by wiredcanvas
“Google hasn’t yet provided any direction on Android as a tablet platform, which means that the…”
[Via Marco.org]
“Google hasn’t yet provided any direction on Android as a tablet platform, which means that the Tab is held back by lagging application support and software that doesn’t fully take advantage of the extra screen real estate.”
–
Part of the conclusion of Engadget’s Samsung Galaxy Tab review. This is going to plague every Android tablet until Google takes a clear, bold stance by making their own tablet versions of Android’s built-in apps — which may never happen.
There’s likely to be a big chicken-and-egg problem: Google probably won’t care to devote any resources to good tablet interfaces for Android software unless one of the hardware tablets takes off, but none of the tablets are likely to take off with half-assed tablet interfaces on its software.
[More]
The problem with a fragmented market where software is written by one company working under one set of commercial pressures and hardware is constructed by other companies with other sets of commercial pressures is that it becomes very hard to create new devices. The software company has no pressure to create the needed software for the new hardware but the hardware company has no pressure to create the hardware without the software.
Apple, by integrating both and having both responsive to the same commercial pressures, can innovate and create in ways the others cannot. It moved from iPod to iPhone to iPad to AppleTV to desktop. There are just now some competitors to the iPod Touch, some copycats for the iPhone, nothing to really match the iPad, no one is even looking at the Apple TV and the desktop is a pipe dream. For anyone else but Apple.
They have developed a software that scales across all devices and the hardware know-how to make it all work. Google has no such incentive to make their software work across all those devices. The hardware guys have no incentive to create new devices if the software is not there.
It will take these guys years to catch up in a meaning fashion.
A Man With A Ph.D. 