Google shot themselves in the face trying to make ChromeOS happen at the expense of making Android tablets that don't suck. Hell, Kindle tablets kinda do suck and they still sell fine.
I do wonder how many people buy Kindle Fires when they aren't on one of their $40 clearance sales. I've bought three or four of them that way.
They are, to be honest, pretty terrible, but for reading in the middle of the night when I can't turn on the light and use my regular Kindle, they beat using my phone.
Paperwhite is not a cheap product.
Unfortunately there are no cheap alternatives either, I always wonder why Chinese don't clone and manufacture something similar in mass.
Is it so hard or e-ink is something that is not manufactured there?
I really prefer the old Kindles that had the physical paddle buttons to change pages instead of a touchscreen. It's a much better UX, and those things are virtually indestructible.
The top end Kindle Oasis model has physical buttons again. It's even more indestructible with supposedly good water-proofing added in the most recent refresh. Just below that top end you can still find the Kindle Voyage sometimes on sale (it's a generation behind now, so don't buy it if it isn't on sale) with haptic, capacitive touch that are a decent close second to physical buttons.
There was internal turf warfare going on over whether tablets should remain Android devices or Chrome OS should take over that form factor. Rumors were that the Pixel C tablet was originally meant to run Chrome OS but it ended up shipping on Android.
I would say that turf warfare is still going on, e.g ChromeOS vs Android vs Fuchsia, or PWAs vs Java vs Kotlin vs Dart.
If you want to have a glimpse how Android team feels about Flutter, just check this year's Android Fireside and how they react to questions about JetPack Composer vs Flutter, or what should be the way to develop on Android.
Mostly political correct answers with some pauses trying to think how to best state them, and facial expressions revealing how they rather not answer it at all.
Let me make one thing very clear: nobody gives a flying fuck about Fuchsia. Nobody. It was and remains a project that people who want to do something fun go to when google thinks that they are valuable enough to keep around.
It is not the future of anything. It is not even remotely capable of doing anything serious. For fuck's sake, go look at the code - it is all out in the open! The scheduler is a JOKE. SMP support too. Power management is nonexistent. Driver support? HAHA!
The most important part about message-passing microkernels? The tuning for the message-passing. None of that is anywhere to be seen either...
Oh, and app support.. Where is that? Yeah, one could go the chromeos way and try to make an android compatibility layer - it is very hard and never 100% compatible, and relies on having a linux kernel. And then why bother with a new OS? Or one could go the microsoft way and pay app developers to write apps for the new SDK. How did that go for windows phone? Or one could make a VM and run android in it, but then why bother with a new kernel anyways, if everything will be in a linux vm? Linux runs just fine on hardware as is.
Basically a group of people did all the fun parts of writing an OS and did not do all of the boring hard-to-get-right pieces.
I have no idea why the whole world keeps thinking Fuchsia is serious, when they can see the code all along and note that it is a joke.
But yeah my impression is that it isn't meant to replace Andrdoid, but that they want to use it in places where a full Android doesn't make sense, like in their smart display devices or other future categories. Or maybe it's really just a retainer project for engineers.
Another reason people think it's real is that there was a lot of press a couple of years ago about something called "Andromeda" that was meant to combine Android and ChromeOS into one project. This was then supposedly shelved in favor of Fuchsia:
Speaking as someone who used to use a Google-branded chat app to keep in touch with people daily and now doesn't use one at all: I am not sure that the ability to look at something and go, "That looks like it won't work" is a guarantee that Google will not go out and do it.
It's not that bad to have internal teams competing, for example I doubt we'd have seen compose without flutter.
It seems to me they're trying to not fall into the same trap as Microsoft did trying to protect their dominance with one OS over all other innovation.
That said, the Android team really seems to hate the flutter team ( Jake Wharton lol) also the main flutter guys all come from chrome like Ian Hickson so if there was bad blood from chromeOs that will stay.
Personally I hope Flutter succeeds because I really hate the Android sdk. Fuchsia just seems like something they're experimenting with and putting into smart clocks or whatever.
Microsoft suffers from other problem, DevTools vs WinDev.
