You said "I'm not sure how long Android has had to develop a tablet OS". They've had just as much time as anybody else. This nets an eyeroll? To say 'Android's tablet OS is impressive given they haven't had has long as Apple to do this' doesn't make any sense. Nobody prevented them from doing whatever they wanted.
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Anyone else impressed with Honeycomb?
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You said "I'm not sure how long Android has had to develop a tablet OS". They've had just as much time as anybody else. This nets an eyeroll? To say 'Android's tablet OS is impressive given they haven't had has long as Apple to do this' doesn't make any sense. Nobody prevented them from doing whatever they wanted.
Huh? If you read my post I make that quite clear. Not sure why you are talking about the memo app. My point is that iOS could do with a communal pot, that apps could use, such as a documents, pictures, etc, folder. There is no particular need for iOS however, to give you access to other parts of the file system. It's not needed, or required for anything. The only real reason you need to access anything in the pot is to either download to a certain place, or upload, from that place. That's it.
Honeycomb is indeed very impressive, and as an OS is superior to iOS 4.x. There, I said it.
Multitaslking, widgets, live wallpapers, access to the file system, and Google apps (Earth, Maps) make it better. And as a Xoom user since launch day I can say all this talk about buggy software is crap. Yes, it has bugs, and maybe more than iOS, but some iPad apps simply quit once in a while too.
Now, if you want to compare app stores, iOS kicks Android's behind all around the block...
I fully agree.
The biggest problem with Android, as a tablet operating system, is that its fundamental business model is fatally flawed. It is set up in such a way as to make it virtually inevitable that Android users, manufacturers, developers, and content providers will suffer as a result.
The most important thing to remember is that Google isn't a "vendor" in the traditional sense of the word when it comes to Honeycomb. It doesn't sign sales agreements, or accept license fees. It simply posts the source code on an FTP server.
Now, this suits Google just fine, because it gets them off the hook for things like patent infringment or DRM violations. But it, rightly, makes content providers wary about providing content. Which is why there has been such a delay getting a Netflix App. And why Amazon downloads will play on your TV or your computer - but not your Android tablet.
The second part of the problem is that Android's "openess" really means there is no effective marketplace for software. You can put out a free, ad-supported App, and hope that you get enough eyeballs to pay the bills. But an App that costs $5 - $20? That side-loading capability means its all but a cinch for people to avoid paying for it. So many developers simply don't bother.
Manufacturers lose from the Google business model too. Sure - it might seem like a "good deal" not having to pay a $10 or $20 licensing fee to use Honeycomb. But the lack of uniformity, the dreaded "fragmentation", the uneven update schedule - all create uncertainty in the minds of consumers. And manufacturers seem unable to help themselves from trying to get an edge on their competitors by putting a custom "skin" on the Androdi OS. Do you think Microsoft would have built its thirty year Windows monopoly if it had allowed Dell or Gateway or HP to all put their own front end on top of the windows desktop?
Lastly, I question Honeycomb's value to Google itself. Last week the Asymco blog had an article which calculated that each iOS user was worth about $150 per year to Apple.
How much do you think each Honeycomb tablet user is worth to Google? Because if you think the couple of ad-clicks you do each week add up to much more than a handful of dollars per year, then you are kidding yourself.
If Apple maintains a ~ 70% marketshare, in a global tablet market of 50 million units - that would suggest iOS becoming a sustainable multi-billion a year business. But if Google gets 20% of that same market, but only makes $10 a year off each Honeycomb user - its barely breaking even on its bandwidth costs.
Long term, I find it hard to believe that Google will be able to match Apple's development investment in the tablet marketplace.
The most important thing to remember is that Google isn't a "vendor" in the traditional sense of the word when it comes to Honeycomb. It doesn't sign sales agreements, or accept license fees. It simply posts the source code on an FTP server.
Now, this suits Google just fine, because it gets them off the hook for things like patent infringment or DRM violations. But it, rightly, makes content providers wary about providing content. Which is why there has been such a delay getting a Netflix App. And why Amazon downloads will play on your TV or your computer - but not your Android tablet.
