Toshiba to make quad-core Android 4.0 tablets in 7, 10, and 13 inch sizes | Hacker News Reader

Toshiba to make quad-core Android 4.0 tablets in 7, 10, and 13 inch sizes

arstechnica.com

28 pointsiProject31 comments

Its shocking how effectively Apple is able to move the eight-ball on companies like Toshiba. "We have lots of cores!" "Available in any screen size!"

Hey Toshiba: no one cares about those specs right now - Apple shifted the conversation for the majority of the tablet market to screen res, where they have an essentially unassailable competitive advantage for quite some time. And, Toshiba missed the boat, which makes their claims for cores and screen sizes seem flat and mis-timed.

Note: I have an awesome toshiba laptop that I carted around the world for me in 2008, which is still going strong. Added a hybrid ssd/platter drive to perk up win7 performance, and its still my daily driver. Toshiba makes great products, they're just eating Apple's dust, like everyone else.

Care to elaborate what's your particular hybrid drive model? I thought the fashion for hybrid drives faded away.

Sure - Seagate Momentus XT, 750GB model; 16GB SSD. The OS boots at SSD speeds, and the ~7 applications that I use frequently do too. But, I have the storage of a traditional drive, and the whole deal cost $170.

Hybrids aren't for eveyone - gamers, pro photogs, heavy developers, etc. I think would overwhelm the hybrid's ability to offer any advantage. But I knew my usage patterns (a limited retinue of light weight applications) were ideally suited for it.

The laptop is a U200, has a first gen Core Duo, and 2GB of RAM. Bought in 2008 ($800!), upgraded the RAM too, obviously. Boots Win7 to password screen in ~15 seconds.

* "We have lots of cores!" "Available in any screen size!" Hey Toshiba: no one cares about those specs right now*

We're talking about the Apple that is trialing a 7" tablet, right? The one that talked up "4 cores" at the 3rd generation unveiling? Same Apple?

There are millions and millions of non-Apple tablets being sold. This seems like a laughably tiny number compared to the incredible success Apple has yielded, but in consumer electronics it is substantial. It is bloody sad, however, that every time someone tries to make a product this whole clucking "nah nah Apple is better" nonsense gets carted out.

Keep on keeping on Toshiba, and samsung, and LG, and...

You've managed to nail my point exactly in your pugnacious response. A year from now, when Toshiba, Dell, and everyone else have pivoted and are talking up even better screen resolution, Apple's going to move the eight-ball again: maybe to 7 inch tablets, maybe to cores, nobody knows but Tim & Jon.

Did you even read my post? I don't think Apple is "better" - I think they're great at wagging the dog, the dog being us consumers.

I believe it's only a matter of time before tablets become commoditized like the smartphone market is doing right now. Amazon is working hard on that.

Some will still care for the Apple brand and whatever quality advantage it has but in the end Apple won't be forever selling 5 times what it's competitors are selling.

You don't have to be the best at this point, just managed to sell enough to make some money per run.

You're missing one point - if tablets become commoditized, Apple still wins because they're establishing ownership of the ecosystem today.

You're spot on identifying Amazon as Apple's only real competitor.

You're spot on identifying Amazon as Apple's only real competitor.

Amazon was, however nowadays Google sells music, rents and sells movies, sells books, and of course sells apps. The reason they rebranded the Android market to Google Play is because of this ecosystem.

Fair enough; I'd say outside of apps Google has a credibility curve to climb however. The market doesn't perceive google as a content provider the same way it does apple or amazon, and both apple and amazon worked for many years to achieve the perception that they have today.

So - my counter point would be that Google will be a competitor in time.

> I believe it's only a matter of time before tablets become commoditized like the smartphone market is doing right now.

Why wouldn't tablets be more like, say, the iPod than the iPhone? The phone market is significantly warped by carriers. When people's contract are up, they walk into their carrier store and ask the salesperson what phone to buy. Articles about the Lumia 900 launch indicate AT&T is planning to push it as their primary high-end phone[1]. In this regard Apple does not control their sales channel as they do with all of their other products. This is significant, as recent data show that the vast majority of iPhone buyers purchased their device at the carrier's store[2].

The only real vulnerability Apple has in tablets right now is price, but I think the chances they'll leave a price umbrella where people can continue to swoop in at $199 and undercut the iPad is very small. I expect their pricing to play out like the iPod, where eventually there was a model at every price point from $50 to like $400 at $50 increments. They've also done this with the iPhone, where what started out as either a $500 or $600 phone is now sold for $300, $200, $100, or $0.

If the quality of competing tablets does not improve significantly, there is nothing at all inevitable about the tablet market playing out like the phone market.