I believe, that if they were both going into the same direction, maybe Longhorn would have successes, instead of having the detour of rebuilding its ideas in COM, going through multiple iterations of it (WinRT, UAP, UWP) and then complaining that most devs use the .NET projections anyway.
What I dislike in Flutter is its dependency in Dart, yet another eco-system starting from scratch, just to save a programming language, kind of.
As an Android developer I am kind of wary of how they push Kotlin for Android. I'm sure it is good, and I enjoy learning a new languages, but I already have a code base that I am worried they are going to make me rewrite.
Kotlin once compiled is (for practical purposes) indistinguishable from Java. Even if new APIs will be Kotlin only (Jetpack Compose), you can write new Kotlin code alongside your legacy Java with no issues.
Not really, because Kotlin uses concepts that aren't exposed in Java the same way, let alone the clunky J++ used by Android.
For example extension methods or suspend functions.
Hence why there is a guide on how to write Java friendly APIs from Kotlin.
Jetpack Compose is an interesting story, looks like it sprung into existence as response to Flutter, without any concrete ideas on how tooling should look like and total disregard for the ongoing efforts to sell constraint and motion layout editing on the graphical tooling to android devs still using the old layouts.
Having watched all SwiftUI tooling related talks, and from experience how Android Studio has evolved, I don't have great hopes that by Google IO 2020 we will see demos at the same level as WWDC 2019 SwiftUI ones.
My iPad Pro is my favourite portable device that I wouldn't want to give up. Definitely not a feeling I have about my Macbook nor my iPhone.
I felt the same way about my MacBook Air. It's been my constant companion since 2011 to a dozen countries and dozens more cities. Love that machine.
This past April my wife bought me an iPad. The last three trips I took were with the 'Pad instead of the Air. I'm really surprised how useful that little thing is.
I feel the same way, because the iPad is dramatically more useful. I’m a gamer so I have a ton of PDFs on it, read comics on it, program on it in Pythonista, write in Google Docs, create charts maps and diagrams, all sort I couldn’t realistically do on a phone.
One of my daughters loves drawing and ‘painting’ on the iPad, I got Procreate for her and she spends hours on it. She complains she’s started tapping to undo when she’s sketching on paper.
Form factor I suppose. I just don't use my phone for as many things as my iPad (which I have always with me, with LTE). iPhone I use for short messages, google maps and quick email read-throughs and taking photos. That's about it. Maybe streaming songs. Any Android phone can do the same, some even better (Huawei Mate 30 Pro cameras e.g.)
iPad can do all the above, plus much better web browsing, reddit, video/youtube viewing, photo editing, email and writing in general (with Apple Smartkeyboard), etc. It works with touch, pencil and keyboard and just feels like my personal device.
On my 9.7 inch iPad I can have split screen, video playing in a small window and a slide over view. When iOS 13 comes out it will have better keyboard support and finally mouse support. If anything I want the larger iPad Air.
As far as the Galaxy Note. Android still sucks as a tablet OS.
I bought a Tab S5e recently. Samsung did a good job with its DEX interface. When activated it's a desktop with a dock and Android apps in windows. Bluetooth mouse and keyboard or soft keyboard. Video out over USB-C to hook it to a monitor with a HDMI adapter. And USB host mode obviously. There is even an Ubuntu 16.04 container sharing Android's kernel. It must be installed separately. It displays its own Unity desktop in a full screen DEX window and it comes with LibreOffice, VSCode, IntelliJ IDEA among the others. Great as ssh client, better than any other I used on Android. I used it to edit some pictures with Gimp and I made it run Rails, to check it could be used for some sw development.
The iPad gives you a lot of functionality for audio and video production, nobody has produced any mobile apis on par with apples core audio for audio production. Support for creative media on Android is so limited compared to what you can do with iOS whether it's an iPad or iPhone. Google underestimates the importance of media production and focuses on very basic use cases.
Extend this comment to the most creative branches. When it comes to being digitally creative you need an OS and hardware functioning together without any hiccups. I've worked on iPads and other tablets and from drawing to music making, nothing has come close to the feel of it. Microsoft's surface pros are the closest in hardware and work decently for art, but honestly, when software like sketchbook is present on the iPad, there's no competition.
iPads in schools definitely contribute a lot to total sales revenue, but I don't think they're the majority users by any stretch of the imagination. Plenty of school districts also bought into the GSuite + Chromebook fantasy so they can't be the only reason iPad is doing so well.
