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I strongly agree. I've been averse to owning a tablet for a while; generally, I prefer to have a laptop: if I want to do work on it, I can. I've recently trie
by frio 15y ago
I strongly agree. I've been averse to owning a tablet for a while; generally, I prefer to have a laptop: if I want to do work on it, I can. I've recently tried a different approach: use the laptop (/tablet, now) for all my entertainment needs, and my desktop for work (in order to encourage myself to do more/better work on my desktop).
So, to facilitate that, I grabbed a cheap HP TouchPad, and flashed the (admittedly still reasonably raw) CM9 ICS build onto it. ICS itself is pleasant: the notifications system is great, the multitasking is easily on par with WebOS, and the action bar is a good step forward. The screen wasn't so great, but I knew that going in; most of the "real" Android tablets have beautiful hardware.
The state of the apps, however, is shocking. Even Facebook and Twitter haven't bothered to build tablet apps. I believe Google is somewhat stuck between a rock and a hard place here, however, and it boils down to an argument I've often thought entirely facetious - fragmentation. While they introduced decent APIs in ICS for making apps that work well on both phones and tablets, the vast majority of phone hardware out there is still running Gingerbread or older. Meaning that developers can't use those new ICS APIs, because their apps will no longer run on most user's devices.
I don't know how Google can address that easily, but I'd wager it proves to be a significant impediment to those trying to target Android tablets: either they do the whole thing manually in Gingerbread, or fork their codebase into an ICS version, and a Gingerbread version. Neither is an overly pleasant solution.
(for the record, I ended up drooling over/buying an iPad 3. The apps are much better)
- j_col 15y agoGiven that webOS has some fantastic tablet apps, why on Earth remove it from the Touchpad and install ICS which has a lot less tablet apps? I see people doing this all of the time, and frankly it confuses me because they just by-pass the best feature of the Touchpad: webOS.
- frio 15y agoI should clarify that: I agree that WebOS is an amazing OS. I had a great time using it. I really liked the Enyo framework, and most of the apps were well optimised for tablet. Despite that, the app ecosystem as it stands is dying, and I wanted to see what things were like on the other side of the fence. Installing Android was straightforward (I'm going to develop a nervous tick with relation to the iPad in a few months, no doubt). Note that you don't remove WebOS when you flash Android onto a Touchpad; it sets itself up to dualboot :).
- j_col 15y agoI know it's dual boot, but I also know a lot of people who just bought a cheep Touchpad to install Android, and never booted into webOS. Many never even gave it a chance, and hence are missing out on arguable a better tablet experience than ICS (it certainly has more tablet-optimized apps). As for the webOS ecosystem dying, I'm willing to wait and see what happens with Open webOS later this year before I agree with you there. It's certainly in a lull with no new hardware on the way, but once Open webOS hits that issue is no longer relevant as I can install it on any existing hardware that supports Android.
- kalleboo 15y agoThey actually have a compatibility package[1] to let apps use the new tablet layout classes on Android versions back to 1.6. Developers have no excuse. [1] http://developer.android.com/sdk/compatibility-library.html http://developer.android.com/sdk/compatibility-library.html
- frio 15y agoI wasn't aware of that; thankyou for the link.