LG touts 'surprisingly productive' iPad killer LG says that its upcoming tablet, set for worldwide release before the end of this year, will compete against Apple's iPad by being, well, useful. "It's going to be surprisingly productive," LG VP for mobile-device marketing Chang Ma told the Wall Street Journal. "Our tablet will be better than the iPad." Ma told the WSJ that …
you can bring a tablet with pico-projection, 1TB of storage, 64GB of RAM, 6 cameras, GPS, 3G, satellite TV, full-blown Windows 7, a 12-core 6GHz processor and a flashlight to the party, but if you don't have the apps to run on it, you're going to be sitting on the couch all night failing to get any action, and that's where the iPad is well ahead of the game: Apple's leveraging an ecosystem that they've brought to maturity and has, at the moment, no real competition.
If it's running win7, then it already has an app eco-system that tears the ipad a new one - that being every application ever written for the windows OS.
I'm guessing you meant "Apple has the advantage of an application market that is designed around the interface [that being touch] of the device", which is surely the major factor here, not the volume of available apps - of which, as an iphone owner of 2 years I can say has resolutely failed to inspire me. Prolly the most useful I've encountered has been the free tube map app which has gained plenty of use in my summer of living in London and what used to be known as echofon.
Yes, I'm a dirty twitter user ;P
The windows foray into touch interfaces has been piss poor to put it politely. Surface looked amazing, but they decided it'd be best to limit it to $10k a unit and only to corporate/rich markets.
Such a shame, MS have come up with some really interesting devices (the aforementioned Surface and the late Courier being the most eye grabbing) but have sucked at bringing them out of vaoporware/rich-playground-ware and into the market.
If they don't sort their shit out, MS are in for a slow dwindling death in the consumer space.
The Android marketplace might not be as large as Apples but its still very large and growing. Any tablet which implements android and bothers to pass platform compatibility tests will be allowed to ship with the marketplace app. Then it doesn't matter much what you get out of the box since you can download more.
It may well be that LG's tablet or Asus's tablet or Lenovo's tablet etc. doesn't exceed iPad sales but the Android ecosystem as a whole is very likely to and faster than it took for phones.
A look at the top-grossing iPad apps in my country sees the top ten dominated by productivity apps. Apple's iWork offerings, OmniFocus, Documents To Go, and Quickoffice. It's a stark contrast to the iPhone App Store where the top ten grossing list is mostly games.
Seems ironic that the device that's generally considered pretty useful sells mostly games while the 'useless' tablet sells mostly productivity apps.
One would think that the best way to differentiate yourself from Apple would be for your product to be exactly like one of Apple's in nearly every way but far cheaper. It would have a slick design, intuitive interface, useful applications, would "just work", "won't" crash, wouldn't be locked down and would, conceivably, be half the price or less. Again, everything an Apple product is but better and cheaper. Not sure why this is so damned hard these days, but it apparently is. Even Microsoft, who made their fortune by ripping off Apple software and letting people put it onto cheaper machines (yes yes, I know it's far more than just that, but it's also not wrong), can't seem to do it anymore.
To use the mp3 player example, the Zune was a spectacular failure because it couldn't do anything it set out to do well. Sure, the lack of iTunes sync sucked, but the god-awful software, small storage sizes and the fact that the interface made doing just about anything on it only slightly less difficult than using a punchcard machine are what killed it.
I hope LG manage to pull this off and at a decent price, too. You sell a (fairly precise) multitouch tablet for ~$400-500 that can either interface with DAW software (and act as a "mixer" frontend) or is useful as a DAW in its own right and you'd sell them like hotcakes. It's what Wacom is trying to do, but they forgot the whole "being cheaper than their competitors" part.
The reports I saw including from commentators who brought one was that the Zune software was superb and "made" the device. As did syncing over wifi and the gorgeous UI (Metro - e.g. Windows Phone 7 and Windows Media Centre)
Have you actually seen one?
The Zune didn't break into the MP3 player in a big way (55.5+ million units according to Wikipedia) was down to poor marketing and not launching internationally.
Less restrictions than an iPod Touch, cheaper, better interface and wifi sync I'd look at getting one.
A plug-in DAW would be my ideal for fhe next gen music machines. It doesn't have to be cheap for musicians, since it would replace much of the interface. Current keyboard screens are tablet format. Also, it probably needs built-in DSP. In fact, couldn't we get the whole works into the tablet, and add a keyboard docking station?.
Music consumers would baulk at paying for so much, though.
I really doubt that a pad without a proper keyboard can ever be something people want to do serious work on.
The iPad was a SOMEWHAT logical move, after Apple noticed the way many people were using iPod Touches to surf the web or play games. Making it larger does make it better to surf, play, or watch videos.
But claims of a productive pad runs directly against all the comments found on this very web site: a laptop or a notebook is way more useful.
Locked down data. How do you...
Use one file between two aps on the ipad? Print (there are lots of wifi printers available)? Open an email attachment, edit it, email it back? You can use the camera kit to read some file types from an SD card (photo or video, but not MP3s for example), but you can't write to it.
