On the 20th of October, 2011, when I wrote a post on my experience of using the Samsung Galaxy 750 tablet, it drew rave reviews from various visitors to my blog. Some said I\u2019m a noob and don\u2019t know how to use a Samsung tablet properly yet. Some said I sound like a complete liar and I\u2019m crying like a girl who doesn\u2019t know how to use a product properly.<\/p>\n
Well, I know truth has a way of leaving many people disappointed, but I couldn\u2019t really care less. My duty as a tech blogger is to inform people of my experience with gadgets and let them have their views in the comment sections.<\/p>\n
Android, by far, is the worst mobile operating system I\u2019ve ever used and I\u2019m pretty darn sure many discerning users of mobile devices (both cellphones and tablet PCs) would attest to this.<\/p>\n
Actually, the world is divided into two different types of users \u2013 ones that have never used a better OS than Android (their previous devices were either Blackberry or Noika smarphones) and the ones that used devices operating across all OS platforms.<\/p>\n
So whom would you trust when it comes to their experience with Android OS? Of course, the latter, right?<\/p>\n
Ok, if you are still NOT convinced, here is the feedback from the rest of world.<\/p>\n
Android tablets were expected to give the Apple iPad fierce competition in 2011. It never happened<\/a>. Here\u2019s why Android tablets flopped. The following part of the article is a republished version of \u00a0Jason Hiner<\/a>‘s article.<\/p>\n On smartphones, Android had just had a huge 2010 of its own. It went from virtually zero market share in January to a third of U.S. smartphone sales by the end of the year, leapfrogging the iPhone in the process. With so many of tech\u2019s biggest hardware makers lining up behind Android tablets heading into 2011, the expectation was that Android tablets would likely leapfrog the iPad by the end of the year. At the very worst, it looked like Android tablets would pull even with the iPad and split the tablet market. Even as late as June 2011, some prominent tech commentators were still predicting that Android tablets would gobble up a huge chunk of the tablet market by the end of 2011.<\/p>\n It never happened.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n Depending on who you believe and what exactly you count (tablets sold to retailers vs. tablets sold to customers, and whether you count Android offshoots like the Amazon Kindle Fire), Android was running on somewhere between 15% to 30% of all tablets sold in 2011. That\u2019s respectable, right? Disappointing, but respectable. However, that\u2019s not the whole story. It gets worse.<\/p>\n If we look at actually tablet usage, the numbers get really ugly for Android. Recent reports that track web traffic from tablets show that the iPad accounts for 95% of tablet traffic in the U.S. and 88% globally.<\/p>\n That means that either Android tablet sales to paying customers are much lower than previously reported or the people who buy Android tablets aren\u2019t using them very much, or a combination of the two. Whatever the details are, it\u2019s an ugly scenario that means Android tablets have almost no traction in the market.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n So, why did Android tablets flop in 2011? There are four main reasons. Let\u2019s count them down, and then talk about what 2012 looks like.<\/p>\n Google tried to get innovative with the form factor of Android tablets by giving them a 16\u00d79 aspect ratio instead of copying the iPad\u2019s 4\u00d73 form factor. It sounded good. It was different. After all, 16\u00d79 is associated with HD and 4\u00d73 is associated with SD. The problem is that when you put a 16\u00d79 tablet in your hands, it feels awkward. Google made landscape the default orientation so it feels like you\u2019re holding a laptop screen that\u2019s missing a keyboard, instead of holding a book or a magazine or a padfolio like it feels when you have a 10-inch 4\u00d73 device like the iPad.<\/p>\n When you turn a 16\u00d79 tablet to portrait mode, the screen feels oddly squished. And now, it\u2019s going to be difficult for Google to fix the problem. The 16\u00d79 landscape orientation is still the default in Android 4.0 and there are a ton of existing Android tablets like the Motorola Xoom and the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 and the ASUS Eee Pad Transformer that are locked into the 16\u00d79 orientation, so even if Google did a software update, it wouldn\u2019t help.<\/p>\n One of the ways that Android tablets were going to move a lot of units in 2011 was large orders of 1,000s of tablets to traditional enterprises like hospitals, manufacturers, and schools. Last March, I wrote about Samsung gearing up to sell a lot of Android tablets to the enterprise<\/a> by setting up sales programs and preparing its sales force to handle big tablet orders. Samsung reps enthusiastically said they would contact me when they had big customers willing to talk about their tablet rollouts. I never heard from them.