On TechCrunch, guest writer Jim Dalrymple from The Loop looks at why, a year on, Apple’s iPad still has no real competition and all the other hardware manufacturers are still scrambling to catch up.
He points out that Apple has done such a good job making the tablet useful in people’s everyday lives that everybody else is still trying to be Apple rather than beat Apple. Every other tablet introduced thus far has looked remarkably similar to the iPad. Even the competitors who come the closest—HP and RIM—still haven’t done anything.
And Apple is only a week away from moving the goalposts again.
Blackberry is bringing its new Playbook tablet to market, of course, but it is becoming unclear how well it is going to be able to compete with Apple. Yesterday, disgruntled would-be developer Jamie Murai blogged at length about how Playbook’s over-bureaucratized, over-expensive, under-useable development process had driven him away from developing for it.
So, my dear RIM, primary supporter of my local economy, I bid you adieu. You have succeeded in your quest of driving away a perfectly willing developer from your platform. On a more serious note, being the underdog, you need to make your process AT LEAST as simple as Apple’s or Google’s, if not more so. You need to make your tools AT LEAST as good as Apple’s or Google’s, if not more so. You have failed at both.
This all must be coming as great schadenfreude for long-time Apple fans, who watched for decades as Microsoft stole march after march on (and idea after idea from) Apple and prospered while Apple languished in relative obscurity. Apple has the tablet bit in its teeth and shows no signs of slowing down.
Well there is all that plus the real news.
Just because they are finally launching the hardware and the new version of the OS for those new Android tablets the same issues are a problem.
All those android apps have to be updated to work on the new Android hardware with the bigger screens and the new flavor of Android OS. I have not seen any orchestrated move to get that done and finished yet unlike Apple who was shipping developers their OS long before the iPad showed up.
So new Android tablets does not automatically mean any apps will really be available to take advantage of them.
Sorry, not impressed. The only thing an iPad has going for it is size/weight. The screen and ‘keyboard’ are too small to be of any use for doing any real work. I sent mine back after a short trial.
Hi Mike – I write all my email and business documents on my iPad as I travel. I create and distribute Keynote presentations and edit and develop business plans and even work on Excel spreadsheets. A little practice was all it needed. A couple of weeks ago I wrote a 20 page business case for a project I am working on.