All this makes it as useful as write only memory for most productivity uses.
I'll concede the camera kit issue, for the time being, but your wrong on all the other accounts
Someone can email me a word document, I tap it to view the contents, I then choose the View In... Option to transfer it to Pages, edit it, email it back to the original author, and can also export it to the File Share area for other apps to open. Printing direct to wifi printer (no need for desktop pc) is just as easy as it was to pass the doc from email to Pages, using the Print Bureau app
So what other excuses do you have for not being productive ??
So when you mail back that edited word doc it's not going to have all it's formatting in tact right? Even if a Mac user sent you a Pages doc the light version on the iPad will strip stuff it doesn't support, it's not "round trip". Oh you can export to a file share? What a kluge!
Since there is no printer support in the iPad OS, you have to pay for an app just to print something. You can only print documents from apps that are supported by the print app. Yes you can print but it's another kluge to get around Apples idea that no one is going to want to print from their iThing.
I do have an iPod touch (jail broken - bite me apple), and might buy mini iPad if one is produced as rumoured to replace it, but I have no expectations of being able to do any real work on it.
I looked at the iPad but bought a netbook.
The 'Tablet' is now a personal device. If y'all want productivity then Fujitsu been doing slatey tablety things for years for productivity. MSFT failed with theirs, it didn't rock as a productivity enhancer.
The magical & revolutionary thing is not about user/personal productivity, it's primarily about Apple's. Sure, it gets the punters all productively consuming the Chunes, the Yapps, the Buykes, the Moovies. There's more volume in serving up Chunes, Yapps, Bukes and Moovies than there is enabling the commutering masses to get the latest polished widget report done before CoP.
nice note how nobody has touched iPod. Will be interesting to see if they do the same with Pads/Slates/Tablets/etc. But sure seems they are well on their way to doing so. Going to be hard for anyone, even MS, to beat the App distribution. Vista, Utlimate Extras, lol. MS had so much behind it and now I look at people with their iPhones and think it might very well be over. Apps, Apple really seems to have it down.
Who knows for 100% sure, but I think everyone might be late to the dinner table, except Apple, and I always thought those were for lunch. S#!t I guess it is a new world!
Despite my loathing Apple, and believing itunes to be the amongst the worst, if not the very worst, pieces of software I'be ever had the mis-fortune to use, I own an iPod (a classic) for one very simple reason.
It is the only MP3 player available which has a decent sized hdd. This means I can carry nearly my complete audio collection (audio books) in one easily transportable device. The nearest rival to iPod I ever found was iRiver - but they seem to have given up on the hdd MP3 market. The Zune might have been a good device, but it was let down by poor (very) marketing,
In my limited experience Apple produce lovely hardware, but then nearly cripple it buy making you use some seriously shite software.
"It is the only MP3 player available which has a decent sized hdd."
Well, the Creative Zen series has a few: 20, 30 and even 60G. I'm sure there are others.
Anyway, given the way it'll be used I'd rather have a smaller flash-based unit than a 40G rotating disk. And now with 32G (and even 64G) solid state media players there's no reason at all, other than aesthetics/UI, in going for an iPod, especially since most of the others appear as a mass storage device to their host, and can be easily filled without some bloaty proprietary tool. I didn't look too closely into it, but I suppose there are also players that have an SD slot. With such a player and carrying a few of those cards you could carry way more than 60G in less space, and with longer playing times too.
(NB: a Clinton reference, rather than a personal attack)
When the iPod came out, most of the other players were aping the CD player interface. You got a line or two of display and digital buttons to move back and forth between tracks and to proceed through playlist selection. In summary: navigation was really hard with, most of the time, you having no overview of what you're scrolling through and taking forever to get from one end to the other.
The original iPod did two things very right: the scroll wheel (which gives you fantastic control over moving through a list) and a big screen that shows quite a lot of the list you're selecting from. The other players took years to catch up, even the original Zune had digital buttons disguised to look a bit like a scroll wheel to unsuspecting customers in a brilliant move of self sabotage. And by the time they'd caught up, Apple had become the first company to put together a compelling music shop front. And by the time everyone had caught up with that, the app revolution had come along and Apple had used the iPhone as a stealthy way to reinvent the iPod interface.
One of the interesting things to come out of one of the Microsoft antitrust cases was a record of internal emails from somewhere around 2003 in which the guys in Redmond seem to be pulling their hair out over the very poor quality of the then latest Creative players, feeling that their efforts in PlaysForSure or whatever it was at the time were being consistently hampered by hardware partners failing abjectly to step up to the plate. Source: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=conewsstory&refer=conews&tkr=MSFT:US&sid=anhaQOstu83g
If Microsoft were willing to say it then, it seems ridiculous to try to rewrite history now.
Why did the LG dude say that? It kind of implies the current LG phones (like the stupidly named Viewty) suck ass.
Who else is bored-to-death of companies saying 'we have a kick-ass tablet..... it's , um, just not out yet....'. Tell us when it's freaking ready. Don't set expectations so incredibly high, that you'll set up tech journalists to mock you.
