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Comment: Re:Seems reasonable (Score 1) 294






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Comment: Here's the thing (Score 2) 294






Comment: Re:Disproportionate Malware (Score 1) 117








Comment: Re:Slightly biased... (Score 1) 487




Comment: Re:So what? (Score 1) 487

by hazydave (#46416619) Attached to: Android Beats iOS As the Top Tablet OS

2560x1600... a bit higher than my dual monitors on my high-end-ish PC (2560x1440, along with one 1920x1200). But of course, less actually usable space. Even as a big tablet, a 12.2" screen has its limits.

This is a good tablet. I bought one a few weeks ago at Best Buy in Delaware. The last one at a Best Buy in Delaware -- they had sold out of the 64GB version, as well as all of the 32GB 10" Notes. The pen is a big advantage in using the tablet for real work... I had it on a loaner Note 8, and I can't really go without. I'm pretty good wiht the 12.2" size, but I can see smaller people getting tired with one this big, used for reading or note taking.

Comment: Re:And yet apple sells more tablets than anybody (Score 1) 487

by hazydave (#46416587) Attached to: Android Beats iOS As the Top Tablet OS

> Apple *DOES NOT BUILD ANYTHING* - they pay one of your white-label chinese manufacturers to build it for them as they are too incompetent to build it themselves.

Hon Hai Precision Industry Company, aka Foxconn. Of course, Foxconn makes about 40% of all of the consumer electronics on the planet. They also made some of Amazon's Kindle tablets.

> While Samsung, ASUS, Lenovo all build their own.

Samsung and Lenovo also make a large percentage of the components that go into their in-house manufacturered products; it's about 70% on the average Samsung tablet.

ASUSTeK Computer started out as a contract manufacturer for PCs, but they sold off some of their manufacturing business in 2008. The spinoff companies are Pegatron (PCs and components) and Unihan (casework and other mechanicals). They still do in-house manufacturing in several countries.

Of course, most of the other tablet makers also outsource their manufacturing or, like Google, the whole schmeggie.


by hazydave (#46416519) Attached to: Android Beats iOS As the Top Tablet OS

Apple doesn't care that much about market share. And that's not a new thing.

Look at the Mac PC. I mean, just face it, there are only so many people who are willing to pay twice as much cash to buy a laptop-for-the-desktop (iMac) or overpriced laptop. And yeah, I mean feature for feature... I bought one for my daughter, for college, a year-and-a-half ago. I actually got less laptop (less RAM, fewer ports, lower screen resolution, older Intel i7 chipset) for not-quite-twice the money. It would have been more than twice, but I bought a refurb, from Apple themselves.

So Apple's got about 5% of the PC market, but over 80% of the $1000+ PC market. That's a very good example of how they work. They're making 30%+ margins on Mac PCs, versus say HP, at about 5%. If Apple really cared that much about numbers, they'd have to drop their margins significantly to increase sales. In the short term, sure, they'd sell lots of Macs. But the cachet of that as an exclusive platform would fail, once it were just as cheap as everyone else. They'd need to sell about 30% of all the PCs on the planet, just to break even selling at HP's margins. And HP actually has high margins, compared to the ubercheap Chinese PCs at the very bottom of the market.

They've done basically the same thing with iPhones and tablets. The iPhone's market share is kept artificially high by the US sales model -- the average consumer doesn't see what they're paying, so they don't see the iPhone as being more expensive than other smartphones. Of course, it's a different market, but still changing... I don't think we're anywhere near the point of stability that the Mac vs. PC hit. You'll know it, of course, when smartphone news is as boring as PC news.

There is only one thing that would really bother Apple: a significant drop in iTunes revenue. That could lead to diminished support for iOS applications, and that's not the way you sell a premium priced product.

As of late last year, iTunes was still bringing in nearly twice as much of the green stuff as Google Play, despite Play having eclipsed iTunes in terms of total downloads. Now, sure, Google Play isn't open in as many countries as iTunes, but it's still an accepted meme that iPhone buyers spend more money on apps and media than Android users. So developers are going to support iOS, and they're going to support Android. Even if Android keeps improving, there's no reason to expect iOS to become a problem, even at lower market shares.

About the only real thing that could be a problem would be the emergence of a really strong other platform, something strong enough to replace Apple as #2. Does anyone really see Windows Phone, now essentially a Nokia proprietary OS, doing that anytime soon? No one else in sight even has a change... most of the other mobile platforms (FirefoxOS, Sailfish, Tizen, Ubuntu for Phones) are pretty much expecting HTML5 apps to be the norm, not much OS-specific development beyond embedded applications.

So Apple's optimizing profit, not market share, for the near to medium future. As long as that formula works, I don't think they're going to do much about their installed base. That's different than their worrying about not being a player at all in major markets. They want to be popular in China and India, not an also-ran.

Comment: Re:Insert "Hahaha - OH WOW" gif here. (Score 1) 487

by hazydave (#46416445) Attached to: Android Beats iOS As the Top Tablet OS

Samsung isn't making their own OS. Tizen is a Linux Foundation project. Yes, it's supported by Samsung and Intel. Samsung and Intel are also the two largest contributors to Android, aside from Google. Samsung's using Tizen as a replacement for BadaOS. In fact, there are two official Tizen APIs: the BadaOS API (the official NDK), which was ported last year, and HTML5/Javascript/JQuery. Samsung sold about 10 million low-end smartphones running BadaOS. Sometime this year, they're expected to release Tizen phones into that same market, but so far, they only have a developer unit available. They're also using it in the next generation smart watch, and a digital camera. Other companies are looking at Tizen as kind of a competitor to QNX in auto entertainment systems.

The point of Tizen is the same as the point of FirefoxOS: sub-Android smart devices.It's also not entirely open source: the SDK, for example, is published under a non-open-source license from Samsung. Some other non-GNU-compatible licenses cover other parts of the finished OS.

Comment: Re:ANDROID != LINUX (Score 1) 487

by hazydave (#46416407) Attached to: Android Beats iOS As the Top Tablet OS

The Android API/Java classes are properly termed "middleware", or alternately, an application framework (that's the term Google uses). And yes, it's a fairly portable application framework, which has been ported to run over QNX (Blackberry) and Windows (Bluestacks). You need Linux for anything written under the NDK, which is apparently less than 20% of the Android applications released.

The Android kernel was originally a fork of Linux, but it was merged back officially in Linux 3.3 I believe. Just that has made Linux a better platform for mobile devices. No to mention other mobile environments, like FirefoxOS, helping themselves to bits and pieces of Android as they see fit.