The second part of the problem is that Android's "openess" really means there is no effective marketplace for software. You can put out a free, ad-supported App, and hope that you get enough eyeballs to pay the bills. But an App that costs $5 - $20? That side-loading capability means its all but a cinch for people to avoid paying for it. So many developers simply don't bother.
Manufacturers lose from the Google business model too. Sure - it might seem like a "good deal" not having to pay a $10 or $20 licensing fee to use Honeycomb. But the lack of uniformity, the dreaded "fragmentation", the uneven update schedule - all create uncertainty in the minds of consumers. And manufacturers seem unable to help themselves from trying to get an edge on their competitors by putting a custom "skin" on the Androdi OS. Do you think Microsoft would have built its thirty year Windows monopoly if it had allowed Dell or Gateway or HP to all put their own front end on top of the windows desktop?
Lastly, I question Honeycomb's value to Google itself. Last week the Asymco blog had an article which calculated that each iOS user was worth about $150 per year to Apple.
How much do you think each Honeycomb tablet user is worth to Google? Because if you think the couple of ad-clicks you do each week add up to much more than a handful of dollars per year, then you are kidding yourself.
If Apple maintains a ~ 70% marketshare, in a global tablet market of 50 million units - that would suggest iOS becoming a sustainable multi-billion a year business. But if Google gets 20% of that same market, but only makes $10 a year off each Honeycomb user - its barely breaking even on its bandwidth costs.
Long term, I find it hard to believe that Google will be able to match Apple's development investment in the tablet marketplace.
Honeycomb is indeed very impressive, and as an OS is superior to iOS 4.x. There, I said it.
Multitaslking, widgets, live wallpapers, access to the file system, and Google apps (Earth, Maps) make it better. And as a Xoom user since launch day I can say all this talk about buggy software is crap. Yes, it has bugs, and maybe more than iOS, but some iPad apps simply quit once in a while too.
Now, if you want to compare app stores, iOS kicks Android's behind all around the block...
Sorry, but you bought a Xoom. Your opinion on technology is rendered irrelevant forever. The Xoom is, quite possibly, the crappiest thing on earth.
Thanks for the response and the advice. This will likely end up long as well. Bear with me. Or, skip to the last paragraph
The first part of my answer is somewhat specific to my case, and I include it here to answer the issues you raised. I suspect there are doctors, engineers, nurses, and other professions that face similar problems with organizing articles, reference materials, and materials produced within their institutions (guidelines for specific projects, etc.) for use across multiple platforms.
The PDF files I have amassed include books and articles by scholars. Many of these I have not read, and I don't plan to read, but they often contain bits of information in the text, footnotes, and bibliographies that searches are able to deftly dig out for me.*
Many more of the files are historical materials from Asia and Europe that have somehow reached printed form in massive collections that would fill several book cases or papers printed by local historical societies. Again, I do not need to read each and every word, but these contain in some cases nearly everything that was known to have survived from a particular century or region. Search programs enable me to find materials I could have never uncovered through traditional means. Alas, many of these sources or editions are not catalogued or are catalogued incorrectly in library systems. Worldcat and individual library databases contain a large number of errors. These are especially egregious for Asian materials.
Finally, there are many thousands of original manuscripts that I have collected by photographing the documents in archives and putting them into PDF form for portability. These cannot be searched, of course, but i spend a lot of time trying to decipher them. They are hundreds of years old, have often only been seen by a few people, and I will be cataloguing them for the first time. Determing the bibliographic information that best describes them (how do you record information for documents that have been mounted on a scroll?).
as I said in an earlier post, I long ago outgrew my hd. I have many external drives. In fact, to be safe, I have them in three locations on two continents. Some of these materials no longer exist anywhere but on my drives.
