Analyst: ICS Does Not Solve Android's Main Problem

Have you considered the fact that people like have different phones, and not having identical ones? Same thing for Tablets. Not everyone wants a slim tablet, thats why Toshiba made the Thrive. Some people don't want a full touchscreen, but want a keyboard...

Here's incentive to buy an Android based device: It's not Apple.

I think that analyst got it backwards. In this particular case, the "fragmentation" of Android actually makes it attractive to folks that don't want to be locked down to 1 manufacturer+OS combo and have some degree of "freedom" to choose the underlying hardware and OS version. Even more, now that ICS has the apps support from tablets, makes it even more delicious! Besides, phone makers are entitled to "customize" the Android they get to fit their target market with the phone.

Anyway, Windows could have those same advantages, but closed development ain't gonna cover that much market without some serious help to the manufacturers. The rapid development of Android is it's biggest strength IMO.

Cheers!

Putting OS aside. I'd gladly take an adroid tablet because I don't have to deal with that bloated crappy Itunes software. Apps that "act" pretty but don't have any of the features I need, for example their PDF readers are very crappy, and the built in one didn't even have searching. I cringe when i'm fixing a pc and I see Itunes installed. What's worse is that when I do walk around with my much smaller android tablet, people always go "hey that's really cool, is it an Ipad?" and I tell them of course not, here hold it. It's not an anvil, and that I'm not going to cry if I drop this lol

@kanaida
iOS 5 doesn't need iTunes. It can do everything over the air, though 36 million happy iPad users says your iTunes hate is overblown.

The big incentive for me is this: Sign in once to any android tablet with my google account pw and my entire E world is at my fingertips. (music, news, contacts, calendar, email, books, photos, videos) And I can easily choose to stream or pin local any of it. Not so simply with apple; even with ios5/icloud.

everything over the air? from itunes?

The point of this article is this: Always take analyst advice with a grain of salt because most of the time they are completely off base.

Yea I have seen many people who use iTunes, not cause they like it cause they HAVE too to use their iPods or iPhones and all told me they did not like it. When a few got rid of their Apple product and I showed them how to use WMP or another Media Player to organize music and they saw the speed boost getting rid of iTunes gave they were astounded. Moral of story, 36 million people are forced to use the software, do not confuse that with them being happy to use it.

Android's worse touch lag bugs the hellouta me.

"So far, we have seen the iPad control the $500 and above tablet market, with Android and other competing platforms making waves only with heavily discounted products."

WRONG! I ain't buying any tablet with such price and rather wait for "discounted products".
If Android does not offer such products I might just live without a tablet on my hand.
For me, PC, laptop, and smartphone are necessities but tablets are merely toys.

Greetings,

A proud HTC Desire+ Archos G9 80 user

Android tablet makers are finisehd. Apple and Amazon will rule because they offer something the consumer wants: an all-in-one place to get their content.

Apple has the higher end and Amazon will own the lower end (pre-orders for Amazon's new tablet suggest iPad numbers for sales). There just isn;t much room left over for the umpteen other tablet makers to carve out any reasonable piece for themselves.

to: ericburnby
've been satisfied with my tab7 android and with netflix and hulu and expandable memory (and samsung market) personally I do not see any reason to have neither apple nor amazon cloud access

Too bad you (like everyone who visits tech sites) don't represent the average consumer.

Android does thing differently. Case 1: Widgets. Case 2: File Explorers. Case 3: Launchers. Case 4: If you didn't get the point by now, you are on Apple's payroll or invest in Apple heavily.

Uh lemme guess how you installed IOS 5? hmm... Itunes?

I develop web apps for apple and android devices and that's how I had to do it.
To me they are just target platforms.

My beef with Itunes is that it's MASSIVE, very slow, and doesn't work as intended very often. I wrote a program that took 5 years of work, and it's about 40MB. Does many things related to manufacturing, reporting, entering orders, tons of stuff. How big is Itunes? like 300MB +
I have no idea how that is even possible for such a trivial thing like a media player with a couple extras, especially when IOS images are NOT included in all that. It's slow as a dog and messes with wifi by installing some bojour crap.

But worst of all is that, if I discover winamp tommorow and think it's amazing, i'm pretty much screwed without resorting to hacks.

Amazon's tablet runs Android

LOL

This is what irritates me from switching from my iPod Touch to the Galaxy S2.
iTunes music transfer to DoubleTwist, to my Galaxy S2. Some of the tags are messed up no thanks to the AAC format. Ironically DoubleTwist (and EVERY other media player) have the appropriate tags before transfer.

When its Android with its X amount of different tablets vs Apple and its TWO tablets (iPad 1 and 2), Android has the problem of its tablets not being different enough from one another? This makes no sense.

Android problem: emulation - slooow, needing 2-core [plus: fast to adapt]
Apple problem: love/hate customer base [plus: slick 1-core operation]
HP problem: what was that OS again?
Intel problem: MeeGo or what?
RIM problem: shrinking
Nokia problem: shrinking + Elop as a mole
MeeGo: N9 = Marvellous product - destroyed by M$ mole Elop
Symbian: N8 best hardware, outdated software, still going strong for years (Accenture)
Windows 7.5 too little too late, waiting for WP8
......
The winner in year 2015: WP9+
1) Samsung
2) HTC
3) Nokia

What about iApple iProducts?
No Jobs = no jobs

make a cellphone/tablet doc that works as a wireless base connected to the tv.

give us a keyboard/mouse/gamepad support

and there you go, you just made a game console, and a portable device all on one.

you get kids, parents, and teen support all in 1, easy move.

