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Google says Android is not ready for tablets

Posted by Gil Bouhnick on Sep 11, 2010

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Talk about bad publicity.
Just a few days after the exciting reveal of the Samsung Galaxy Tab and Samsung’s extreme Android affection, Google’s Hugo Barra, director of mobile products, claims in a typical engineering-honesty-that-can-really-ruin-sales that "Froyo is not optimized for use on tablets".
Wow. Did you get this one? That could really speed up sales for Samsung’s Tab, couldn’t it…

Samsung_GalaxyTabOfficial_13_610_w500-728-75

Two upcoming versions of Android, Gingerbread and Honeycomb, will apparently be built with tablets in mind. For now, the best a hardware manufacturer can do is to put Android 2.2 Froyo on a tablet and tweak it to deal with the new form factor. But Google doesn’t seem to think that’s a good idea.

Samsung did some modifications to the Android based code (open source, remember?) to turn the built-in Android apps such as e-mail and the calendar into a tablet mode (dual view instead of a single page), but knowing Samsung’s Windows Mobile custom UI history – I’m not even sure it’s a good thing…

Beyond those modifications, there is nothing else that was made to he Android OS, which means the real problems will begin when using apps that were simply not designed to run on the large screen…

In terms of specs – the Galaxy Tab wins:

Samsung-Galaxy-Tab-vs-Apple-iPad-MobileSpoon

Talking about specs, it seems like the Galaxy Tab does hold some advantages like the camera, flash support, GPS, weight, and of course… phone, but to me it seems irrelevant – the most important factor is the operating system and the applications running on top of it, and besides – who cares about a phone that big? And a camera? will I really stand in front of my family with this gigantic gadget and ask them to smile? Don’t think so…

For now, I’m happy with my camera’less iPad. iOS seems more solid than ever running on the iPad and everything falls just into pieces.

No doubt, the battle between Android and iOS will continue but in the first tablets round – iOS wins big time.

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Gil Bouhnick (70 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook


Gil Bouhnick is a guest writer at MobilitySite and the owner of The Mobile Spoon. He is a Director of Mobile Solutions at ClickSoftware, running ClickSoftware's MobileFever, and constantly trying to examine new mobile trends and technologies.

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    • http://www.svpocketpc.com Pony99CA

      I read this, too, and recall stories back in earlier Android days about the source code having code for netbooks. Netbooks have larger screens than phones, so either the code wasn't complete back then and still isn't complete now, or it shouldn't be that bad to support larger screens.

      Steve

    • http://www.svpocketpc.com Pony99CA

      I read this, too, and recall stories back in earlier Android days about the source code having code for netbooks. Netbooks have larger screens than phones, so either the code wasn't complete back then and still isn't complete now, or it shouldn't be that bad to support larger screens.

      Steve

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