the tablet war is heating up

[Felon]

As for the screen size you even state that reading on a small screen can be very difficult. the bigger the screen the better. But being to big then the portability becomes a problem. But this could change once samsungs flexable amoled comes to market. Then it will be quite possable we will see bigger screens that fold. check out the demo for it from the ces2011.

Small screen by current standards is < 4". The iPhone is 3.8". Oh, and my vision is not great, so I'm not a good consumer model in that respect.

I wondered how long it would be before someone dragged up that ridiculous argument here again.

It sure explains why the iPad sells like crazy and its "powerful" competitors don't and haven't for a decade. If you don't like it, it's gotta be a matter of brainwashing, marketing, "iSheep", etc. Can't possibly be because it's actually a better thing.

Did I mention that I own an iPhone? I'm certain I did. That's because it was the better product at the time, and once we actually hear what the heck is in the iPhone 5, I may very well go for an upgrade. Heck, when I was in Manhattan last month, the glass-capped Apple Store was my second or third stop. Kind of lame, because some security jerks were hassling everyone who came near the structure without moving straight to the doors. Far be it that someone have a picture taken standing next to it. Might shatter.

I'm pretty even-handed when it comes to acknowledging Apple's innovations and great service, but I'm also painfully aware of their inadequacies and shinanegans. Hyperbole is common in marketing, but outright describing your product as magical is talking down to your customer. "Look! Shiny! Smooth! Neat things happen when you poke this or swipe your finger that way!" If anyone regards Apple loyalists as an unsavvy pack of hipster sheep, it's Apple. What is Apple's depiction of a Microsoft loyalist in their commercials? Some four-eyed nerd who spouts techno-babble. Tell me, Fast Learner, are you just as incensed at their shameless generalization?

It's pretty obvious that there is a very strong level of unwaivering loyalty towards the Apple brand, and to its loyalists the flaws of Apple products simply...aren't. For instance, the iPhone has been falling behind the smartphone pack on numerous features (multi-tasking, camera, processor, and then there's the whole Flash thing), and even the iPad's follow-ups coughed a camera before the iPad 2 came out. When Apple finally does incorporate a feature, it's regarded as a revolution rather than a johnny-come-lately.

In short, Apple's popularity has become something that exists is in spite of where their product features stand compared to the competition. These days, their big edge in the features department is that they have the best third-party support for their app stores. Apple's brick-and-mortar (and, er, glass) stores are constantly crowded not because of the love of Apple technology, but rather a desire to be seen someplace deemed hip.

 

[Felon]

Took about twelve minutes to get this far using safari, but I just couldn't resist...

Sent from iPhone

 

[Alan Shutko]

Many of the other tablets seem to be a little bit slower. But.....they do *more* in some ways. With some reviews, it seems that the reviewers will count slower speed against some of these other devices...

Not entirely. iOS does have an advantage over Android in terms of UI latency, and it's not just due to a lack of features.

iPads have hardware accelerated graphics for most of their animations and transitions. That's the advantage of having control over your hardware platform. Android devices before Honeycomb do the UI completely on the CPU.

Honeycomb devices do have hardware UI acceleration but it seems that it's still not as polished as it is on iOS. Which isn't surprising: it's brand new instead of 4 years old and Android has to support a wider variety of hardware than Apple does. That's where the first-mover advantage comes in. But of course, first mover isn't insurmountable.

Android reviews, and the WebOS reviews that have just come out, generally get a lot of credit for their platform and features, but a lot of that is just potential until enough apps come out to satisfy the majority of users.

And on price, the problem for competitors is that Apple has done very well at sourcing components in huge volumes (often paying in advance) and getting good deals on them, so they can market the iPad at prices that are hard to beat. Right now, competitors can market as being cheaper (but lower quality hardware), good hardware but a smaller app store and worse for general users, or good hardware and great platform for hobbyists or specific niches.

 

[Fast Learner]

Hyperbole is common in marketing, but outright describing your product as magical is talking down to your customer. "Look! Shiny! Smooth! Neat things happen when you poke this or swipe your finger that way!"

See, I don't agree that it's talking down. When I got my first iPhone two years ago I hadn't touched a Mac in a decade, far from some Apple fanboy, using PCs exclusively and programming for Windows Mobile. Playing with the iPhone was pretty slick and I decided I wanted to get involved with making apps, etc.

When the iPad came out, however, it was more than pretty slick, it was... see, there's no good word here. The experience was unlike anything I'd ever had: the device seemed to become the app that was running. I was holding Wikipedia in my hand, rubbing the red eye out of the photo of my daughter I was holding, etc. To me, in a way the iPhone only approached but never reached, the iPad would -- magically -- transform.

