My buddy Dwight Silverman of the Houston Chronicle and Techblog summed things up with this tweet over the weekend:. This conversation on Twitter was part of my grousing about how frustrating I was finding Honeycomb yet again. My ranting was the result of the inconsistent interface that is Honeycomb, no matter the particular tablet. Frequently accessed controls are sometimes in the upper right of an app window, and other times in the lower left appended to the main Honeycomb system controls.
This makes switching from one app to another in Honeycomb, something Android excels at given good multitasking, less than intuitive. I constantly have to stop and think about what I want to do next, which should be a fluid operation if the interface was well designed. You can blame the app developer for putting these controls in different places, but something that affects operation at this level should be controlled by the OS. If certain controls would be better in one particular place then the OS should force that.
Google has left too much control over the interface in the hands of app developers no doubt to be "open". That is not a good thing in this case as the result clearly demonstrates. Frustration should not be caused by simply using a system.
Android is a great platform with tremendous potential, but Honeycomb falls short in too many areas. In addition to the frustrating interface, the confusing update system hits the user in the face all the time. There are many alternatives to the iPad on the Android scene, but most of the old and cheap tablets still run on Android 2.
However, Android Honeycomb 3. There are quite a few Honeycomb tablets in the market and here are the best of them :. The XOOM from Motorola is one of the most popular Android Honeycomb tablets around, thanks to the fact that it was the first tablet on which Honeycomb was previewed and ran on.
It has so far sold , units in its first month of release, which is pretty low considering the sales of other competitors like the iPad. The Xoom comes with a 10 inch touchscreen and has a resolution of by The Xoom comes with a built in storage of 32GB and weighs about 1. It has a 5 Megapixel camera which is capable of HD recording and a front facing 2 MP camera which can be used for making video calls via apps like Skype.
Overall, the Motorola Xoom has one of the best build quality and is really high by standards, making it one of the best Android based HoneyComb tablets you can buy. Altogether, then—and considering the wave of Android tablets expected to launch later this year—is it wise to buy the Xoom now? Or would you be better off taking a wait-and-see approach?
The recently announced Samsung Galaxy Tab Apple, on the other hand, always has shown us what we can do with the hardware, even if it's less powerful. The iPhone was not the first major smartphone to feature a front-facing camera , even if Apple's commercials and marketing would have you believed that the company pioneered the technology.
I suspect that the same thing has happened on the tablet front; there's simply too much focus on expensive hardware. I could talk all day about how incredible the Transformer Prime is on paper, but many consumers just don't want to spend that kind of money unless they see value in what it can do for them.
Perhaps that's one of the reasons that the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet stand to be successful. Sure, there is that all-too-tempting price point to help things along, but I believe it has more to do with focus on experience. Both should sell like hotcakes this holiday season based around inexpensive alternatives to the iPad 2 that offer a lot of cool features. E-mail, books, calendar, and music?
You bet. Pay attention to the television commercials over the next few weeks and watch how these devices are marketed.
0コメント