We are in close consultation on a weekly basis. Few libraries in the world hold the sources, and as rare items it is somewhat difficult to locate and access them. I am being paid a stipend for the express purpose of collecting research materials, and I can assure you after talking to my colleagues at other universities that aim actually gathering far less than they are. See my earlier note about our exchange of data at conferences.*
I use bookends. I will see what zotero can do. As I said above, though, putting all of these into one folder seems unwieldy to me, especially when I can only transfer parts of the entire collection to my computer's hard drive. And, if I have to enter bibliographic information for each by hand, I cannot keep up. I try to limit myself to data entry for the stuff I know I will use in projects. There is, for example, a huge mass of sources in Chinese that are useful in searches to help me decipher materials, but only indirectly.
I'll look into this, but I am not sure how it will work with the variety of sources I have, particularly the manuscripts. Obviously, my case has unique aspects, but more generally speaking, institutions (business or academic) produce a huge quantity of uncatalogued papers that people would have stored in countless binders, bookshelves, and records rooms in the past, but now it can all be held in a large database somewhere to be transferred to the iPad as needed. I doubt bibliographic software is designed to handle this (not as far as I have found). Fortunately, I have had no problems with searches (I usually use houdah). The file system is there to keep me sane and only becomes a bottleneck when I want to move stuff to the iPad, because I lose the file structure in the process and have to stick them all back in.
Thanks. I have an mbp 13". it is quite powerful and I am loving it. It is just a computer, though, like any other. The real life changer has been the iPad. It beautifully displays manuscripts and other sources while making everything portable and immediately accessible during travel, in lectures, and in libraries. Just the other day I was comparing the manuscript I had copied in one location to my notes (also in PDF form on the ipad) and a manuscript in the archive. I was able to find discrepancies in the texts that generations of scholars had overlooked. It was easy, because it was all in the iPad at my side. In the time it took to do that, I would have still been looking for a place to set up the computer.
Anyhow, I am not sure i explained myself clearly in the earlier post. I do not expect the ipad to do much more than display documents (for this task). What frustrates me is the fact that i cannot directly place the items into an app like goodreader. I have to go through itunes. This is not an os, tablet, or desktop issue. It is a technical requirement absent from honeycomb. It is a policy that apple has stuck to, and the result is that people who want to move large quantities of data around on a regular basis encounter great difficulty.*
Bwahahaha. Funny.
I do have to say the Galaxy Tab 10.1 is sweeter. Were it not for the promise of 4G and built in hotpot functionality I would have dumped it. Heck, I still may!
Oh my god, you are sure proud of your PDFs. I almost died of boredom reading your post. Get a PDF reader that is compatible with DropBox. Problem solved.
Honeycomb is indeed very impressive, and as an OS is superior to iOS 4.x. There, I said it.
Multitaslking, widgets, live wallpapers, access to the file system, and Google apps (Earth, Maps) make it better. And as a Xoom user since launch day I can say all this talk about buggy software is crap. Yes, it has bugs, and maybe more than iOS, but some iPad apps simply quit once in a while too.
I'm sorry this is 100% BS. I have a Xoom on my desk for development and it is extremely buggy. Seriously you cannot say its not and be taken seriously. Its very flawed. If it was so much better than the iPad to most consumers it would be flying off the shelf instead, but its not.
Not proud of the PDFs. Merely explaining one of the reasons I think apple's policies have made os function inferior to honeycomb in this respect. It is a discussion board, and some of us like to discuss things, especially when people kindly take the time to offer me advice.
You obviously didn't read what I wrote or have a wildly different understanding of dropbox's features. Thanks for the suggestion, but besides having a tiny limit of free usage available, I think uploading files to dropbox and then transferring each file to good reader seems like more work to me and does not solve the folder problem.
As I said, I think there are probably other people out there who regularly transfer large amounts of data and find the inability to directly move files and folders without going throughh iTunes quite laborious.
Frankly a raw file system seems to be about the worst way to work with your PDF's. The iPad can clearly perform the tasks you require, you just need to find the right app. I'd recommend a document management app that supports bookmarks tagging and annotations. ReaddleDocs may be a good fit for your workflow (since it had good folder uploading support). You may want to start a new thread specifically geared towards your document management needs.
