➤ Tablet Hunt
Yesterday, I went on a hunt for a Blackberry Playbook to try out at Best Buy. Instead, I got a lesson on Android tablets.
Every single card over an Android was pretty much the same:
- Generic statement about the Android version number
- Something about the screen size
- Something about the standard apps, or connectivity
So every tablet basically looked identical to each other, both in industrial design, and in specs.
Really, it was the idea that these tablets might be sold on specs that blew my mind. These are not desktop computers, not configurable like desktops, not as widely varied in hardware and performance like desktops, and what happens is you get nonsense like this where consumers are supposed to care about “dual-core Tegra 2” processors, a thing that barely existed before until now and no one has any notable experience using before.
The first product to use a Tegra was the Zune HD, people.
Not surprisingly enough, the only tablet that stood out at all in this mess was the HTC Flyer because of its emphasis on its stylus. It appeared that anything on screen could be scribbled upon, which was quite pleasing and surprising. It made it noticeably different in actual use from everything else on the tables, and kept it from getting blended into the “big black square with a Google logo in the upper-left corner” pool.
The Sony S2 tablet was present and had a unique industrial design which might have worked in its favor, but the few custom applications on it felt tacked on (the icon designs looked like bad paste jobs from VAIOs) or were implemented in a slap-dash fashion (the app catalog opened a tab in the web browser next to whatever else you had been browsing).
There are real world power, ergonomic and price constraints that desktops or laptops don’t have because you can stick a fan in them, or you can leave them plugged in at a desk. Once you lose those luxuries, you end up at a very common middle ground as far as today’s components go. The advances are then in how smart the software is about managing these limitations.
Even if you had an true engineering breakthrough to introduce in a device, you’re still not going to be Dell or HP or RIM doing this. Your job for the last decade or so has been finding out what parts to order and what corners to cut so you can fight on price and sell in volume. That’s how you sell PCs to enterprises. This isn’t that kind of market. They’re still looking at arbitrary processor speeds and screen dimensions as things that will convince users to go from a proven device platform like iPad and a leading content platform like iTunes to a new competitor.
This is an experience market, one that none of the current manufacturers know how to sell in yet.
