We Need to Talk About Android

> what's wrong with Android from the perspective of someone planning a long-term 1:1 deployment in a school

There's nothing wrong with Android. The problem is that you're trying to throw expensive toys at school students in the hope that you'll win the award for "Digital Curriculum Innovator". As a student and 1:1 program participant, the notion that tablets are even remotely useful as educational tools makes me incredibly frustrated. These devices are designed for light web browsing and viewing images and videos, not the sort of tasks that students actually need portable devices for like writing down notes, typing up assignments in class and communicating with their instructors via email.

> My question was then, and remains this: where are the apps to challenge iMovie, GarageBand, Keynote, OmniFocus, OmniGraffle, Soulver, Flipboard, iThoughts, Noteshelf, Collabracam, The Elements, Brushes and ArtRage?

This sounds an awful lot like the sort of thing you would use a laptop for. Perhaps a more useful question would be:

> Where are the apps to challenge Geogebra, Mathematica, CMap, AutoCAD, Photoshop and Office?

or

> How am I going to interface my expensive light sensors or CNC machine with a tablet?

The applications mentioned in the article give me the impression that there isn't much serious work being done on these things. Students need technology skills which will be useful in the workforce, which usually means using the same hardware and software which you are likely to encounter in the workforce. Nowadays you have relatively advanced topics like robotics and video editing being taught to 4th-graders, meaning that by the time they are twelve they have already started learning how to use music composition software (think Sibelius) and commercial CNC machines. Tablets and smartphones just aren't capable enough.

Sorry if this sounds a bit harsh, but sometimes I feel like educators need to spend more time educating and less time reinventing the wheel.

If so, why would you not feel you are missing out during the year between functionality updates for iOS and instead focus only on the OS version number? Is it simply that you don't want other people to have updates if you don't have them, rather than missing the actual functionality itself? Because you not having an update because it's in Apple's secret lab seems fairly similar to not having it because your phone hasn't yet update to the latest Android OS.

Would you prefer if Google kept all those updates to itself and then forced them on carriers once a year? I'm assuming you don't think iOS (or Android) is more than say 6 months ahead of the competition or you'd just have given that as a reason for switching rather than the manner in which you get the latest functionality.

I bought my i9100 full retail. I am most certainly their customer. Just got a major Kies update yesterday. Even for those people who get their device carrier subsidized -- which is the vast majority, including for Apple devices (where Apple sells the device to the carrier and not to the end user) -- Samsung is very interested in making their customer, the end-user, happy. The end result of their efforts is unprecedented, almost Apple-like interest in every leak about the Galaxy S III.

Same thing with HTC -- they suffered a down year because they didn't do well, so they're back and ready to delight customers again. The One is on my short list.

Android is merely a platform that allows Samsung to tailor their devices to the carrier's requirements...So how does Android 4 help Samsung better meet the demands of the carriers? It doesn't

Pick an argument and stick with it. That you have collapsed all of Android's many advantages into such a biased, nonsensical anti-Android growl is absurd enough, but keep some coherency in your argument.

Neither the carriers nor the manufacturers will spend a dime to rush out Android 4.

Yet the next 30 days will see tens of millions of devices updated. I'm curious what you'll say then. Oh I know what you'll say: Google is hard at work trying to push the next version of Android out, and then the next version after that, reaching a frantic pace, even if it provides ammunition for bores to declare fragmentation.