FixYa, a product Q&A site, took a look at its own holiday stats to collect some facts about many major cell phones and tablets including iOS and Android devices. The conclusion? iPhone owners tend to be most interested in fixing battery and call quality problems on Android users found a number of screen issues including freezing and problematic interfaces.
They also found that the iPad had far fewer support questions than the aggregate number of Android tablets. Obviously the cohort they surveyed isn’t very statistically useful, but they were able to grab quite a few percentages based on page views of various support questions.
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A number of prominent folks have been ripping into the Kindle Fire lately, claiming that it is slow, exhibits poor UX choices, and that consumers are returning them en masse. Heck, even the affable Marco Arment writes “If I didn’t need the Fire for Instapaper testing, I’d return it.”
Tough crowd.
But there’s another narrative that says this is a secret success. Analysts estimate that Amazon will sell 5 million of the devices this quarter, a little under half the iPads sold in Q4 2011 (although the Fire has been on sale for a shorter period). I have a feeling that Amazon will hit or just graze this mark once it tallies holiday sales but, Amazon being Amazon, they’ll never announce total sales. Marco Arment or no Marco Arment, the Fire will do just fine. → Read More
Digitimes, quoting “sources from upstream supply chains,” is stating that PC manufacturers like Dell, Acer, and HP are building fewer tablet products in direct reaction to devices like the iPad, Kindle Fire, and Nook Tablet. Citing an inability to gain traction against devices with rich content to back them up, the manufacturers are looking elsewhere to regain a foothold in the mobile market.
In truth, manufacturers know they won’t get far building vehicles for Android, Google Music notwithstanding. Building and marketing a tablet like the Xoom or the Asus Transformer is a perilous process and is buffeted by the whims of a price-conscious consumer. It doesn’t make economic sense to build and try to sell a few hundred thousand slates that will be considered obsolete in a few months. → Read More
The Nook Tablet, announced last week to much fanfare, is a follow-up to the company’s popular Nook Color and a direct competitor to Amazon’s $199 Kindle Fire. I’ve only just got this device into my hot little hands so expect a full review this week but initial impressions are good.
The device is about as big as the Nook Color and the Fire, although the Tablet is considerably more streamlined than Amazon’s offering. The OS is clean and clear with a small ribbon of icons along the bottom of the home screen for video and music as well as newsstand and book apps. There is also an apps menu consisting of a number of preloaded apps including a mail app, Doodle Jump, a crossword app, Hulu Plus, and something called “Angry Birds” that appears to be a bird-spotting companion.
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Short Version: The Archos 80 G9 tablet isn’t necessarily something I’d recommend for the hardcore tablet enthusiast, but it certainly gets the job done. Powered by pure Android 3.2 Honeycomb, the tab offers everything you’d expect out of Android and a nice variety of ports, albeit with a somewhat rough build-quality. → Read More
TechCrunch Disrupt finalist Pressly is an HTML5-based platform that turns online publications into tablet-friendly websites that work on the iPad, Android tablets or the BlackBerry PlayBook. The sites it produces are nearly indistinguishable from their native counterparts, like Flipboard and Zite for example, offering a similar experience for browsing through articles, images and videos. Navigation is designed for the tablet interface, using common gestures like multi-touch swipes and pinches.
Pressly’s platform includes five customizable templates as a starting point, each designed with the needs of different publishers in mind. One template is more text-driven, while others are better for browsing through photos or videos. Like native apps, navigating a Pressly-built site uses intuitive gestures, like a 2-finger swipe up or down to reveal quick navigation and a pinch to close articles. → Read More
Before we enter the breach, I’d like to ask that you all have your grains of salt at the ready because we’re entering some highly speculative territory. Motorola has been going on a domain shopping spree lately, and thanks to a little snooping by the folks over at Fusible, now we’re all privy to Moto’s purchases. → Read More
Remember when I said I thought HP was telegraphing its sales with the TouchPad pricing? And how I said the device is $100 off this weekend? Well either HP is not selling any TouchPads at all ever or they’re on some Quixotic race to the bottom in relation to every other tablet out there. You see, the TouchPad is $379 on Woot this morning.
