Probably not. The exception might be Samsung who Apple is attacking on a copyright front because their model sales were making a little dent in Apple’s market share. The lawsuit is of course frivolous and there are some indications that Apple may have doctored some of the photos to make the devices look more similar than they are. Acer and Asus are also taking some of the share from Apple. I’ve seen the recent Samsung and Acer models and I’m finding that the latest larger form factors need two hands to hold which takes away from the whole tablet experience for me. I have yet to see any device that can challenge the notebook in terms of getting reasonable amounts of info into it.
I do prefer the Android versions to Apple’s however. They include a provision for far more connectivity than Apple allows for and the biggest draw card for me is the removal of the need to install what I consider a virus, the iTunes store software. Give it a few more months and the Android software offerings, already far more in number will match or exceed anything Apple currently provides. These will all be at a lower price and more compatible that the Apple alternatives.
Google has bought Motorola. Apple has created a big patent mess. How are these things related? Android has bumped iOS off the top of the phone pyramid. According to the Gartner group Google is activating a whopping 650,000 Android devices every day, yes that is every day. Some are still saying that Apple dominates the mobile phone profit sector.
So let’s look a little deeper. Adults are buying the iOS devices while the younger group are buying the Android devices, because they tend to be less expensive both as hardware and for the software. Which of these two groups will be buying devices for longer into the future?
Google makes money from the indirect sources of advertising and the like. They don’t make money from Android directly so they don’t care so much how much the OEMs make from the technology. The more that are sold the better off Google is. Yes Apple makes mobile advertising dollars but as Android grows that become less and yes Google wins. Once the tablets drop in price they will eventually move, again Google doesn’t care how cheap they get because their revenue stream is not from these sales.
The real issues here are around the patents. Apple has been quietly and loudly patenting everything from the word “App” to rounded corners. They have so many patents on tablets it’s amazing they haven’t tried to patent the story of the Ten Commandments or retroactively sue Moses.
So why did Google buy Motorola? The company has about 17,000 patents with another 7,500 in the processes of being granted. This should stop Apple dead in its tracks because Apple is suddenly open to any infringement they may have made on those 75K. The Apple patent threat was looking like it was going to cost Google over $2B per year. It is almost certain that some will overlap with Apple’s. Let the patent war begin.
Mini Review – Latest Samsung Tablet
It might be contraband at the moment but it is a nice piece of hardware. The problem, and a similar one for tablets in general, is the available software. One reviewer described tablets as halfway between a computer and a dumb screen. It is worth noting that the iPad has no killer apps that keeps it apart from the others, marketing, brand recognition and fawning Apple lovers are doing that. Add the law suits against any challengers and the iPad holds a rather protected position. So once again great hardware shame about the rest. Samsung has relied on Google to fill that gap in for them and like many others Google is not sure where to aim in that regard as well.
The hardware is very nice. It is landscape oriented (compared to portrait) so aimed at movie watching and game playing rather than eBook and Web page reading. It is light and well made with a very nice screen. It fails by not having a HDMI or USB slots in this case going for the annoying iPad like one slot for all design paradigm. Performance is very speedy and makes the TouchPad look slow.
The browser is nice and beats Safari hands down. Sophistication however falls behind iOS but has better font rendering than say the HP alternative. One annoyance is the iPhone like rendering of websites, why? As a scaled phone it does poorly with things like the small back button. Honeycomb as the latest Android experience is still too messy and has too many screens and panels to work through. You need a nice simple user interface on a tablet device.
For some reason having the interface a two year old can work out is fine in the Apple world but when it moves out of that arena it lacks something. Apple gets away with it because they are maintaining a kind of consistency. Multitasking etc. are not necessary for the average Apple user (there is a joke in there somewhere I’m sure).
Honeycomb then is somewhere between the media player world and the computer world and it leaves the user with a what do I have in my hands feeling. The iPad directs people to approved things through their iTunes store. The Android experience leaves you with a device that lacks definition and you feel somehow cheated of your expectations.
Industry News
Bored with your iPad2, waiting for that iPad3 with the "retina display" sorry nothing before 2012 because LG and Samsung, they guys they are suing, can’t make the 9.7in, 2048 x 1536 fast enough. So the production has been cancelled for a while. If the current production figures had been met then Apple would have been selling both iPad2 with iPad3s perhaps this is another reason to slow things down. So it remains to be seen if the iPad3 now becomes a less expensive alternative to the iPad2 instead of its replacement.
ScaleBase a service provider for MySQL. ScaleBase is a startup founded in Israel and located now in Boston. Their first product the Database Load Balancer is out now. It is a proxy server that sits in front of a database and breaks a single relational database into pieces and spreads it out across multiple physical servers. This is called sharding and people have been doing it for years. However, if you shard your database, you have to basically rewrite the entire data access layer of a database management system. The ScaleBase Database Load Balancer tricks those applications, backup programs, and report writers into thinking they are talking to one database; it looks exactly like a MySQL or Oracle database would at the network level to any application. The database proxy then accepts SQL commands and depending on what those commands are, it either runs the query against the appropriate subset of the database or across all the shards at once. You don't have to change one line of your application code, but you may have to work out a different license with your database vendor.
The product currently works with MySQL but depending on customer demand, ScaleBase will add support for IBM's DB2, Microsoft's SQL Server, and other open source databases such as PostgreSQL. The target is databases that are 50GB or larger and that have to field tens to hundreds of requests per second.
No comments:
Post a Comment