Anecdotally, I've seen that GSuite + Chromebook has worked wonders for my high-schooler sisters. Assignment hand-ins can be done all online, no problems with file compatibility, and homework can be accessed anywhere with an internet connection.
Sorry, I probably used the wrong word there. I was referring to the fantasy tech companies try to sell school districts that buying X technology will radically alter education forever; as long as you spend your money with them.
I used Chromebooks in high school and they were quite nice, but they didn't completely evolve my relationship with education. They were tools and not much more than that. Certainly not part of an education revolution. Definitely useful for writing papers though. I imagine districts that bought iPads are content with them as well.
Not at all. Although not fast growing, tablets are still great business. Not all people like to carry those monstrous phones in their pockets. Even if you do, its hard to enjoy details while streaming high def content, planning trip, reading books with pictures/diagrams, do email jujitsu, play high def games and so on. Tablets are far more popular among kids age < 10. I see the transition where laptops would be largely extinct and tablets with keyboard dock would be a norm. It has already happened but not yet full scale. The future user base would be divided between two groups where power users would own tablets + phone while more typical users would own only phone. Giving up on tablets entirely is unwise. Power users are minority but they have lions share of influence.
A tablet and dock is clumsy and a poor experience compared to a laptop in both hardware and software. I would never consider replacing a desktop OS with iOS or Android in their current states, I think Samsung did some work to improve multi-window support so perhaps that's worth a look, but I don't want a sloppy keyboard that folds randomly when I'm trying to type or I can't position comfortably on my lap on a car, bus or while sitting outside.
After owning a few older iPads and Nexus tablets, I haven't used them in years, instead preferring to do content consumption on my phone or TV and anything more on a full PC. Most people say they even prefer to do basic shit like shopping on PCs - easier to comparison shop, bigger screens, more capable machines and user interfaces. This situation isn't going to improve for tablets, they're trying to hit on a niche that's quite limited.
Just because the display diagonal is rising does not mean, that the phones themselves are getting bigger. It is due to two factors:
a) the phone displays are getting wider; with widening of the aspect ratio, the diagonal is rising faster than the surface of the display.
b) the ratio of screen to body rises (you are getting smaller bezels).
That means in practice, that for example the 5,2" Sony Xperia Z5 (with ~70% screen to body ratio, 16:9 display aspect ratio) is 1,5 mm narrower and 4 mm shorter than 6,1" Samsung Galaxy S10 (~88% screen to body ratio, 19:9 aspect ratio). Subjectively, thanks to the rounded corners of the S10, it feels smaller than Z5.
Based on the screen diagonal, you would not say that you are going to have such impression, the difference is 0,9" after all.
Phones seemed to have settled on around 75 x 160 x 9mm, there is surprisingly little variation from that. Somewhere along the line they seemed to have decided that is as big as people will generally accept.
As you say the battle now is on to eliminate bezels. From what I can tell the final station on that journey is a screen of about 6.5" to 6.75".
Honestly with 1password integration I'm pretty ok staying on iOS 12, that's pretty much the last itch I have that Apple's likely to scratch. I love my SE and would be very happy to get another 5 years out of it. It's the perfect size for my pockets & has a headphone jack. I do miss the big screen for GPS but that's about the end of my complaints.
I'm writing this on an Xperia X Compact (first gen, 2016). The next iterations more or less kept the same form factor but started to weight more and more. I'm not liking that. I would own a SE if I'd like iOS.
Isn't iPad market is shrinking or staying the same? Not growing by much certainly. And the Surface line pretty much succeeds primarily on the more laptop style models as far as I've seen at least.
As an Android user, I liked my Nexus 7 at the time, but I received security updates for a year or two max, and then never bought an Android tablet again because of it.
There was also the fact it's memory (I think it was flash memory) got really slow after a year or two. Like unusably slow. That's probably how they got it so cheap, to try to showcase and build momentum, but after two years (from both hardware and software POV), it's useless.