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What does MSI’s new WindPad want you to do? Enjoy (but only a little) that’s what! That’s why their latest 10-inch Android device, the Enjoy, looks so underpowered.
The device has just appeared on the FCC website and is running a 1GHZ ARM Cortex-A8 processer and, get this, Android 2.3. Feh. → Read More
Panasonic is prepping an Android 2.2-powered e-book reader/tablet hybrid [JP] that’s specifically designed for the Japanese market. The device will offer e-books through a store set up by Rakuten, the country’s biggest e-commerce company, with the initial line-up including a total of at least 10,000 titles. → Read More
Word on the street, specifically Wall St., is that Apple has an “iPad 2 Plus” in the works, with plans to ship in late 2011. Go ahead and grab a salt-shaker now, because despite the truckload of congruent predictions, I still don’t quite buy it.
FBR Capital Markets’ Craig Berger claimed earlier today that Apple has asked for component suppliers’ quotes to build the iPad 2 Plus, which is supposedly a “marginally different device.” → Read More
We didn’t exactly heart the TouchPad. We didn’t hate it, either. We even said that “WebOS and the Palm TouchPad are nearly perfect, an excellent amalgamation of everything that was ever right about Palm.” Granted, perfection in this industry lasts about as long as a battery cycle, and we had plenty to gripe about, but as far as the TouchPad goes, we have hope.
But day-one reviews haven’t been as understanding as we were, which has prompted HP’s webOS boss Jon Rubinstein to blast out an internal letter of support to both the TouchPad engineers and the webOS 3.0 development team encouraging them to keep up the work and continue believing in the product. → Read More
This $99 Archos tablet runs Froyo and has a 7-inch 800 x 480 pixel resistive touchscreen and 4 amazing GB of storage. No mention of processor but I suspect a few TI-81s have sacrificed their lives to be part of this mess. → Read More
Just yesterday, HP finally let slip pricing and availability for the HP TouchPad tablet, which we now know will hit stores July 1. In terms of competition, HP is top-dog when it comes to PCs, but thus far, Apple has dominated the tablet market. The question now is, will HP’s TouchPad finally create a true, aggressive competitor for the iPad? → Read More
Microsoft has chosen to take the semi-exclusive route when it comes to tablet software. While Google’s Android operating system is a free-for-all platform for OEMs, and Apple’s iOS is completely closed off to manufacturers, Microsoft has plans to fall somewhere in between open and closed. Specifically, the PC maker will limit the number of initial hardware makers that can employ the Windows OS on tablets to five, pairing each OEM with a chip maker selected by Microsoft, according to unnamed WSJ sources familiar with the matter. → Read More
Another day, another slate aimed at the education market. The Brainchild Kineo is an education-only device aimed at grade-school kids. It runs Android, sure, but the whole thing is locked down like Gitmo and the teacher has full control over the lessons displayed on the screen. → Read More
Today at the Reuters Global Technology Summit, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang threw out a prediction for the future of the tablet market that isn’t too far removed from that of the smartphone market over the past few years. Huang said that Android will surpass Apple’s iOS-powered iPad in market share over the next 2 1/2 years. → Read More
The more CEOs try to defend their products in the public arena, the sadder they sound. For example, Stephen Elop’s discussion of an upcoming (as in not ever shipping) Nokia tablet smacks of careful CEO talk and whiff of BS. When describing Nokia’s future plans for the device, he hedges his bets, saying that they may go Microsoft or they may go somewhere else (Ubuntu?) and that they don’t want to be another me-to tablet and instead they want to create something amazing and special. The last time Nokia created something amazing and special was probably 1999 when Neo talked to Morpheus on a modified Nokia 8110. → Read More
After ousting previous tablet lead Gianfranco Lanci, Acer has named Jim Wong as head of their Touch Business Group (Touch BG) and PC Global Operations (PCGO). After a series of wildly unsuccessful tablet launches, including the inscrutable Iconia, Lanci resigned. Wong, who led Acer’s IT initiatives, has been with the company for a little over a decade. → Read More