<\/p>\n By mid-2011 that didn\u2019t surprise me because the IT leaders I spoke with were spooked about Android malware. The fact that users could click on browser links and accidentally sideload apps that could siphon data out of Android devices was not something IT pros wanted to deal with. As a result, surveys like the one from enterprise vendor Good Technology showed that 96% of tablet activations in the enterprise were iPads<\/a>.<\/p>\n Despite the 16\u00d79 problem (and Honeycomb\u2019s initial software glitches that Google eventually ironed out), the Android tablet platform itself isn\u2019t all bad. I like running widgets and mini-apps side-by-side, for example. That makes Android tablets feel more like a traditional multi-tasking computer. The built-in Gmail, Google Books, and web browser apps in Honeycomb are really slick \u2014 I especially like the thumb controls in the browser. The problem is that there just isn\u2019t enough of this stuff. Google has not created enough of its own apps and third party software developers have hit the snooze button on Android tablet apps.<\/p>\n Where\u2019s the Google Analytics app or its Google+ app or its Google Finance app or its Picnik photo editing app? Instead of building its own native Android tablet apps and firing up software makers, Google seems intent on focusing app developers on building HTML5 apps that work well across tablets, smartphones, and computers. That\u2019s an important and admirable goal, but dedicated apps can still be extremely useful for taking advantage of a platform\u2019s strengths.<\/p>\n And the bottom line is that users like the simplicity and focus of having an app that they can tap and enter a dedicated environment for a particular service. Google doesn\u2019t get that, doesn\u2019t like it, and hasn\u2019t pushed for it on Android tablets. The result is that Android tablets just don\u2019t feel like they\u2019re useful for doing much besides surfing the web.<\/p>\n When Apple first announced the iPad, I had honestly started tuning out by end of the event (there\u2019s only so much of that \u201cmagical\u201d and \u201crevolutionary\u201d nonsense you can stomach). I was ready to write an article excoriating the iPad as a badly-overpriced toddler toy when Steve Jobs announced that the price of the iPad would start at $499 (I\u2019d expected the price tag to be $800-$1000). I immediately bolted straight up in my seat and my eyes popped open and Apple had my attention again.<\/p>\n To this day, I believe that the iPad\u2019s greatest marketing strategy and the No. 1 factor in its success has been its price tag. Conversely, when Google and Motorola announced that the first big Android tablet \u2014 the Motorola Xoom \u2014 would cost $800, my immediate reaction was to shake my head and say, \u201cDOA.\u201d At the time, other tech analysts tried to argue that what you got for the price with the Xoom compared very favorably to the highest-priced iPad.<\/p>\n It was a logical argument but that\u2019s not how most of today\u2019s tech buyers think, and the proof is that virtually no one bought the Xoom. Eventually, other tablet makers rolled out some nice Android tablets for $400-$500 by the middle of 2011 \u2014 again, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 and ASUS Eee Pad Transformer are both very attractive \u2014 but to the masses, that price tag was apparently still too much for tablets whose primary function is surfing the web.<\/p>\n Even Google\u2019s own numbers don\u2019t paint a pretty picture for Android tablets<\/a>, and the release of Android 4.0 \u201cIce Cream Sandwich\u201d is unlikely to help the situation much in 2012. ICS is\u2019t about fixing the tablet problem. It\u2019s about unifying the Android experience between smartphones and tablets. My ZDNet colleague Jason Perlow has been testing Ice Cream Sandwich on the Motorola Xoom <\/a>and has concluded that it won\u2019t fix any of these fundamental flaws with Android tablets.<\/p>\n Last month Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said<\/a> that Google will \u201cmarket a tablet of the highest quality\u201d in the first half of 2012. It\u2019s also been rumored<\/a> recently that Google is working on a low-cost 7-inch tablet to battle the Amazon Kindle Fire, which runs a bastardized version of Android 2.3 and quickly grabbed the No. 2 spot in the tablet market at the end of 2011.<\/p>\n However, until Google deals with the four issues we\u2019ve talked about here, it\u2019s unlikely that it will change the fate of Android tablets. At the very least, Google will have to fix No. 1 and No. 2, and that might be enough to overcome No. 3 and No. 4.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On the 20th of October, 2011, when I wrote a post on my experience of using the Samsung Galaxy 750 tablet, it drew rave reviews from various visitors to my blog. Some said I\u2019m a noob and don\u2019t know how to use a Samsung tablet properly yet. Some said I sound like a complete liar […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3962,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[471],"yoast_head":"4. The 16\u00d79 Problem<\/h2>\n
3. The Enterprise Doesn\u2019t Trust Android<\/h2>\n
2. The Lack of Tablet Apps<\/h2>\n
1. The Price<\/h2>\n
What Now?<\/h2>\n