I still have some iPad 2's floating around, which have the same issue, albeit on a longer scale. Can no longer update the OS, most new apps won't install as they target a different OS, it _seems_ to be getting more sluggish over time (though there was a clear performance drop between two of the major OS versions - I think it was 6 to 7). It's a shame as it's still a useful and nice piece of hardware.
Google is pretty good about announcing security update support up front so you can make that decision at least. I think the Nexus/Pixel phones are generally 2 years of updates, 3 for security. Maybe a little short if you're optimistic about how long you'll keep the device but that's better than most manufacturers being late or inconsistent about updates.
My company at the time gave every staff member a Nexus 7. There was a ~50% failure rate after a year. Not a bad machine apart from that, but it soured me on Google hardware for the next half s decade.
Not on the same scale but I had my Nexus 7 replaced twice due to failure while under warranty, then the 3rd time it failed shortly after the warranty ran out. They all failed the same way, just refused to charge any more.
I love my pixel slate, best tablet/laptop I ever had. Such a shame. The screen is great, the keyboard is surprisingly good and it's awesome to be able to ditch the keyboard for a while when reading docs etc.
Linux and Android apps mean I can run android studio and e.g. Lightroom (android version) as well as many games. I got back to playing some DOS games in dosbox.
You pretty much described me. There's a ton of software glitches, but I have a tablet that I can code on (running Linux), answer emails, run every Android app I need, and weighs far less then a laptop.
The keyboard design was quite poor compared to the Surface Pro in my opinion. It felt wobbly when carrying around too as it didn't magnetically keep the bottom part of the keyboard snapped to the display when shut closed.
I also don't feel it was light by any means. It weights almost a full 3 lbs with the keyboard attached. That's heavier than the Dell XPS 13 and much heavier than a Surface Pro 6.
FWIW, I love my PixelBook, and it's become my number 1 dev machine (runs the full Jetbrains suite, Postgres, etc. from Crostini), plus I just flip the screen all the way around and it turns into a tablet. Selfishly I hope this just means Pixelbooks get more love.
Google's tablet dreams died when they killed the Nexus line in favor of Pixel. Instead of making devices 95% as good as other flagships at half the price, they became the market-leader when it came to overcharging.
I was a huge fan of the Nexus 7 -- it's the device that changed how I looked at personal computers. I bought myself one, and ones for a couple of family members.
Within 3 years they were all unusably slow. Kept them going for a little while with some device resets, but eventually we just all had to give up on them. The family has been on iPads ever since and even the oldest of the bunch still run great (much thanks to iOS 12's perf improvements).
That's the whole story on how I got sold on Apple hardware.
Similarly, my iPad 3 from the same year as the Nexus 7 1st gen sees more use than my 2nd Gen Nexus 7. Also the microUSB broke and I resorted to wireless charging after 2 years, which sold me on wireless charging.
Google bricked my 2013 Google I/O special edition Nexus 7 a month after they gave them to us. Can't say I had much confidence in Google devices after that.
I went from the Nexus 7 2013 to the shield tablet k1 when the updates stopped and the battery died. The shield tablet was well specced and the best supported android device I've used (even including the 2013 n7 and the n5x) but it's also bulkier than the n7 and it too is past its batteries good days.
There's not really a good option left for Android tablets sadly, so looks like my next one will be the surface go.
Yeah. I use mine to run ssh commands on my workstation/servers via Termux while in bed pretty much every night.
Also watch videos while on the treadmill via rclone's dlna server on vlc. It'll still run close to 4 hours of video on full brightness even after all these years.
It's an absolute shame Google failed to follow up on this device - very disappointing.
Very sad to see Google bailing out while iPad Pro and iPadOS is going stronger than ever. Honestly, this is the tipping point for me to switch from the Google ecosystem to the Apple ecosystem.
"ChromeOS/Android hybrids must have confused people"
It's not confusing at all. "It's a laptop and it can run android apps". It doesn't get any simpler. It's harder to explain to people why you can't run android apps on, say, a windows laptop.
Having a Chrome web app for something and an Android app on the same device can get confusing for some users.
Especially if the web app and Android app have different levels of functionality.
