Tag Archives | Tablets

“Why Should Anyone Buy the HP TouchPad Instead of the iPad?”

Posted by Harry McCracken on June 29, 2011 at 11:05 pm

My review of HP’s TouchPad is up over at TIME.com. My take is pretty much the same one as the consensus of the crowd that’s published reviews tonight: very nice interface, aging hardware (even though it’s a brand new device), too many bugs, and too few apps. And definitely not as good as the iPad 2.

Last week, I blogged that for the time being, every new tablet introduction is about one fundamental question: “Why should somebody buy this instead of the iPad.” If the TouchPad doesn’t take off–at least without significant software updates–it’ll be because it failed to provide a coherent answer. And that raises a whole bunch of other questions.

Continue Reading →

38 comments

For Wi-Fi, PCs and Macs are Now a Minority

Posted by Harry McCracken on June 23, 2011 at 12:16 pm

It’s a big week for interesting stats relating to Internet usage breakdowns by device. Comscore has released numbers that say that the iPad accounts for 97 percent of tablet usage on the Web–no shocker there. And cloud networking company Meraki has published some data based on device usage numbers from its customers networks:

Whenever I look at numbers like these, I try to remind myself that we don’t know how precisely they map to the world at large. But they’re still fun to ponder.

Continue Reading →

7 comments

Pogoplug Goes Software Only (and 200 Technologizer Readers Get the Premium Version for Free)

Posted by Harry McCracken on June 22, 2011 at 11:08 am

Pogoplug is a clever $99 gizmo that lets you plug USB hard drives into your home network, so you can access their contents–photos, music, movies, and more–across the Internet. As anyone who’s used it knows, much of the cleverness lies in the nicely-done Web-based interface (and mobile apps) you use to connect to the drives and get at the stuff on them. And today, Pogoplug is releasing a software-only version for Windows and Macs that lets you experience that cleverness without investing in the gizmo.

Pogoplug’s software-based version works just like the hardware device, except the drive it’s putting on the Web is the one inside the Windows PC or Mac the software is running on. Once you installed the application on a computer and let it index your files, they’re available to you from any Web browser and from PogoPlug’s iPhone/iPad and Android apps.

Continue Reading →

7 comments

“Why Should Somebody Buy This Instead of an iPad?”

Posted by Harry McCracken on June 20, 2011 at 1:20 pm

It’s been fifteen months since the first iPad shipped. Nearly every sizable company that makes anything that looks even sort of like a computer or a phone has rushed into the market that Apple created. Many of these companies haven’t yet shipped the tablets they’ve announced. Still, a critical mass of major iPad alternatives are now here–tablets such as Motorola’s Xoom, RIM’s PlayBook, and Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1.

And yet no Apple competitor has started selling anything that clearly answers a fundamental question: “Why should somebody buy this instead of an iPad?” Sure, it’s easy to point at specific things that other devices do better (or at least differently) than the iPad, and some of the people reading this article can explain why they chose another tablet and don’t regret the move. (If you’re one of them, please do!) Still, sales figures for tablets show that when consumers compare the iPad to other choices, an overwhelming percentage conclude that the iPad is the best option.

As a reviewer of gizmos, I think that the iPad 2 is easily the best tablet on the market–and that most of the competition so far is too half-baked to be credible. As a lover of competition, though, I’m itching to see other tablets arrive that deserve to do well, too. So that question–“Why would somebody buy this instead of an iPad?”–is stuck in my head. I’ve been trying to figure out how an Apple rival can come up with a tablet that pretty much answers that question for itself. And I’ve come up with thirteen ways it could happen.

Continue Reading →

404 comments

In Case It Wasn’t Clear Already, Apple Likes to Build Software for Apple Devices

Posted by Harry McCracken on June 13, 2011 at 1:37 pm

Over at This is My Next, Joshua Topolsky has a thought-provoking piece that says that Apple is going to discontinue its only major browser-based Web apps–the ones that are part of MobileMe–next year after iCloud is fully up and running. There’s a lively debate going on via Twitter between Topolsky and some folks who say that he has it all wrong: the MobileMe Web apps will survive the iCloud transition.

