The questions every Android tablet maker should be asking

The Android tablet problem, nicely summarized by one review’s conclusion
[Via Marco.org]

From Ars Technica’s review of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, which exemplifies the softball “please keep sending us gadgets” review so prevalent recently:

The Galaxy Tab 10.1 easily has the best hardware of any Android tablet on the market today. Samsung has really outdone itself—the Tab 10.1’s svelte profile and impressively light weight (it weighs less than an iPad and has more RAM) are sure to attract the attention of consumers.

Really? Will a lot of customers notice the 2% thickness difference or the 6% weight savings over an iPad 2? I guess it must be the RAM they’re clamoring for, since that’s a hotly debated spec among iPad buyers.

Hardware excellence isn’t the only measure of a good tablet, however; software is arguably just as important—if not more so—on such a personal device.

Google has moved Honeycomb forward with Android 3.1 and has thankfully fixed the stability problems, but that’s still not enough. Honeycomb’s barren third-party application landscape really hobbles the Tab 10.1 and other Android tablets.

Translation: Android tablets have managed to copy the iPad’s hardware well enough — the easy part — but have failed to provide good software and significant third-party app choice — the hard part.

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Not only is the review skewered in this fashion but the essay also brings up questions that need to be answered by any tablet maker:

1) Why would a significant number of buyers choose this instead of an iPad?

2) What will cause enough people to buy this that developers will beat down the door to make great apps for it?

The mass markets are not buying these because of the hardware spec – only geeks care about those. The mass market cares about what it does, how efficiently it does it and if it will improve things.

Looks are nice. Industrial design is an important part of a successful product. But people want to do things with the tablet and simply having a large screen or a light weight does not cut it.

Apple was able to make the iPhone a success because out of the box Apple had created a software environment that enhanced people’s lives. Apple but a lot of hard work into that software that was the OS and into its original apps.

People bought because of the enhancement the software provided to the hardware. The hardware by itself would not have sufficed. With that popularity, Apple was able to leverage a huge developer response.

Not so with Android tablets nor, so far, with Windows. Heck, MS has been rumored to be paying developers to create software.

The geek market has very little idea of what will sell in the mass market. Apple’s perhaps greatest impact has been on moving technology out of the geek market and into the mass market in ways that enhance people’s lives.

Too many hardware and software makers seem to feel that if they can get the geek market to adopt the tech, then it will naturally flow to the mass market. See Linux for why this does not necessarily follow.

Until more companies understand how to make this transition, and how to provide livelihoods for the very developers the hardware requires,  Apple will continue to eat them alive.

They thought the streets were paved with gold

by Mike McCaffrey

Multiple Android tablet peddlers give up, focus on 4- to 5 -inch smartphones
[Via MacDailyNews]

“Branded handset vendors as well as ODM/OEM handset makers, who have ventured into the tablet PC segment, have recently switched their focus back to the development of 4- to 5-inch high-end smartphones in the wake of recent lackluster sales of Android-based tablets, according to industry sources,” Daniel Shen and Steve Shen report for DigiTimes.

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Like any other gold rush, all these companies thought they would be able to just pick up market share just by showing up. The tablet market that Apple revealed would be theris for the taking.

All they had to do was produce the goods.

Many produced the goods and saw little results. It really does appear that, at the moment, there is not a tablet market – there is an iPad market.

The only success so far – Samsung – slavishly copied the iPad so much that Apple is suing Samsung over that plagiarism.

None of them really want to put in the hard work of creating the market. But because they did not, they have no real understanding of the market or what really works. Apparently copying Apple will only work for one of them.

Non-scientists getting confused about science

by Pink Sherbet Photography

Climatologists figuring out which data makes their models better
[Via Ars Technica]

In order to improve long-term predictions of global climate change, we need more information about the current and changing environment. Unfortunately, in the current era of government budget problems, expensive satellite climate studies are being cut, so it is important to identify the measurements we need the most, choosing among things like air temperature, pressure, humidity, radiance at various wavelengths, radiation transfer to and from the surface, etc.

One possible way of prioritizing is to figure out which of those measures would help us the most when it comes to projecting future climate change, and focus research funds there. A paper that recently appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science presents a statistical method for doing this and shows that surface temperature measurements may not be the most useful data to improve surface temperature predictions.

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Reading the comments reveals a tremendous misunderstanding of what the report was about. It is not about cherry-picking data to get the best model.

Data for things as complex as climate models are collected by a wide variety of methods, each with their own error – some measures are quite precise while others have large error bars.

The researchers took a model which incorporated a lot of data from a wide variety of sources and asked the question – Could a smaller number of more precise measurements provide a model that was just as robust as one where all the data could be included?

They wanted to know that if only some methods for collecting data could be carried out, which would be the most informative? It might be that using 3 highly precise forms of measurements would produce a climate model virtually identical to one which included all the available data.

If that were the case, they we should make sure we continue to accumulate data from those 3 forms of measurement.

And that is what they found. Several measurements from satellites for instance, as well as some terrestrial measurement, can reproduce a climate model as well as including all the data used to create the model. Just a handful of approaches can create a model just as robust as including all the different approaches.

In a time when we seem to be limiting ourselves, to preventing some spending for research, we now have an idea of the relative importance of several data collection methods. we can make sure that he get the data using the approaches that will be most informative.

Apple will shortly be able to pay cash for the rest of the mobile phone makers

Apple could buy the mobile phone industry
[Via asymco]

The second quarter ends in less than two weeks. When it does, I expect Apple will have over $70 billion in Cash, Cash Equivalents, Short-term marketable securities and long-term Marketable Securities. That figure has been growing predictably.

Also predictable has been the decline in value of Apple’s mobile phone competitors. Most spectacularly Nokia and RIM. The enterprise values of the public companies selling 75% of all phones sold world-wide are as follows:

• Nokia $22.6b
• RIM $13.8b
• HTC $25.4b
• Motorola Mobility $4.2b

The values of the profitable phone-making subsidiaries are a bit more difficult to estimate but we can use multiples of trailing operating profits. I generously use the multiple applied to HTC (14).

• Sony Ericsson $0.21b x 14 = $3.0b
• Samsung $3.76b x 14 = $53b

That leaves valuing LG’s phone business which has not been profitable in the last four quarters. I assume a nominal value of $10b. These data points are shown in the following chart:

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Not stock but cash. This gives an idea of the growing cash hoard Apple has. It shows just how it has caught the wave of smartphones at just the right time, and now has a cash pile about as big as entire industries.

That cash hoard allows it to do some possibly interesting things, like perhaps building out a nation/worldwide infrastructure to carry data wirelessly using White-fi, completely circumventing the wireless carriers.

Being unable to adapt kills companies

RIM called a ‘one-trick pony,’ company’s ‘nightmare’ seen as benefit to Apple
[Via AppleInsider]

With Research in Motion’s second quarter of fiscal 2012 officially in the books, analysts on Wall Street have begun to pile on the beleaguered smartphone maker, declaring its outlook bleak as competitors like Apple are poised to gain on its losses.

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A few years ago, back when it was a niche market, RIM was on top of the smartphones. Now that they are much more a mass marketplace, they are failing.

While the same thing could happen to Apple, they have shown the ability to adapt that is simply lacking in most other companies.

Adapt or Die is more than just a motto.