Having to log in twice to Pocket was annoying, for example. The Android app couldn't even log in using the browser's session if I recall, since it presents the Firefox oauth in an Android web view
x86 2-in-1 devices are so clearly superior to the Android and ChromeOS sort, that the latter just feel like a bad joke in comparison. I can't wait to be able to run a pure tablet device on mainline Linux and GNOME-Shell; this has become truly feasible only very recently, with GNOME 3.30 and 3.32. (Hopefully the PostmarketOS project will step in and support this on old Android tablets as well, but the huge amount of hardware variety just makes it hard to predict what models will be able to support this without resorting to ugly hacks, like using old vendor kernels and proprietary blobs, etc. etc.)
It seems like most chromebooks today run on x86. I have a pixelbook I picked up on sale for around $650 (mid-grade model marked down from $1200). I've had it for around a year now and it's been a good experience.
I think the big issue for most people and chromeOS is that $400 laptops suck no matter which OS they run. A 12" macbook with the same specs (256GB SSD, 8GB RAM, i5 Y-series processor) runs $1400, has no touchscreen/tablet mode, no pen capability, a bad keyboard, one less USB-C port (a big deal for me), and (surprisingly) a smaller, worse trackpad.
Software has gotten radically better recently. I run chromeOS for my browser, Android for a few apps, and Crostini/Debian 9 for the rest and development. My big complaint is that Crostini isn't GPU accelerated at the moment (they have it working in nightly, so it's coming later this year).
The best part is how seamless it is to run 3 different OS's in one computer at the same time. Android (and Debian) are full installs, so no emulation issues. Instead, chromeOS basically hands off a frame buffer for them to fill (along with relevant IO events they are allowed to see). An Android or Debian apps act just like any other native window on the system while still providing a high level of security.
My big complaint is that some compute-intensive things like running a full test suite takes some time, but that's simply an artifact of the fanless, Y-series form factor (and I still have the option of SSHing into my desktop). I'm not a big fan of the new, unified settings and notifications (I preferred them separate), but it's not a huge issue. I'd like multiple desktops, but those are supposedly already in nightly too.
Overall, I'm not sad to leave my Macbook Pro sitting on the shelf.
> It seems like most chromebooks today run on x86.
Even those that do run on x86 are not really PC-compatible. Sure, sometimes you can open them up and unlock firmware write access, and make them usable in that way. But it's just too much of a hassle when you can just pick up a cheap x86 device that will run so much better.
> ...is that $400 laptops suck no matter which OS they run.
They really don't. Sure, ChromeOS is a bit better than the privacy-invasive, ad-infested dumpster fire that is Windows 10, but there's no comparison with something that's running a proper OS! Just make sure that the hardware components are supported, be wary of devices using bottom-of-the-barrel eMMC as their main storage (this is ubiquitous on Chromebooks, BTW! A lightweight linux distribution can ease the pain, though) and you're set.
I really don't know why people would want to run anything besides Linux or Mac OS X nowadays. Even Android and iOS/iPadOS don't really give you anything UX-wise; recent versions of GNOME 3 have matched it quite nicely. (You really have to appreciate the GNOME designers' foresight here! They bet big on making their UX touch- and mobile-ready, and that bet will bring very clear payoffs now that performances woes are being resolved.)
I have been saying "I can't wait" to mainline tablet support for nearly a decade but that ecosystem is so nonstandard and fast moving that not a single distro can keep up.
I have an 8.4" 16x10 tablet and I love it for media consumption. I ride the bus for over an hour each way. It's nice to be able to use the tablet for 2-3 hours a day and not drain the battery on my phone.
Google IO game dev track was a joke, versus what gets shown at WWDC or BUILD.
Google really doesn't get game development.
While Apple and Microsoft make frameworks, IDE tooling, and talk studios language, Google makes PR talks about their cloud services, does some intro level talks about middleware and shows how to do 3D with bare bones FOSS libraries and CLI tooling.
Stadia will surely fail if that is all they have to offer to game studios.
It's kind of their thing, really. Like Microsoft getting the first two of everything wrong. Google gets the second and all subsequent ones wrong, instead. Mostly...
Tablets were always the odd device out of the bag.
Too big to put in your pocket, and not nearly as productive as a laptop with a keyboard. They were fine as a toy or purely entertainment device for someone in the backseat of a car, but mostly a dead-end as far as tech advancements go.
