Clayton Morris reviews the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1

This is the first Android Tablet Review that hasn’t made my toes curl!

The Android Honeycomb software that powers this device is still buggy. Sure, Google’s improved some of the stability issues that hindered the first go round but I still had plenty of sluggish moments. I experienced enough stuttering in the software for it to be annoying. You don’t get that on the iPad. And let’s be honest, no matter how you slice it, Honeycomb lacks elegance.

Apart from the software running the device there are simply too few quality third-party applications built for Honeycomb worth mentioning. Who cares if there are 65,000 Android apps that can run on Honeycomb tablets if most of them are nearly worthless when running on that same tablet?

Let’s get real: almost no quality news-reading apps, no quality movie-watching apps that take advantage of that 16:10 screen, no Twitter apps worth mentioning — and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

My job is to recommend or not recommend gadgets based on my experience using those devices. For the general consumer I can’t think of a single reason to buy this device.

Why Windows 8 is (is NOT) fundamentally flawed as a response to the iPad

This post by John Gruber on his DARING FIREBALL blog and the subsequent rebuttal by Aaron Holesgrove have prompted me to offer up my two-penneth. Why? Well the subject matter is close to my heart – and that’s a good enough reason by itself, but Aaron’s response typifies what I dislike most about Tech Blogging.

It can be rife with inflammatory accusations – like this:

AH: Ahh John Gruber. He only ever writes long articles when it comes time to defend Apple, doesn’t he?

No, actually I don’t think that he does. In my opinion John tries to offer a balanced view, albeit from the perspective of an Apple enthusiast.

And in the spirit of open discourse Aaron writes:

AH: So, without any further delay, let’s rip his article to shreds.

That’s good!

Polemic…

JG: If not for the existence and success of iOS, Nokia wouldn’t be in trouble (and thus, Elop wouldn’t even be its CEO), HP wouldn’t have bought Palm (and Palm wouldn’t have come up with WebOS), and Windows 8’s innovations wouldn’t primarily revolve around how it looks and works on thin touchscreen tablets.

AH: Yeah John, Apple is the ONLY reason for all of this stuff going on in IT recently. I’m not trying to disagree for the sake of it but I would argue that Apple (and iOS) aren’t the biggest enemy of those three companies; for them, their biggest enemies have been themselves. It was predicted many years before the iPhone and its mobile operating system hit the market that all three of those companies would fall flat on their faces for their respective reasons (see here and here and here) – iOS is simply the straw that broke the camel’s back, I’m afraid. Despite its enormous and disruptive success, the Apple gets too much credit for how it affected its competitors – especially those ones.

…without even the saving grace of strong supporting arguments – Aaron’s references, meant to explain why the three respective companies were going to fall flat on their faces anyway are: a cnet Australia Review of the Nokia N-Gage QD from 2004; a CNNMoney analysis from 2005 relating to HP’s decision to hire Mark Hurd as CEO; a BuzzMedia article from 2007 explaining “Why Windows Vista Sucks”. Hmmm. Way to go Aaron.

Personal issues aside, I find a number of Aaron’s observations questionable:

AH: With Windows 8, Microsoft have unfinished business – their biggest goal with Windows 7 was to develop an OS that was touch friendly and as we all found out, it was a good operating system for using computers with a keyboard and mouse but it wasn’t touch friendly at all.

I have seen nothing fundamentally new in the Windows 7 GUI (compared with XP or Vista) to suggest that this was the case. Windows 7 has some nice new GUI features, but nothing conceptually different, which is what, in my opinion, a touch ‘friendly’ interface would imply. The supporting evidence for Aaron’s statement – Microsoft sponsors the Windows 7 Touch Challenge in 2011! LOL.

Perhaps we have different ideas about what constitutes a touch friendly interface. I am looking for the Interface to disappear – Jeff Han’s presentation at TED 2006 demonstrated the way forward.

Aaron continues:

AH: Let’s move on:

JG: But I think it’s a fundamentally flawed idea for Microsoft to build their next-generation OS and interface on top of the existing Windows. The idea is that you get the new stuff right alongside Windows as we know it. Microsoft is obviously trying to learn from Apple, but they clearly don’t understand why the iPad runs iOS, and not Mac OS X.

AH: Actually John, iOS IS built on top of Mac OS X and its core principles. It is common knowledge that it is a modified version of OS X with a touch centric shell on top.

From the Wikipedia page about Mac OS X:

Apple also produces specialized versions of Mac OS X for use on its consumer devices. iOS, which is based on Mac OS X, runs on the iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, and the 2nd generation Apple TV.

Well, I am not an Apple developer and I cannot speak with any real authority, but I doubt that iOS is a modified version of OS X. What Aaron’s reference actually tells us, by the way, is: “The iOS platform was built using the knowledge that went into the creation of Mac OS X, and many of the tools and technologies used for development on the platform have their roots in Mac OS X as well.”

Oh, and I hardly consider Wikipedia to be the definitive reference for this kind of question!