1: http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/09/att-going-big-with-lumia-90...

2: http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/apple-only...

The phone market is significantly warped by carriers. When people's contract are up, they walk into their carrier store and ask the salesperson what phone to buy.

The phone market is indeed significantly warped by subsidies from the carriers. If carrier subsidies didn't exist (if people didn't fall for it being subsumed into the cost of plans) the iPhone market would never have taken off (Ballmer in his original dismissal of the iPhone was actually right -- people won't pay $600 for a phone. They will, however, pay $149 and pay the rest over the contract period while acting blind to it). Those value options would decimate it.

Aside from that whole "carriers against Apple" bit (completely opposite of reality), the tablet market already is playing out like the smartphone industry. With each successive quarter Apple's share drops (while their volume increases just as in smartphones). They once had it in the bag, and now account for about 1/2 of tablets, heading ever downwards.

Except that the original iPhone launch was gangbusters, and it did cost $600. But Apple had the advantage of absolute novelty and a dose of fanboysim back then. So Ballmer was right in general about the phone market, but he was oh so wrong about the iPhone launch in particular. Apple just needed to pivot to a carrier-subsidized model once the initial enthusiasm wave receeded.

> The phone market is indeed significantly warped by subsidies from the carriers. If carrier subsidies didn't exist (if people didn't fall for it being subsumed into the cost of plans) the iPhone market would never have taken off.

The point I made about carriers was about Apple owning their sales channel. Most people buy their phones directly from carriers. Carriers have their own agendas. Thus Apple has less control over the phone sales channel than they do for any other product they sell. It matters. We could debate how much, but it matters. For example, if I walk into an AT&T store and ask the salesperson, "I want a smartphone", and he replies, "This Lumia 900 is our latest and greatest" and so I buy that, my opinion is that that has a real impact on the market.

Regarding your point, though, if carrier subsidies didn't exist, presumably they wouldn't exist for anyone, so who knows what the market would look like? It might favor Apple even more. Their supply chain seems to be the best in the industry. Rivals are having trouble making tablets with similar features for competitive prices, and competing PC manufacturers are having trouble selling ultrabooks for similar prices as MacBook Airs. So wouldn't it stand to reason that in a subsidy-free world, Apple could make a phone for $300 or $400 and still make a healthy profit, but Samsung or HTC or Nokia would struggle to do the same?

> They once had it in the bag, and now account for about 1/2 of tablets, heading ever downwards.

Do you have a link for this? I'm sure you're familiar with discussions of market share based on shipped vs. sold. And this is only anecdotal evidence, but just about everywhere I go -- coffee shops, airports -- all I see are iPads. I've seen maybe 2 or 3 Android tablets (including the Kindle Fire) in the wild ever. Again just anecdotal, but it was pretty clear once Android phones started to gain traction and were selling in real numbers. It doesn't seem that way at all with the tablet market.

I'm not sure that the tablet market will really settle down to look like the iPod market. There is too much money to be made and way more competition than there ever was for portable mp3 players. But I do think a lot of the market fundamentals are the same as they were with the iPod, and assuming Apple removes the price umbrella relatively soon, I think it's going to take a _significantly higher quality product_ than what we're seeing today before competitors start gaining real traction.

A year from now, when Toshiba, Dell, and everyone else have pivoted and are talking up even better screen resolution

Your point isn't even coherent. Apple made the increased resolution the primary selling point of the iPad 3rd gen: Everyone knew they would, and it was the worst kept secret in technology (indeed it was expected almost a year earlier!). Just as with the iPhone 4(s), no one is chasing them: Sure, there are products coming out somewhere in between (the 3rd gen iPad -- love mine, btw -- has a resolution far past the point of diminished returns owing to a naive scaling system), but no one is going to even bother trying to match them because...why.

I can't follow your core narrative because it makes no sense. Somehow Toshiba making different screen sizes is bizarrely behind Apple? What?

- Apple sets the market - Toshiba talking about screen sizes as a differentiator is not speaking to the market that apple has largely defined, and is highly unlikely to redefine the market.

I'm not sure how much more clear I can make it. Enjoy your new iPad!

> We're talking about the Apple that is trialing a 7" tablet, right? The one that talked up "4 cores" at the 3rd generation unveiling? Same Apple?

I may be biased here, because I visit apple.com frequently but I never bother with the announcement videos. I don't care about Apple's market metrics, and I didn't care about quad-core.

As far as websites go, apple.com/ipad shows me lots of useful stuff. Safari has a reader mode and a read-later list. There are great apps on the store, for education and whatnot. iBooks can do this and that. Everythings syncs and gets backed up.

