Figuring Out Why Android Wins On Phones, But Not Tablets 451
GMGruman writes "Android smartphones have overpowered the iPhone in market share, yet Android tablets barely register in sales versus the iPad. Android tablets are as competitive in most respects against the iPad as Android smartphones are against the iPhone. So why the difference in success? Galen Gruman examines five theories for the gap, and concludes the reason is that Android tablets' real competitor is in fact not the iPad."
Re:Isn't it obvious? (Score:3, Informative)
Heh...
1) Same CPU equates to roughly the same performance for regular tasks like UI, browser, etc. since the speed in 3D doesn't equate to 2D stuff.
2) It's only about 1.5 or so times faster than the Xoom, based on the benchmark results (Magic word there...benchmarks...)- so not so much slower like you're making it out to be. Resolutions can tump things into a slower framerate.
Seems to be more an issue with the Xoom. My Nook Color's roughly on a par with Gingerbread (well...CM7's got Bluetooth support and the hacked Honeycomb doesn't... Since I've got an Iconia now, the Nook's going to CM7 to be fully useful by way of PAN and Keyboard support...) and the Iconia doesn't seem...laggy...like the Xoom is on the same SoC for all intents and purposes. Moto...go figure...
My Iconia's not really any heavier than the Xoom. However, having handed it over to several iPad owners, they couldn't understand the rancor about it being "heavier" that was coming from some quarters. Weight differences were almost negligible in their opinion.
Heh... No argument there.
That isn't a function of the Honeycomb/non-Honeycomb difference, per se. It's setting up the decode/playback through the DSP and it takes care of most of the load-lifting. Sounds like a display driver boo-boo or a weak DSP program for the video formats, if you ask me...
Heh... No argument there. Lame, really, when I've got the better execution of the idea in hand now.
Ouch. Heh... My Iconia and my NC seem to be able to grasp hotpluggable MicroSD. I'd call that lame, yet again.
I'm unsurprised that the Xoom figures aren't pretty. Moto's apparently done a botch on both the Xoom and the Atrix. Doesn't mean that the follow-on tablets (Iconia, eeePC convertable, etc...) are the same story. And it's silly to have articles like this out at this stage as others have pointed out- it's not Android so much as it's Motorola we're talking about in this story.
Re:Isn't it obvious? (Score:2, Informative)
Over a thousand people have seen the data (Score:1, Informative)
You may as well see the data too. Estimate of WP7 sales through scraping Facebook App active user data. [j.mp]
Simply put, Windows Phone 7 failed to thrive. It didn't take off. All that estimated $1B in marketing money added up to a big bucket-o-fail. It peaked at less than two percent of share on launch and is trailing off now to less than one fourth of that. Wishing that will change is not going to make it change. For the past month it's not even making up for the people giving up on Windows 6.5.
I, for one, would prefer they didn't gain any market share whatsoever. I would prefer that Microsoft fail in mobile, and that they continue to fail spectacularly by burning huge bonfires of money to no avail. Mobile is the future, and if you look at their suit against Barnes and Noble [groklaw.net] you will see that their desire for market share is not about innovation, it's not even about money. It's about control. They want to prevent all progress they don't supply. It's not enough for them to win - everybody else must lose also, including the customers. They want to stop all this neat stuff we've been getting the last few years. We like this stuff.
No, we don't need Microsoft for a vibrant competitive environment. Quite the opposite. For a vibrant competitive environment we need them to shrivel away to nothing through wasting all their money on lost causes. From the look of things [businessinsider.com] they're well on their way.
Android tablets will put up the good fight yet. The Nook may save Barnes and Noble, particularly if they get really angry. We just need some tablets to hit the right price points with credible features and decent tablet-base OS. After that choice will win out over The iPad.
Re:Also (Score:4, Informative)
People compare marketshare of "MS-Windows" machines to Apple (MacOS) machines all the time. One is a huge variety of machines (MS-Windows) and the other is just a few models all from one company (Apple).
So what is there to not understand?
There are a dozen Android phones for which the hardware is superior to the iPhone. And the "environment" is basically Android for all of them, and they can almost all run almost all the same apps. So yes, it *does* make sense to lump all of the Android phones together when comparing to lumping the three models of the iPhone together.
And I don't know where you are getting your statistics, but there are already a lot more Android OS phones in use than there are iOS phones.... get your facts straight!
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/Android_number_one_in_us_smartphone_market_share.php [readwriteweb.com]
Re:Isn't it obvious? (Score:2, Informative)
Your comment says to me that you know nothing about java and are just parroting the same tired arguments all the rest of the uninformed people parrot.
How do you know he's not informed about Java? I am, and he's right. Especially on Android, Java runs under an interpreter costing at least an order of magnitude in performance versus native, operation per operation. Not as bad if code is heavily library oriented but that is not always the case and it is the corner cases that people notice. Jitting, if it ever arrives for Dalvik speeds up code after a while, but the Jit itself introduces a perceptible lag.