<i>What will cause enough people to buy this that developers will beat down the door to make great apps for it?</i><p>Simple. Price. The new Vizio 3.1 tablet is $350. If they can hit $299 by the holidays, these may well fly.<p>But the app ecosystem you say? Not important. What?! How can that be? Most users won't care about apps they don't know about, and most ppl don't know about iPad apps.<p>If I can demo the following to you:<p>1) HD video playback w/ some key apps like Netflix and Hulu<p>2) Kindle/Nook eReader<p>3) Music player<p>4) Web browser<p>5) Office suite<p>6) Some games<p>7) Nice scrolling and responsive UI<p>8) GMail/Maps<p>9) The price is $150 cheaper than the iPad.<p>I'm done. You're sold. The long tail I just don't think matters as much as ppl in the industry think it does. It's the exact same reason why OS X is viable now for most ppl despite the fact that the Windows app ecosystem is still much larger. The web neutralized that difference though. The web isn't quite as important on mobile devices (surprisingly), but the ecosystem gap isn't as important as it was in 1990 on the desktop.<p>The big problem with Honeycomb (Android Tablet) is that Google treats it like they do everything -- they shipped a beta quality product. They did that with Android for phones, but its pretty baked now. They did it with Google TV and with Chrome Books. But with Honeycomb and Google TV (especially) they didn't update them the way they do the Chrome browser. The problem with Honeycomb up to this point is that it was crap. It sounds like this is beginning to change.
I heard a lot of these arguments before. 3-4 years ago when the early Android phones came out and being compared to the IPhone.<p>From the post:<p>========<p>Developers will rush to Android tablets once a lot of people are buying Android tablets. But hardly anyone will buy them if there’s too little compelling software available.<p>So there must be a very good reason why someone would choose any given Android tablet over an iPad, and that reason can’t be the available apps.<p>This, not how closely a manufacturer can mimic the iPad’s hardware, is what reviewers should be asking about each new tablet: Why would a significant number of buyers choose this instead of an iPad?<p>Or, more generally: What will cause enough people to buy this that developers will beat down the door to make great apps for it?<p>========<p>Replace "Android tablet" with "Android phone" and "IPad" with "IPhone" and it's almost exactly like what Android naysayers were saying years ago.
The review seems a bit biased. Sure, Apple may have a head start in many aspects but this is just generalizing and reading between the lines of a different review with assumptions and speculation peppered throughout. The Android platform may not be the perfect developer ecosystem when compared to itunes and iOS apps, but there's plenty of gems and the developers behind them will eventually crawl onto larger screens when they figure it out and have the time. There's plenty of applications already in the marketplace for legitimately getting media onto the device which Marco either overlooked or dismissed. The Android marketplace even has a movie rental section which isn't hard to miss either.<p>The good reason for picking an Android tablet over an iPad? Easy, no stupid lock-ins.
The only real Android tablet problem is that the Honeycomb emulator performance blows goats and you <i>need</i> to have a physical device to do any sort of meaningful development. Google <i>is</i> working on it though, just not fast enough for us devs. :(<p><a href="http://www.androidpolice.com/2011/01/27/android-team-acknowledges-honeycomb-emulator-performance-problems-hard-at-work-on-fixes/" rel="nofollow">http://www.androidpolice.com/2011/01/27/android-team-acknowl...</a>
>“The Tab is a reasonable choice for people who watch a lot of video, as long as it’s all pirated, because there’s almost no legal content available.”<p>Ha, the only thing that proves is that Marco lives in a nationalistic bubble. Outside the US, there is no video content on the iTunes store. Nothing, not even a public domain propaganda movie or some old public domain stuff.<p>Yet the iPad is popular here, as well.
I think he underestimates how many Android early adopters are there. I'm sure there are at least a few million out there who would buy an Android tablet this year if given the chance for a good looking, high performance an well priced one.<p>The Xoom was too expensive. Asus Transformer has been hard to get so far. And Galaxy Tab may be arriving a little too late because a lot of people are already expecting Tegra 3 tablets, but I'm sure it will sell quite well, too.<p>However, I don't think Android tablets will make a big impact until the <i>second wave</i> starts, late this year - all the Tegra 3 tablets arriving, and Amazon is launching 2 tablets as well, and they'll push those heavily.<p>And ultimately, the price will help the most, probably. Once the big name manufacturers start making "mid-end" tablets under $300, I think marketshare for Android tablets will quickly rise.
For me (I don't claim to represent a viable market share though) it's simple enough:<p>I have no use for a tablet so far.<p>I played around with an iPad, and frankly I couldn't care less. Yes, it's nice and "shiny", my inner gadget collector wants to keep it. But I know that I wouldn't use it. I want _my_ selection of software available, I want decent tinkering ability (can I easily create software for this? Can I change things to suit me, whatever the industry defines as 'best' right now?) and - power. A smartphone with a larger screen (which is more or less the impression these things leave on me) is nothing I long for.<p>I'll wait, look at each new candidate - and see if anyone of them might appeal here. The iPad, while beautiful, probably never will. Touchpad maybe? But I doubt that as well.
I think the biggest problem that Android (Honeycomb) is having is that Google totally rebuilt the OS for the tablet. Where as apple did not make many changes to there iOS and the developers had to make very few changes to their apps code to make it run on the iPad. Android (Honeycomb) will be fine it is just taking developers longer to fix the code to run with all the new features that Honeycomb has to offer.
If device thickness wouldn't matter, people would still be buying iPad 1s.<p>A lot of devlopers already have Android apps that only need to be ported to Honeycomb.<p>I am not going to install 400000 apps on my tablet.<p>I don't like Apple's lock in and politics.
I will not be buying an iPad. Or any other tablet that ties me to a single store (especially one vetted for "decency").<p>That leaves me, at the moment, with Android if I want a tablet.
Marco's post makes it clear why traditional review sites don't work for the normal consumer. On a different level, this post also raises a big question - how can someone compete with a well established app platform like Apple's ? Android managed to do it on phones because it was the lone competitor to Apple in the touch phone segment, but I feel the same success will be tough to repeat with tablets.
<i>cough</i><p>Yup, software is why the iPhone is enjoying so much success and Android is struggling to gain traction in the smartphone market. The Xoom has been out for a couple of months, the 10.1 hasn't even been released yet.<p>Is it possible that we could wait a bit longer and reflect back on Android v. iOS Tablet-edition (or at the very least the 10.1) rather than espouse these completely inferred blog posts that only lead to fanboyism and (literally, seriously) useless conversations.