Innovate? Innovate how, exactly?
Apple came out with the iPad1 last year which was there one defining innovation. But the iPad2 is a softball upgrade at best.
After one year, the competition cannot even copy Apple's innovation correctly and you feel Apple missed the boat on the iPad 2 upgrade? I've owned both and its amazing what double the CPU power and 9 times the graphics and double the RAM will do for an already incredible device.
Besides being slightly thinner, a tad lighter and a bit faster where's the innovation? Certainly not in the crappy cameras which were outdated before ever being placed inside the device.
A
bit faster? Okay, let's ignore how wrong that is and move on to your camera comment -- which may be a valid attack. Personally, I wasn't looking to snap photos with my iPad -- never missed the cameras not being there in iPad 1, likely will rarely use them in iPad 2. If you really want a 10-inch camera, then certainly the iPad 2 is not the device for you.
iOS still lacks a file system and true side-by-side app multitasking. Instead we sit here lusting after the mythical iOS5 (with its hoped for "improved notification app") and iPad3 (which may or may not arrive in time for Christmas with a decent camera).
I really love it though when people say "lack of filesystem" is a drawback. Nothing gets more cluttered on the computer than the filesystem. Nothing causes more problems with network shared files and applications still using files or locking them than the filesystem. Hiding this from the user was one of the best moves they could have made to make the device easy to use. Dropbox serves me very well for these needs.
iOS has a design theme that sorta prohibits side-by-side multitasking and it seems to stem from a desire to sustain battery life (which I appreciate). For iOS the device becomes the app, for Android they seem to want to keep you on a desktop metaphor (hence the battery-chewing live wallpapers and widgets). Personally, I am glad I don't have to do a little dance with my iPhone whenever I put it in my pocket by shutting off this that or the other just to make sure I will have battery life in a few hours. I'm glad the iPad keeps with that design. I'm all for multi-tasking, but I'm not looking for a portable PC in a tablet -- if I wanted that, I would just purchase a macbook air which gives me all the complexity and power that comes with a PC.
Meanwhile Samsung at least debuted a smaller, more pocketable 7" size last Fall and is preparing to launch a range of sizes this summer.
That was not a tablet. It was an oversized smartphone without the phone -- akin to Samsung's version of a large iPod touch (which Apple invented in 2007). I heard sales were very "smooth" or "small" or something -- very non-definitive. But I heard there were always plenty on hand at Best Buy.
Motorola came out with a dual core faster processor and way better camera before iPad2 was even announced. Then there's the in-built future hardware upgrades of expandable memory port and LTE/4g access.
Have you used it? I have. Its the very first Android device to have a responsive touch UI (I think they finally got around to using the GPU for rendering the UI). It's got some cool things on there like the new 3D Maps view which is a nice gimmick that I would show off to all my friends but rarely if ever actually use. The flip-through widgets for music and books look interesting too, but not the way I want to browse my books -- yet they do look cool and would do well to things you want to process in a queue.
What Xoom also has is a bunch of apps that don't look right on a tablet. It took me a while to find what I was looking for on it (apps), but once I found them I saw that the basics were there. Sure its got some specs that are slightly better than the iPad 2 (comparable CPU, superior camera, inferior GPU). If all you want to do is surf the Web, check email, take pictures and listen to your music, then this device might be for you. While Honeycomb shows promise it is still for early adopters.
I think it is funny that the major selling points for Xoom were Flash and 4G, yet "Beta" Flash is now available for it and it still runs like crap over a year after Steve Jobs' scathing remarks on Adobe and 3 years after Adobe said they would have a version for the iPhone. I also think that the 4G upgrade plan while interesting will be moot for anybody with a 4G phone that will do personal WiFi hotspot. Not that the Xoom has 4G yet or anything or that anybody has tested the battery life with 4G or even tested the device to see if it works with 4G. But still there is the promise that if you want 4G you can send your Xoom to Motorola, wait six days, and then get it back with 4G capability -- sounds great if it works and you didn't just want the WiFi version anyway.
If you want to argue that Motorola was the innovator here by rushing an incomplete device to market before it was ready thus making them the first to release with dual core processor, then yeah I guess they paved the way and nobody would have thought of putting a dual-core processor in a tablet before Motorola did. I'm sure Apple and everybody rushed back to the drawing board to try to figure out how they might accomplish that.
Wait.... I think RIM announced a dual core tablet months earlier -- does that mean Motorola copied them?
As a rule of thumb, just look at who is copying whom to figure out who the innovator is.
Don't get me wrong. I enjoyed the kool aid enough I've invested in 2 iPads and an iPod Touch, but I can definitely see the end of the line for my Apple fascination. See as much as I get use out my iPad as a content consumption device it just never fit the niche of content producer. I really need that intuitive file system and desktop-like OS. I want to leave my netbook behind on trips but Apple doesn't let me do that. Honeycomb looks far more capable. Only issue for me has been deciding which of the Honeycomb tabs made the best investment.
I've never had the Kool-Aid -- I've used tons of different computer technologies over the years and still do (including Solaris, AIX, IRIX, Linux, Windows, Mac, Palm, Apple II). However, I can recognize when a company gets something right, and iOS and especially the iPad are something that Apple has gotten right for many many people and I can see where Apple is going with it and they are taking the device where I want it to be. Judging by what you say, it certainly seems that iOS is not for you -- I'm not even sure Honeycomb is going where you want it to be. I'm guessing you will need your netbook on trip for years to come even with a Honeycomb tablet.
I use the iPad all the time for content production. I prepare entire lessons on it. I take notes on it. I've done some writing on it too. It's also great for balancing our budget and tracking our transactions. Sure I still use my desktop computer more effectively on some things (like large spreadsheets) or anything that requires a large screen where I can look at lots of things at a time (like doing our taxes -- too painful on a small screen -- even a laptop). But iPad lets me escape my desktop computer to do many of things the desktop is overkill for. And the greatest thing is how easy it is to use the iPad when delivering a lesson or speaking to a group. It is far less awkward than a laptop.
Regarding which Honeycomb tablet to go for? If I were you I would wait. I am betting Motorola will show the most promise here, but if you buy now you will just be disappointed.
I respect the iOS ecosystem for Apps and content acquisition (though I'm ethically opposed to DRM video), but anyone who thinks that domination will not be surpassed within a year by the likes of Google and Amazon is mistaken.
Certainly the one thing you can't do on an Android device easily is load up a bunch of movies for an airplane ride. Not sure if Amazon is going to fix that or not since they only support streaming right now -- but I am sure they are going to try -- and I am sure they will use DRM (because the movie production companies will require it). So if you have a bunch of illegally copied movies or a bunch of DVD's you have ripped, you may be able to encode those and store them on your Android device, but that's not a process most folks want to go through. It might work great for you due to your ethically opposing DRM though. Most people favor ease-of-use over ethical opposition to copy protection and want to click a "buy/rent" button on the screen, download the movie, and watch it.
Regarding your last sentence, I will mark your words on that and we can check back in a year. Amazon has yet to surpass Apple on music downloads. And unless you are taking about the amateur or pirated stuff on YouTube, I don't think Google and Amazon are going to provide top-rated movies without DRM to anybody anytime soon.