Moving on:

AH: John, I don’t know what has you so convinced that Office has to look different in order to qualify that it belongs on a tablet. The ribbon interface was supposed to introduce bigger buttons along the top so that menu options were easier to find and I think a lot of users don’t want to re-learn how to navigate Office all over again – they just want it pretty much the way it is on the devices they want to use.

I don’t think that is so much that it has to look different, but rather behave differently – and different behaviour would not necessarily mean that all the navigation would have to be different. Depends upon what you mean by navigation, but Aaron isn’t explicit.

A little later:

AH: … say all you want about Microsoft products but Office has no peers, particularly in the enterprise, and has three times the amount of features of anything else. There are no comparisons to be made here.

Commercially speaking this is no doubt true, and perhaps it is also true  if you consider a count of features to be the only meaningful measure of a software product. To my mind Office Suite is a mixed bag: whereas Excel is an exceptional product; I find Word less than inspiring, and I think that there are several substantially better Word processors – here’s one; and as for PowerPoint, Keynote trounces it any day of the week.

and in a similar vein:

JG: The ability to run Mac OS X apps on the iPad, with full access to the file system, peripherals, etc., would make the iPad worse, not better.

AH: Agreed – but just because that’s true of Mac OS, that doesn’t mean that the logic auto-applies to Windows as well.

I think that it does actually – one of the key iOS objectives is that users can get on with the business of ‘consuming’ and ‘creating’ without worrying about how the devices they are using work. One of the reasons that iPad is so successful is because it realizes this objective so well. It is hard to see how Windows 8 could succeed as a Tablet OS if Microsoft were to adopt a fundamentally different approach.

JG: The iPad succeeds because it has eliminated complexity, not because it has covered up the complexity of the Mac with a touch-based “shell”.

AH: Actually, the iPad succeeds because it enables you to read websites whilst sitting on the toilet and play casual games in bed. It’s a toy. You can’t eliminate complexity when there was never any complexity in the first place – Apple went and threw a 10″ screen on the iPod Touch and iPhone and called them the iPad and iPad 3G, respectively.

And like I said earlier John – iOS IS a touch-based shell covering up Mac OS X – it’s one tenth of the OS and one tenth of the battery consumption. Your characterisation of what you think it is not couldn’t describe what it actually is any better.

Actually I would argue that the iPad succeeds because it eliminates complexity for the user. Difficult to imagine though that this success is not underpinned by considerable complexity within iOS. And Aaron  can’t have it both ways! On one hand he is stating that there is no complexity in the iPad, but on the other he restates his belief that iOS is “a touch-based shell covering up Mac OS X” – which I assume he would consider to be complex.

Penultimately:

JG: OS’s lack of backward compatibility with any existing software means that all apps for iOS are written specifically for iOS.

AH: Again, apples and oranges. This mentality works well for Apple products because basically no one gave a shit about them up until about five years ago. With Windows it’s different – people would expect Windows tablets to have backwards compatibility with old Windows apps because if it didn’t, they could have just settled for an iPad instead and been one of the trend-setters. Sure some apps in Windows 8 tablets will be as ugly as a hat full of arseholes but at the end of the day, backwards compatibility with legacy Windows apps isn’t a drawback – it’s a feature, because that’s what the market will demand.

Aaron misses the point when he talks about backwards compatibility – it refers to the ability to read and edit legacy documents, not whether the application’s user interface is consistent across platforms!

Finally Aaron’s statement regarding the relative intent of Apple and Microsoft:

Now, the deal with iWork for iPad is that it’s a skinny rip-off of iWork for Mac because Apple’s original pitch for the iPad is that it’s a consumption device, not a creation device. With iWork, Apple are making glorified document viewing programs that have simple editing features. In the future, Apple are going to slowly wean people into the idea of using their iPads more and more for creating but we are hardly at that day today. Microsoft, on the other hand, are looking to make tablets that are full screen computers which you can do anything/everything with – dock them as full computers, do full-screen computing using things other than touch – off screen gestures, voice control, etc. It’s a totally different kettle of fish.

Aaron seems to be of the opinion that both Apple and Microsoft have similar long term visions for tablet computing – i.e. that they should be capable of replacing today’s desktop and laptop computers – but that the difference, in terms of Aaron’s ‘kettles of fish’ would seem to be in both organizations view of what is achievable now. Apple is taking us there in incremental steps – because, I would suggest, the iOS UI paradigms are so completely different to what has gone before, that applications need to be rewritten from the ground up. In contrast, Microsoft, it would seem, believes that it can realize this vision in one fell swoop. Time will tell – but I know where my money is!

Hello world!

I have decided to stay with the WordPress title, because this is the first time I have spoken to  you.

I want to talk about technology, which in and of itself is nothing new, but I will carefully attempt to frame my musings in the context of a personal ‘world view’ that hopefully will resonate with you.

In the immortal words of Sir David Frost – “Hello, good evening, and welcome!”