The last Android tablet Google made was the Nexus 9, released in 2014. It was also the last tablet I bought.
The ChromeOS hybrid laptop-tablets are absolutely terrible - both the software and the hardware are miserable to use. I wish Google would just release a refreshed version of the Nexus 9. It's really all I want in a tablet.
The entire google OS stack is a mess. Most of the problems that the device manufactures are being blamed for can be traced back to the core model.
AKA the idea that the firmware/os/drivers are all bundled together and hacked to work on a given device simply doesn't scale. Its employment for engineers because very security patch, every upstream refactor, requires all those closed source patches to be rebased on the latest version. This might work ok if the underlying technology (linux) didn't change their driver APIs at the drop of the hat, or the device manufactures didn't play throw darts at the soup of ARM interconnects, ram controllers, and devices, everytime they spun a new generation of phones/tablets/chromebooks.
Apple can get away with the monolithic model because they have a half dozen fairly similar devices to support. There are android manufactures which have released more devices in the last 6 months.
Yah, google is trying to fix that, but without a hard line in the sand with respect to pushing non-core OS/driver functionality into standardized runtime firmware APIs (think powermgmt) and locking down the driver API (userspace or otherwise) and assuring that it takes a long time for API's to be replaced/upgraded/deprecated. The hardware/upgrade story will continue to be a mess.
Yeah, Google needs to make this move on Android. If they're just say "okay, if you want Android 10, you need to provide your drivers in this exact ABI way, no more custom software crap, we push the updates", that'd be awesome - basically, use the Windows model.
I believe the only reason they didn't do this out of the gate is because device manufacturers wouldn't have signed on for it. Android is establish enough at this point that it's not like many device manufacturers could really step back from it at this point.
Treble is a strong step in this direction - but they need to take it farther, open up customization APIs and drop the garbage manufacturers pump into devices. The way Treble is right now it only benefits power users who have their devices rooted - who could update without the manufacturers permission anyways.
I wonder if their only hesitation at this point is the mess they're making with ChromeOS and all their other garbage... I think the Android roof was the right one to bet on, massive numbers of users with primary devices running it, but I fear they've done significant damage with their other offerings.
There were some statements that they were updating the Play Store contracts to impose this, specially after GSI.
Because the uptake from IO to IO has been diminishing, as Android is already good enough for the purpose of selling phones, so most OEMs aren't even bothering with Treble (Android 7+) for new devices, other than flagship ones.
So Google is now forced to do exactly that if they want OEM to actually care about new versions.
From my experience, I disagree that it was an improvement over the Nexus 9. The Pixel C was originally intended to be a Chrome OS device, but it was changed at the last minute because (IIRC) Chrome OS wasn't ready for the "hybrid" devices. And it shows, via lack of polish in the overall experience.
Still, the Nexus 9 was a horrible device right after unpacking it: The UI was slow, apps were OOM killed due to memory pressure after light usage, the back was scratched easily and the buttons felt flimsy. The display was also terrible and not high resolution enough.
The Pixel C was so much better: Beautiful screen, built like a tank, everything felt solid and relatively light weight, Android performed excellent on it and with Nougat it was even usable as a true productivity device because of multi tasking. I loved the Pixel C. When I tried to upgrade it to an iPad Pro due to it having reached its EOL, I returned the iPad Pro after a couple of days and kept using the Pixel X, until Google announced the Pixelbook. Then I managed to sell the Pixel C for about 300€ because it still looked prestine and the person who bought it brought it another 2 years of use thanks to some after market Android image.
The Nexus 9 was awful. It was very slow and lagged all the time. I think it was due to the Nvidia CPU as I've also had a Chromebook with an Nvidia CPU and it's also really slow.
It had the right form-factor (4:3), good high-res screen and a completely underpowered CPU/GPU. The modem-slow flash-storage sure as hell didn’t help either.
I use a ChromeOS convertible daily and I don't quite get what's so miserable? It works fantastic as a web-browser-centric laptop. Then I can also run Android apps on it (admittedly I don't use that many, but it works great for the ones I use). Sure, you have to hope the particular Android app is optimised for tablet use, but that's the case for any app running on an android tablet.
