller percentage than Android) number of iPads are bought as a novelty and don't see much real use. The difference is that Apple makes good margin on that. From the perspective of a healthy platform, active users, or as an app developer, that's effectively a non-sale.

Remember, channel stuffing can't stay a secret forever. Android tablets have been on the market a while. Even if a manufacturer takes returns, unlike HP, at some point they either have to sell the tablet or take the loss. Other than RIM, I haven't heard of any manufacturers writing down tablets on the scale that would be required to sustain channel stuffing.

That's true but there are a lot of warehouses in the distribution channel and they could very well be sitting there. Companies can keep write-downs off their books for a while.

I remember there was at least one accusation by Lenovo that Samsung was doing it with the Galaxy Tab at the end of last year:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/sep/02/samsung-gal...

Exactly. That's what happened to the TouchPad. HP, presumably because of excessive optimisim, stuffed the channel past its breaking point. In response, the channel revolted and was going to return TouchPads en masse before HP decided on the fire sale instead.

It is also worth noting that ASUS, one of the more successful Android tablet vendors, is doing the exact opposite. There were severe shortages of the Transformer after it launched and, from what I can tell, the Transformer Prime isn't easy to get either. I think ASUS is deliberately ramping up production slowly to match demand so they don't have problems with variants that flop (like the Slider).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com