Well, I can't speak to it as a development platform, but as a end user I use it all day long and I don't see the "extremely buggy" you refer to. I have to say some of the widgets and live wallpapers do cause a bit of lag, but the device is functional. I am not saying it's perfect, but the hyperbole regarding Honeycomb bugs is just plain wrong.
The reason it's not flying off the shelves is more related to apps than it is to the OS. But, whatever.
Well, I can't speak to it as a development platform, but as a end user I use it all day long and I don't see the "extremely buggy" you refer to. I have to say some of the widgets and live wallpapers do cause a bit of lag, but the device is functional. I am not saying it's perfect, but the hyperbole regarding Honeycomb bugs is just plain wrong.
The reason it's not flying off the shelves is more related to apps than it is to the OS. But, whatever.
Wrong. The reason it doesn't "fly off the shelves" is because it's a limited piece of crap. No one wants it. It's garbage. It's laughable to watch anybody defend it.
Honeycomb is indeed very impressive, and as an OS is superior to iOS 4.x. There, I said it.
Multitaslking, widgets, live wallpapers, access to the file system, and Google apps (Earth, Maps) make it better. And as a Xoom user since launch day I can say all this talk about buggy software is crap. Yes, it has bugs, and maybe more than iOS, but some iPad apps simply quit once in a while too.
Now, if you want to compare app stores, iOS kicks Android's behind all around the block...
when multitasking, can you have two apps side by side? if not, i don't see what the big deal is
i understand how some want widgets and live wallpapers but i don't. they seem a bit tacky and it's not like it takes me more than 3 seconds to open my weather app or whatever
i have google earth on my ipad
Jesus dude, I almost want to deem you Apple Fanboy #1 for all these posts I see from you. You just bash and tear up anything that comes your way if it isn't made by Apple, talk about closed minded. Enjoy your little world there, because it isn't going to get you very far when technology advances. When someone makes a device that exceeds that of anything Apple has made, I would love to see your reaction to such a thing. In fact, the Galaxy Tab 10.1 is on par with the iPad 2. Do some research please, and stop with the harassment and condescending tone. You won't make any friends here that way and will only get reported. Which I'm sure has already been done.
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Honeycomb is indeed very impressive, and as an OS is superior to iOS 4.x. There, I said it.
Multitaslking, widgets, live wallpapers, access to the file system, and Google apps (Earth, Maps) make it better. And as a Xoom user since launch day I can say all this talk about buggy software is crap. Yes, it has bugs, and maybe more than iOS, but some iPad apps simply quit once in a while too.
Now, if you want to compare app stores, iOS kicks Android's behind all around the block...
Sorry, but these kinds of things are meant to entertain children. No mature adult needs a widget or a live wallpaper. Who on earth sits there and looks at their tablet's wallpaper or "desktop"? When I pickup my iPad, I have something in mind that I need to accomplish. I swiftly find the app I need and load it. I don't sit there and look at the wallpaper waiting for it to animate. I don't look at the wallpaper of my tablet and wait for something to happen like a zombie.
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I'm very impressed. I love android but not a fan of any android tablets unfortunately. Love my ipad 2 more than anything
In my opinion judging Honeycomb or in general an Android Tablet, based on one's experience with XOOM on the day of launch, is unreasonable. Just about everyone knows that Moto rushed it to the market too quickly and launched an unfinished product.
A much better comparison would be the Samsung Tablets or better yet the Toshiba Thrive.
Having said that, I love my iPad2 as well as my Motorola Atrix.
I used a few HoneyComb tablets at BestBuy yesterday and was anything but impressed. The interface isn't intuitive and it looked pretty bad. I much preferred the TouchPad.
Tried those too. I've also owned 3 Android phones. I'm not trolling here, I'm just judging an operating system (and the products it comes on) the way they are. Honeycomb was a mess, and it is still a mess. I wish it wasn't but it is.