And this is already their most technical release in a long time, the first two iPads were heavily marketed by simply showing apps.

The first Google result for Toshiba tablet's is http://www.thetoshibatablet.com/. It only mentions hardware, except for stating that it runs Android 3.1, without any explanation of course.

That is why these spec announcements get ridiculed all the time. If either company were to ship their devices with genuinely awesome bonus apps, ones that Apple hasn't nailed yet, I doubt anyone would point their finger at them and laugh.

Oh, one example comes to mind: The Kindle Fire was not interesting at all as far as specs are considered, but it sounded like a great idea to many Apple fans because it had a better-curated App Store and the full Amazon experience.

And most importantly, a $200 price tag...

I agree that the toshiba website is aweful. But It's not as if everyone but Apple is just talking feature besides talking about hardware specifications.

For example, here is Samsung's page for the Galaxy Tab 10.1: http://www.samsung.com/global/microsite/galaxytab/10.1/featu...

Has anyone ever launched a modern tablet with a 13" screen size? I don't think so. And it doesn't matter what Apple sets the conversation to; just like most consumers don't care how many cores it has, most don't care how many pixels it has.

The product has to work well, be priced right, have good marketing and be visible to consumers. A 13" tablet is unique and may attract some attention, if only as an experiment (which may fail in the market, but would still provide valuable lessons and information to the industry).

Uh, the toshiba thrive 7 had retina display months before apple did.

7" is a great form factor.

I have a cheap 7" Android tablet (along with a 10.1" Transformer, and iPad2, a Galaxy S, and iPhone 4 and and iPod Touch..), and I love the size.

It's slightly heavy for me to use comfortably as an ebook, though. I've tried the Samsung 7", and that thing seems fantastic - roughly as light as my ebook reader, but so thin.

Toshiba as a tablet manufacture.. meh. I'm not impressed with what I've seen so far, but I guess they might get there.

I'm not sure about 13", but I'm sure for the I'm a basketball coach with big hands and 10" is too small for me market it will be a big hit.

To me, this seems akin to Gillette's ads. "Now with 20 blades!!!" 1 core is good enough for most and 2 cores is good enough for anyone with a tablet. Maybe later, after all the usability and product design issues are solved and mobile software can properly make use of multiple cores, this change would be justified.

Edit: This points towards a more global trend I keep seeing with product companies (with apple as the poster child) focusing on a single product with minor variations in the product line and iterating that, versus hardware companies coming up with 6 new tablets every year with model names like tsb-vtbl-32blk. Guess which one generates more of a user following.

The point of cramming lots of cores into mobile devices is apparently to reduce battery drain, not to gain processing power. This might or might not be new to you, but to me, short battery life is still an inconvenience :)

(Random corroborating source: http://www.tested.com/news/news/articles/1483-more-cores-mea... )

This makes no sense to me. More cores means more processing throughput. Design advances lead to reduced power consumption. Both are happening at the same time, which is the only reason there might be any correlation.

More cores means specialized design (aka. nvidia one low power core and 4 high performance cores), and selective activation according to requirements. Software taking advantage of cores is still an issue tough, but for games and multimedia it's definitely not hard.

Well - when you can turn all but one of the cores off (or down to extremely low power consumption), and/or when you have asymmetric cores where the one core that runs alone most of the time (when the device is sitting there, waiting for user input) is an extreme low power one, then yes, more cores mean stingy power use.

Well, the thing is two cores running at, say, 800MHz burns less battery than one core running at 1.6GHz. So you get the similar (but not quite the same) processing power for less battery power.

You also get less heat dissipation. Great clock rates on handheld devices are currently out of the question because they would overheat, and handset designers are reluctant to make the device big enough to fit a heatsink.

Random corroborating source (with annoying popup): http://www.wirelessweek.com/articles/2011/07/devices-multi-c...

These guys can't make a "better" tablet than the iPad no matter how many cores they put in it. Take a hint from the HP touchpad sellout.

We don't need another me-too ipad. We don't need 4 cores. We need capacitive multi-touch tablets that don't completely suck for less than $200.

If they're not planning on delivering that, they should just save their research dollars until they can. I need another not quite as good as iPad for the same price as iPad choice like a broken leg.

"the Excite 7.7 will start at $499.99"

Wasn't Asus going to launch a 7 inch tablet with Tegra3 for $250?

If that's the case Toshiba is borked, big time.

Borked in a big way. You can't sell an inferior tablet for the same price as an iPad. The ones who are succeeding against Apple (like Amazon) are effectively competing on price.

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