So when Apple marketing said "magical," I got it. It was magic, or as close to I've experienced firsthand. If they called it "amazing" or "unbelievably cool" or "unlike anything you've experienced before" they would have been right, but the word "magical" was much closer to my experience and more concisely effective at describing it. That super-responsive UI I described earlier was a big part of the magic, and I suspect it has a very strong subconscious affect on how people react to the iPad vs other tablets.

You can discount it as "neat things happening when you poke or swipe", and I understand that may be all you've experienced. But me, it really was magical, and it didn't require drinking any Kool-Aid or becoming a sheep or being brainwashed. It wasn't hyperbole, it was the best word for the experience.

If anyone regards Apple loyalists as an unsavvy pack of hipster sheep, it's Apple. What is Apple's depiction of a Microsoft loyalist in their commercials? Some four-eyed nerd who spouts techno-babble. Tell me, Fast Learner, are you just as incensed at their shameless generalization?

I thought Hodgman was hilarious and Justin Long came across as smarmy. I also completely identified with all of the problems "the PC" was describing: it was my everyday computing life. So no, I was not incensed.

For instance, the iPhone has been falling behind the smartphone pack on numerous features (multi-tasking, camera, processor, and then there's the whole Flash thing), and even the iPad's follow-ups coughed a camera before the iPad 2 came out. When Apple finally does incorporate a feature, it's regarded as a revolution rather than a johnny-come-lately.

Not uncommonly because when Apple finally does incorporate the feature, they do it incredibly well, usually better than what their competitors had put together. That's even Apple's internal thinking: release a feature when it's really good, not to ensure their product gets a checkmark on a feature list. The rest of the time they pioneer an all new trail that everyone else scrambles after, coming out with half-finished bad copies an an attempt to get into the market.

That's certainly the model of a company I'd prefer to run, rather than the company that announces "our processor is a bit faster (but otherwise this sucks)" or "you can have true multitasking (as long as you don't mind manually ensuring you don't leave anything running that makes it impossible to use your device)" or "it's totally open, you can run anything you want (including malware and software that can secretively grab your voice mail and email and such)".

In short, Apple's popularity has become something that exists is in spite of where their product features stand compared to the competition. These days, their big edge in the features department is that they have the best third-party support for their app stores. Apple's brick-and-mortar (and, er, glass) stores are constantly crowded not because of the love of Apple technology, but rather a desire to be seen someplace deemed hip.

I understand you feel that way, that you disparage people who go in to check out the shiny stuff, that they must be there to seem cool. That doesn't mean it's their actual motivation.

 

[falcarrion]

It's pretty obvious that there is a very strong level of unwaivering loyalty towards the Apple brand, and to its loyalists the flaws of Apple products simply...aren't. For instance, the iPhone has been falling behind the smartphone pack on numerous features (multi-tasking, camera, processor, and then there's the whole Flash thing), and even the iPad's follow-ups coughed a camera before the iPad 2 came out. When Apple finally does incorporate a feature, it's regarded as a revolution rather than a johnny-come-lately.

your remarks about loyalists is exactly what we have been trying to avoid on this thread. We come here to talk, discuss, and learn about tablets. no matter who makes it. Not rip on how any company promotes or sells there products.

 

[Felon]

your remarks about loyalists is exactly what we have been trying to avoid on this thread. We come here to talk, discuss, and learn about tablets. no matter who makes it. Not rip on how any company promotes or sells there products.

I respect your desire for civlity, but you are directing your finger-waggling in the wrong direction.

My minor musing about "magical" technology triggered a rather testy barb from Fast Learner, as if he had been personally provoked. Which he wasn't. The response was totally disproportionate and is certainly where the "loyalist embargo" was violated, not my use of the word "loyalist" which came later. Moreover, his most-recent follow-up has been as unabashedly partisan as it gets, full of gushing about the wonderfulness of Apple and some MS-bashing thrown in at the end for good mearsure. All of which I note you have chosen to let go unchided, which strikes me as peculiar.

If you're going to act as arbiter in a discussion, allow me to offer some advice as I have to engage in this kind of social engineering frequently. A pretty basic rule of the game is to avoid singling out one side of a disagreement for rebuke, because it creates the appearance that you're vindicating the other side. Just tell all sides to chill out and make them feel a little silly for getting all worked up. It takes two to tango.

As I said, I actually do avail myself of both Apple and MS products and judge each product on its own merits rather than sweeping generalizations that evidence an overall bias. If it makes you feel better, I've nary an intention of rebutting FL's last point. If he wants to drop it, I'm fine with that. The entire gist of my posts have been that everything is a trade-off, there is no magical perfection, everybody has weaknesses, and we'd all be better off if everyone could accept that rather than attempt to impose topic embargos.