WHY AM I THE ONLY ONE WHO THINGS OF THIS

No, over the 'cloud'. iTunes is not required at all anymore.




How are you 'locked down' more when you buy an Apple than an Android? As I see it, whichever phone you buy, you're stuck with that OS and Hardware, and when your contract runs out you again have the option to buy ANY other phone. Where's the problem?

There are so many downsides to fragmentation, so many Android handsets never get the updates because they have to wait for their phone manufacturer to release the updated software, sometimes months after it comes out, sometimes never.




Did you somehow miss the many posts telling you that you DON'T .... NEED ... ITUNES, at all. 36 million people can at least read.




Did you continue to say that you don't care if you drop it because it has hardly any apps, ridiculously slow performance and awful touch screen, and is not even remotely comparable to an iPad? You know, the full story instead of the sugar-coated 'I'm cheap so I'll buy an old Ford and claim it's the same as an Aston Martin' story?

I agree about iTunes. I have both iMac, iPhone 3GS and a Toshiba PC. I never wanted to use iTunes and i think it is the worst product Apple has ever made. All of my friends using iPhone, iMac saying the same thing: If we can choose we never choose iTunes.

I was just reading CyberAngel's post and made me think... this is an Apple vs Android argument - where's watcha? Right on cue.

On topic, i don't think a lack of differentiation is a problem. The average user hates change - i worked an xmas in Asda a few years back and the amount of complaints we'd get when we moved sections around was unreal. They didn't care we were putting different/better products/offers in front of them, they only cared about finding their usual items that they know. Same applies to average users.

all I'm saying is that if I drop 200 dollar tablet you might the upset but if I drop something that's 500 dollars it's like dropping your tv. big loss. for a toy.

LOLz, just that

@watcha

Are you telling me that 36 million people has iphone 4S? I didn't know there was so many already sold. I am pretty sure you need iOS5 to use the apple iCloud and I am pretty sure if you don't have iOS5 you need "iTunes" to install it. So, unless you are the 1-2 million people who already has an iPhone 4S, you have to have iTunes until you upgrade to iOS5.

Even if you have got iOS5, you will still need iTunes, iCloud will not update your iPhone. So unless you are planning to never update your iPhone you will need iTunes to update your iphone. Also, unless you are on a unlimited data plan, have fun downloading 16gb, 32gb or *gasp* 64gb of data via iCloud.

You're the only one who thinks of this because most people don't think (and publish) dumb ideas. A game console sacrifices power consumption, heat, size, wireless interfaces, etc. for one goal: high graphics rendering speed. A tablet or phone is meant to be low power, low heat, small and have wireless interfaces. You can't get more opposite requirements.

I think the point the author is trying to make is that the market for tablets is not a big, nor growing as fast as phones. As such, there are too many tablet players in the market on the Android side and instead of it being android vs apple, because of the smaller market is is android vs apple vs android. Some of the tablet manufacturers building Android tablets might want to consider working together to produce a co-branded tablet running Android, thus they will stop fighting each other and could share the profit margin and distribute the cost of building the devices. Its not likely to happen, but with the current state of things the tablet market does not appear to be big enough for several major manufacturers to produce devices and expect the sales numbers to be high enough to cover the R&D, manufacturing and distribution.

That said, we have also seen a number of players stepping out of the tablet (HP, possibly RIM) market and as this continues to happen it just improves the position of those that remain, fewer cuts from the pie.

Samsung and ASUS will likely remain center stage as the leading Android tablet makers, especially if they can continue to produce a quality low cost product as they have (Samsung Galaxy Tab, ASUS Transformer). Plus companies like ASUS are blazing ahead of Apple with the products like the ASUS Transformer Prime which will sport the Kal-El quad core processor from Nvidia.

Its going to be interesting to watch the market over the next year to see where it ends up.

One last note, the fragmentation issue which Android had before, was never really much of an issue, it was just the hot topic that Apple liked to toss around about the product. You could always look up on the android development site the % market share of each version of android, and so long as you selected the minimum level the application was generally compatible with all newer versions without modification. So if you wrote for Android 2.0, it would generally work on 2.1,2.2,2.3,3.0,3.1,3.2,etc. It just would not work on anything below 2.0. The majority of the market 90%+ of devices are and have been running better than 2.0 for some time.

Keep an eye on onlive.com in the next few months. They have stated that they were working on bluetooth gamepad support for Android tablets (and ipads) so that their streaming gaming service works through the tablet device and the user can use a gamepad. Most Android tablets have HDMI which allows them to display on a PC, you combine that with onlive + gamepad + HDMI connection and you have a game console.

I have tried their service on my PC w/ a windows XBOX360 controller and Batman Arkham Asylum and it worked out really well. Saw no lag, gameplay was the same as when I played the game on my 360 and it looked just as good.