It would be great to see smug Steve Jobs facing some actual competition. Let's hope LG's research labs have something up their sleeve. Something that compares with the A4 processor. Let's see innovation.
btw. I do still think Apple rules the roost at the moment.
Look, just bring something out in 2 weeks. Don't care where. Just bring it out NOW; or it ain't happening. I'm tired of seeing prototypes; hearing about the next greatest; blah, blah, blah will be out just before...
What was that show way back in January with Baulmer taking about these tablets and slates and dozens of prototypes that were coming out during the summer? Then the next week, Apple has its little show and SJ goes 'Check this out... It comes out in the 1st week of April…' -actually, late March- '…and this is what it can do…' and instantly made that Baulmer 'dog & pony show' into a forgotten memory.
These companies should just keep their collective traps shut until they know... they know... they know it's ready and say here it is because I can honestly say and guaranty NO ONE will be forming a cue, waiting the night before, camping out, making a video and posting it on YouTube at the MS store (or where ever) as being the first to get the next iPad Killer.
Apple has a tendency to rush a product to market in it's simplest form and then annually upgrade it to a point where it should have been on it's initial release.
Other manufacturers develop a product to include as many features as possible so, when released, their products have a utility of more than one year.
People should remember Fujitsu have been in the business for years and Apple copied their device name, iPad. How much of a 'leader' does that male Apple?
Yeah, brilliant point, you really know your stuff.
Look at MS with Windows Mobile, some would say it's 3 years hopelessly late and while they have been pissing about their competition have all but put them out the market, but really they were just taking the time to make it fully featured...
Apple do not rush things to Market. They were apparently working on the iPad before the iPhone. Not much rushing there.
What Apple also do is release something with a limit feature set that works seamlessly. Most other manufacturers just throw features at the hardware and hope for the best. Just poplar the HTC Evo and it's front facing camera -- completely non functional out of the box.
And your evidence that Apple copied Fujitsu is the name? And I suppose the iPhone is simply a copy of the Cisco iPhone. Riiiiggght.
"Our tablet will be better than the iPad." A brick is better than an iPad!
But that is not the point. This type of device is not meant to be a tool, it is a toy, as such productivity and usefulness is secondary to the very nature of the object.
iPod is is prime example. There are many better mp3 players on the market, but it does not matter, it is still the toy to have.
So line up all you guys and try to compete against the mighty Apple, you stand no chance because you are fighting the war on the wrong front. You have to become more desirable than an Apple product, not more powerful, more useful, more efficient or more versatile.
A few years back, my dad told me "Nothing succeeds like success". Well Apple is the best proof of this: The devices are expensive, locked-down, have draconian conditions attached, and don't really show much regard for the customer (Except for MarketSpeak "We love our users"); and yet it has customers galore and more orders than it can fulfill.
Put it down to excellent engineering and well-thought innovation. That's what the other manufacturers need; not another *Pad.
btw, he also told me: "The rich get richer."
...wouldn't a Microsoft Win32 based system win hands down (as long as it ran acceptably fast)? That's how Microsoft originally wrestled control of the desktop far from Apple's hands.
Today, there are far more free apps, paid apps, productivity apps, etc. for a Windows desktop platform than iPad/ Blackpad/ Android-* pad can hope to have in the near future.
Cheers!
There are indeed far more Win32 apps available, with a proportional amount of pointless and irrelevant ones to boot as you point out. The critical thing here is the touch UI, where there a very few apps on the Win32 that fully support the paradigm - Windows 7 barely supports it at all (No, fanboys, Windows 7 isn't a touch based OS; it merely continues where Vista left off with its stylus based tables toolset and adds a few 'touchy' features). Another advantage that the App Store has over Android is a range of established and successful iOS developer and apps that have developed apps exclusively for the iPad. One of the benefits of 'draconian control'(TM) that Apple exert over he app store is that there were a decent range of device specific apps available at launch. While I'm in no doubt that there will be a handful of decent apps developed for Android (the quality of apps available for Android are no where near the quality that is available for iOS. I can count the amount of better apps for Android on exactly **no** digits); very few will be of are of sufficient quality to be scaled for use on a tablet, let alone specifically targeting such devices.
For the tablet your dreaming of running FULL windows apps means that you need integrated graphics, 2-4GB Memory, .5Tb - 1Tb of storage ... wait that sounds like a laptop.... Doh! wrong form factor.
There is no current way to cram the computing power and versatility of a laptop into something the size of the current ipad.
Hey, do you think thats why Apple didn't?
Thanks for the reminder, me ol' scurvy bilge-rat! Haaarrr!!!
Cap'n Scumbucket at yer service, an' I've jus' seen a chick to whom I'd love to drop an anchor in her lagoon. She could clean me barnacles off me keel anytime she wanted!
Harrr! (wash, rinse, repeat)
http://www.talklikeapirate.com/ and...
http://www.amazon.com/Pirate-Life-Citadel/dp/0806530707/ref=sr_1_3/104-9321180-9515938?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1216151022&sr=8-3#reader_0806530707
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