 

[Banshee16]

According to the Apple website. iOS5 will include more than 200 new features for your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch.
iOS5 is compatible with:
iphone 3gs
iphone 4
ipod touch 3rd gen
ipod touch 4th gen
ipad
ipad 2

My main fear would be if the upgrade process would have the same issues as were experienced by iPhone 3GS users who upgraded to IOS 4. Many of them had significant problems, particularly with speed etc.

Banshee

 

[Felon]

I've been around that mulberry bush. Any massive upgrade has a certain margin of failure. You can just backup your device in iTunes before running the upgrade, and restore if anything goes awry.

 

[Banshee16]

You're conflating "UI system" with "app launching system".

The iOS UI framework -- not Springboard, its app launcher -- is called Cocoa Touch, and it handles all of the drawing, scrolling, keyboard stuff, gesture recognition, etc. (it handles the non-visible stuff, too) of every app. The same is true of the Android OS UI system and HP's WebOS UI system.

An easy example of the kind of sluggishness/sloppiness you see in reviews is a simple drag test. Pick an app that has something that can be scrolled across the screen, like a web page or a list of items. Place your finger on the draggable thing near the bottom of the screen and drag your finger to the top, stopping before you leave the screen area. On iOS whatever you placed your finger on when you started dragging will still be precisely under your finger up at the top, but on other tablets your finger will have "slipped" ahead of the content.

Similarly if you tap on a buttons in the various OSes, whatever UI thing the button does to acknowledge your touch -- light up, animate to appear to press into the screen, whatever -- will happen instantaneously on iOS but often has a delay on other OSes. Now mind you, the delay is usually measured in tenths of a second, but it's just enough that it doesn't quite feel like you're touching a physical button.

I'm not fanboy-claiming that iOS is the end-all and be-all, I'm just explaining how things can feel sluggish in a touch OS regardless of the processors and such. Apple was able to polish and refine that whole interface for years before releasing the first iPhone and even more years before releasing the iPad. I'm sure that Android will come up to that same level given sufficient time, but in the meantime app use simply doesn't feel as snappy on competing tablets.

Of note, Windows Phone 7 is probably the closest to iOS in terms of feeling snappy, but that's no surprise in that Microsoft has also had a bunch of years to work on it.

That's a good explanation. Maybe I'm just not observant enough....I don't know. But I haven't really seen it when I'm at the store. I *have* seen a little lag with some Android devices when moving stuff around. HOWEVER those Android devices were doing stuff with their CPU at the time that the IOS devices can't.....pull live/animated content, and showing it on the desktop via widgets, using animated backgrounds etc. So, I *did* notice things were a little more laggy.....but once I looked at base Honeycomb devices that didn't have a bunch of widgets, and weren't using an animated background, the differences vanished. That's the kind of thing I'm talking about. Just make sure to compare apples to apples. Sometimes I think the difference in what some of those Android devices are doing gets forgotten when doing comparisons.

The new Windows Mango demos look pretty cool. I won't be able to look at them for another year or two though, as I'm in a contract for my iPhone.

Incidentally, regarding my wife's iPhone, I *did* find a software issue that wasn't pleasant. When I hooked her new iPhone to her PC to restore it, and get the songs, contacts etc. the first thing iTunes did was back up the phone....taking all those blank settings and overwriting the backup from her old phone (thus deleting all her contacts).

That's when I researched and found that iTunes only keeps *one* backup, and continuously overwrites the last backup.

Apple tech support and Rogers were unable to help. Thankfully, Microsoft *doesn't* only keep one backup, and though Apple only had the one backup, I was able to restore Microsoft's backup of the directory of folders that happened to contain the Apple backup, and restore it that way.

Seems like poor software design to me. In any case, it took tinkering, and investigation, but I got lucky, and was able to get that info back.

Back to the tablets.....I'm not saying Android is perfect. I've experienced force closes when trying stuff out. However, my iPhone crashes also...both the entire device *and* individual apps.....Apple just doesn't give you an error message, so the average user doesn't realize what just happened. A little like how Toyota helps generate a reputation for their cars being most reliable, by doing things like fixing things without telling the owner, when the owner brings the car in for regular servicing.

I *have* found some of the Android tablets to be slow and sluggish when I test them. But if I reboot them, when they come back online, they'll be nice and snappy again. I'm not sure why that is. Another customer in the store crashed something? A memory leak? A problem with the OS? I don't know.

Banshee

 

[Banshee16]

I've been around that mulberry bush. Any massive upgrade has a certain margin of failure. You can just backup your device in iTunes before running the upgrade, and restore if anything goes awry.

This is a question....not a criticism.

*Can* you do a restore, if you've upgraded the OS? I *thought* that I'd read that once owners did the upgrade to IOS 4, they weren't able to revert to IOS 3, short of jailbreaking their device, if they ran into problems?

Is this not the case?

Banshee