I may be soon in the market for a new Android tablet. Does anybody have suggestions?
Bought a 10 inch Galaxy Tab S2 (T813) mostly because Lineage OS is available. It's fine.
Google Hardware makes cuts to laptop and tablet development, cancels products
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Re: Google Hardware makes cuts to laptop and tablet development, cancels products
#82I may be soon in the market for a new Android tablet. Does anybody have suggestions?
Samsung and Huawei are pretty much unchallenged in the tablet space since every other major OEM has now abandoned the market.
The rule of thumb for me is to buy the device with the highest screen resolution you can afford. Those tend to have the beefiest specs. Common high-res tablets have screens either at 2048 x 1536 (4:3) or 2560 x 1600 (16:10). I prefer 4:3 tablets so on Android, that really only leaves the Galaxy Tab S2 or S3 (the latter having pen functionality).
I'm still getting an iPad because the productivity apps are far superior, purpose-built and actively maintained. And that happens because people actually pay for the app. On Android, everything is freemium, so people are incentivized not to pay, and developers are incentivized to jam up the UX with ads and "unlock this with Premium" CTAs.
Yes, I can write webdev code on my Android tablet with Droidedit, and connect via SSH to my web server. But it's a hassle to do so, especially when the app in question feels like a scaled up phone app instead of a purpose-built tool.
Re: Google Hardware makes cuts to laptop and tablet development, cancels products
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
> $100M in projected revenue? Yawn. Kill it. They should at least tell us what those projects are so someone can pick up the scraps.
Google inbox. Please. Anyone?
Although I love Inbox, it had no chance of being a $100 million dollar business. It would have been lucky to clear $10 million, even ignoring the fact that nearly all of its revenue would be cannibalized from gmail itself.
Re: Google Hardware makes cuts to laptop and tablet development, cancels products
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even Android is not done right. - Android J++ - Kotlin, the successor, still faces lots of tooling issues, regarding incremental builds, code completion, thin APKs,... - NDK users keep being neglected, after 10 years there is still no alternative to manually write JNI boilerplate, handle native libraries, a proper C++ API in the NDK, the ones that exist like Oboe are either plain code dumps on GitHub, or use Blaze, w…
Also Google also has two GUI technologies for Android, the original Java based one and Flutter, which replicates the material UI in full.
Which are a sign of political wars within the development groups.
Re: Google Hardware makes cuts to laptop and tablet development, cancels products
#85I'm looking forward to the upcoming announcement of a Google game console in 2019 [0], and the subsequent announcement that it has been discontinued in 2022. [0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/03/all-signs-point-to-a...
Agreed. There's no way I'd buy a Google gaming console for this reason.
Re: Google Hardware makes cuts to laptop and tablet development, cancels products
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
US education market, hardly noticeable anywhere else. Question is if one country is enough to keep it going, even one of the US's size.
What are other countries using that would be as cheap to deliver/manage?
No idea, the point is that it didn't take off anywhere else.
Here in Germany I only saw them a couple of times in a few consumer toolchains, as regular visitor it was interesting to watch their price being reduced across weeks until they could finally get rid of them, and never again on display.
Re: Google Hardware makes cuts to laptop and tablet development, cancels products
#87Please build me a Linux laptop for software engineering, Google.
For engineers only. No software support beyond ensuring the BIOS and the drivers work and are updated.
I hate Dell, but I got a Dell XPS 15 because it was the only laptop I knew would: boot Linux reliably; last two Ubuntu LTS upgrades (4 years); have a high spec (i9 etc); and was reasonably priced (Apple tax was 50% higher for worse hardware).
Is it impossible to make a laptop better than Dell or Apple? Google: how much goodwill would you receive through developer love? Why do I have to pay for Windows when the OS division seems to be actively working against making my work easier? Google, you have the skills and size to make a secure laptop.
Google, maybe it is because most of your engineers internally just need a good terminal, instead of a fast laptop?
Re: Google Hardware makes cuts to laptop and tablet development, cancels products
#88I may be soon in the market for a new Android tablet. Does anybody have suggestions?
Google just recently abandoned Android and pushed ChromeOS for tablets. Now this, there is just no continuity with Google. Unless you absolutely need Android for some reason, I would recommend the iPad.
Agree on the iPad recommendation.
That said, 2-in-1 x86_64 Chrome OS devices are bearable. Unlike Android; all the drivers are upstream.
I really like my Samsung Chromebook Pro, but would recommend looking for something that's on a later Linux kernel (at least 4.4) because not all the new features get backported. (See http://dev.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-information-fo... for a list of all the options.)
Re: Google Hardware makes cuts to laptop and tablet development, cancels products
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only thing they have going for them is: * They have the most popular operating system in the world * They have the most popular browser in the world * They have the most popular search engine in the world * They have the most popular advertising network in the world * They have the most popular video platform in the world * They have the most popular mapping software in the world * They have the third most popula…
Some devil's advocate: 1) They bought Android - they didn't build it in-house. 2) They bought Double Click - they didn't build it in-house 3) They bought YouTube- they didn't build it in-house 4) Third most popular cloud platform is a bit disingenuous; it's like saying Apple Maps is a top mapping platform: sure, you're kind of right, but the gap at the top is fairly wide. (You might even make the case that the best p…
I mean, youtube, sure (though more the mindshare than the product itself), but what's left of the Android that was acquired? They didn't even have a product at the time so everything they ever released was as part of Google. And Ad Words wasn't an acquisition.
After some amount of time, for most acquisitions this argument becomes silly.
Apple acquired NeXT and PA Semi. And I hear Jony Ive was hired, not grown in a vat in Cupertino. Apple didn't build its hardware, software, or design in house!
Re: Google Hardware makes cuts to laptop and tablet development, cancels products
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean it's kinda true. But they still had to figure out that these were the projects/companies worth buying and afterwards pursuing and advancing them such that they would become the cash-cows they are today. IMHO the Google Home devices and Chromecast are quite successful. I admit these are probably not powerhouses on the level of Android, Chrome or YouTube. However it's just not possible to create a powerhouse eve…
YouTube at least was already well on in that direction - Google had a competing product that was a total flop, and only afterwards did they buy YouTube.
They bought YouTube for a billion dollar - which was back then a crazy number. I still remember all that people arguing (including me) that Google would never make so much money back from YouTube. YouTube even had the reputation for being a huge loss for Google for multiple years.