Silicon Shecky

The Touchpad isn’t completely Dead. Mostly dead, yes, but is it just a flesh wound? The Touchpad frenzy has proved a point, and now can HP, or any company, really capitalize on it?

Apple has been the cock of the walk, the king of the tablet, since the iPad came out. They came up with something that is a great idea which has spawned a whole tablet market. No competitor seems to be able to come up with anything to seriously threaten its dominance. Its not that the Android tablets aren’t good, it has to do with features, and more importantly price point. I touched on this when talking about the Nook Color in the past. HP though, unwittingly, came up with the plan. Something I had mentioned in those same posts about the Nook Color. Its the same thing that gave the PC the advantage in the PC wars back in the 90′s. that is price point.

I’ve been wondering when we would see a price point that would spur competition. Most Tablets are in the $400 plus range of price. The Nook Color, although a reader, is $250 and offers a lot of tablet features, but its App store is lacking. The demise of the HP Touchpad and the fire sale though has shown that for a lower price point, a tablet that doesn’t have as much app support can compete. Now imagine if you will what would happen if Android had a tablet in the $200 or less range. More people purchase it, more developers see a reason to write apps for it, and bingo, a true competitor to Apple can emerge. Amazon might do that with its rumored tablet, but no solid information on it is out yet.

The idea being that in a down economy that we are in does put limits on what people are willing to purchase. Done properly though, a low cost tablet can bring in a nice profit to a company. Yes they might loose on the initial hardware, but if partnered up with the developers, it can be possible to turn a profit through the purchasing of apps. It might mean the developer makes a little less, or the apps are a bit more expensive, say $2 for most apps instead of $1, but it is possible.

Barnes and Noble could have done it completely, instead of halfway. Now the question is will others learn from this or not?

I have an Android phone, and I enjoy it. I don’t care for the iPhone. That being said, Apple has one huge advantage over Android.

The Android Smartphones are popular. The work well (for the most part), and are reliable (again for the most part). The open development community for apps has produced some great free applications, that you would have to pay for on iOS. There is a drawback to Android though, and it is something that by all rights should be more of a strength.

When you look into the world and history of Operating Systems, you see a bloody trail over security. Which OS is more secure, which one addresses security problems the fastest, etc. The Open Source community has always claimed that because more people can look at the code, patches can come out faster, and in the Desktop arena this definitely seems to be true. In the world of Smart Phones though, this “advantage” is lost.

The problem is not directly Android or Google, or the Open Source community. The problem is in Manufacturers, and even more so on the carriers. There is a process for patches and updates. Google writes an update, tests, sends to the manufacturer who tests, approves and then sends to the carrier. Android is so customizable, and on so many different manufacturer’s phones that this process has to happen for each model, each customized OS, and each carrier.

Now we are getting into a situation with this long protracted system of updates. Holes being found in the systems are there for months, possibly years before a patch gets pushed out. In this age of phone upgrades every 18 months, of more mobile applications for smart phones, more people banking and shopping off smart phones, and the upcoming Near Field Communications, updates for security need to happen a lot faster. The risk of more and more identity theft is growing, and the slowness of the pipeline is maddening.

Now add on that every manufacturer has been customizing the Android OS to try and differentiate itself from the others. How many more security issues can this raise. How many of the mods are creating security holes (we won’t go into other issues these mods cause)?

Yes, Apple has to go through the same sort of pipeline, but Apple has only piece of hardware (with different chips for GSM or CDMA) and just the carriers to deal with. Its a much shorter pipeline, and Apple can cut a carrier off from future iPhone releases if it wants to. Android needs to come up with something similar soon, especially with all the malware that has been coming out for the platform already.

I’ve had an iPad for a few weeks now. Been trying to see how usable it is, and at what level. Here is my opinion on it.

The iPad, a revolution in computing. The true coming of tablet computing. I’m still trying to figure out why we need tablet computing. I have nothing against new ideas, or new technology. I just don’t see why someone would want to carry around a tablet, when they can have a netbook which can honestly do more than a tablet.

All that being said, the iPad is a neat consumer toy. It can do quite a bit, but overall it is meant for consumers, or average users, not for techs. The best app I’ve found for what I do, which is consulting and engineering, has been Penultimate, which allows me to create hand written notebooks, which I used to use pads of paper or notebooks for (I have about 10 of them from the past 3 years, each one 200+ pages).

Outside of that, I don’t have much use for it. The amount of free useful apps is minimal. The App Store is awful. Searching the App Store doesn’t give me what I’m looking for the majority of the time, and browsing by category is painful at best. I have found very few of the network tools that I have on my Droid phone (Ping, WiFi Analyzer, NetTools, etc…) available for the iPad, (and that includes similar type programs).

I also have a netbook, which cost about half of the iPad, has way more available for it (even if you leave it with Windows O/S), has more storage space, and a reliable keyboard. The netbook screen, size and weight do make it equivalent of the iPad’s specs there also.

I see the iPad for what it is, a consumer grade bridge, that is refining touchscreen technology. Eventually all of it will be obsolete as we will get a chip planet in us to really give us Augmented Reality. The are working on it.