Even if the MobileMe Web apps don’t get the ax, the gist of Topolsky’s piece remains relevant. Apple filled last week’s WWDC keynote to the gills with news, but it was all about operating systems, apps, and an ambitious piece of Internet plumbing called iCloud. No surprise there: there’s never been much evidence that Apple is terribly interested in creating Web apps. But it loves to create traditional software that runs on hardware devices it builds.

Continue Reading →

8 comments

Disaster Averted: Apple Revises App Store Content Rules

Posted by Harry McCracken on June 9, 2011 at 10:18 am

Whew! Every time I’ve bought a Kindle book over the past few months, I’ve worried about the new iOS App Store guidelines Apple announced earlier this year, which said that app developers could only give iOS users access to content purchased outside of the App Store if the same content was available inside the App Store at the same price.

Apple takes a 30 percent cut of the money publishers make inside the App Store. So the new rule seemed to force some companies into an impossible situation–such as Amazon, which was already handing 70 percent of Kindle book prices over to publishers. Apple apparently wanted all of the remaining 30 percent for itself, destroying Amazon’s business model.

But as MacRumors’ Jordan Golson is reporting, Apple has quietly blinked. Now the rules don’t say that app developers need to match content offers made outside of the App Store inside the App Store. Companies don’t need to use In App Purchases at all. They just can’t provide a “Buy” button inside an app that makes it easy for a user to go to the Web and buy new content.

Continue Reading →

3 comments

Toshiba’s Android Tablet: Officially Official, a Little Ahead of Schedule

Posted by Harry McCracken on June 2, 2011 at 7:12 pm

Toshiba wasn’t quite ready to share the full skinny on its Android Honeycomb tablet, which it first demoed back at CES in January. But Engadget managed to get its hands on the details, and rather than ignoring or denying the leak, Toshiba is fessing up earlier than it had planned.

The tablet will be known as the Thrive, and it’ll start at $429 for an 8GB, Wi-Fi-only version. As a child of the pre-iPad 2 era, it weighs in at a somewhat heavy 1.6 pounds and is on the thick side. But it uses its edge to good effect, with two full-size USB ports, HDMI, and an SD slot, making it feel a bit like a PC. (Makes sense for a tablet from Toshiba, no?)

The Thrive has a 10.1″ screen, the expected cameras front and back, and an Nvidia Tegra 2 processor, and runs Android Honeycomb 3.1. It’ll hit Best Buy, Staples, OfficeMax, Office Depot, RadioShack, and Amazon.com in mid-July.

 

 

2 comments

Coming on Monday: WWDC 2011 Live Blog Coverage

Posted by Harry McCracken on June 2, 2011 at 6:29 pm

On Monday June 6th at 10am PT, I’ll be at San Francisco’s Moscone West for Steve Jobs’ WWDC keynote. It sounds packed, packed, packed–we’ll get our last big look at OS X 10.7 Lion before it ships, and our first big looks at the next version of iOS, and the long-rumored service now known as iCloud. And rumor has it that there are occasionally surprise announcements at these events. (I’m told Jobs likes to keep them until the end.)

I’ll blog the keynote news as it happens, with color commentary from special guest Doug Aamoth of Techland. Tens of thousands of folks attended our last Apple live coverage (the iPad 2 announcement), but we’ll save room for you. Join us at technologizer.com/wwdc11–and go there now to sign up for an e-mail reminder if you like.

No comments

What We Need from Tablets: Fewer of Them!

Posted by Ed Oswald on June 1, 2011 at 5:13 pm

God knows hardware makers have been falling over each other lately in an effort to get their own tablets in front of us. The iPad showed that there was a market for these things. By some counts, over 100 different tablets showed up at CES, and this week at least 50 models were on display at Computex in Taipei. That adds up to a whole lotta tablets!

The market may turn out to be big, but it won’t be big enough for all these copycats to be successful. JP Morgan research analyst Mark Moskowitz is now saying that these folks are finally getting a clue. He claims that “build plans” — in plain English, companies’ planned manufacturing schedules — have shown a decrease in output of 10 percent.

Continue Reading →

4 comments