What happens when that “new gadget smell” wears off, though? The honeymoon effect with your new, heavily-discounted device wears off and you’re left with a tablet that isn’t likely to get any better than it is right now unless you do something yourself. The Preware community already has a nice collection of things you can do to play with any WebOS device, but even that has its limits. So, what are you to do with that shiny new tablet? Well, eventually, you’ll be able to put Android on it.
So, this was basically what I was hoping would happen (and why I gambled on the discounted TouchPads).
I’m actually hoping first that WebOS will continue to be maintained – since I gather it’s quite nice. I think we’ll see a huge influx of developers and software support for WebOS in the very near term.
However, having Android as a fallback solution is everything I hoped for
Bonus points if they figure out how to dual-boot it!
Gingerbread is nice, but hopefully it will soon be even better when/if Google releases Icecream Sandwich to the public as they promised.
What reason would Google have for not releasing the source code to the public?
Their efforts were being undermined by some tablet manufacturers. What was originally pushed out for a subset of manufacturers was low quality code hastily put together to have an iPad answer. It was never intended for public consumption.
Basically its market demands meets development demands and they didn’t want some of the non-official tablet manufactures leveraging the code as they were afraid it would damage the Android brand.
Which is why they should actually put together a strong trademark policy instead of keeping the code closed
On the other hand, I think they’re probably trying to give their handset device makers an edge over the “no-names” by giving them the early-bird access to new versions of Android.
I’m sure that would protect them from shennanigans like this: http://www.shanzai.com/index.php/news-a-articles/tablets-a-gadgets/…
😉
I think selling a product as something it’s not does harm the Android brand (reaction : “Android is for cheap iPhone knockoffs, it’s not a serious OS with an identity on its own”), so Google are possibly annoyed by this. Or not.
Tried to watch the video on that page, but got this:
“This video is no loner available due to a copyright claim by Apple Inc.”
They’re making DMCA complaints against videos showing iPhone knockoffs now? Hahaha, what a bunch of babies.
Every time I find one on sale for the clearance price, they’ve already sold out, and people are bragging about how they bought 5…
i was raging at the same people myself.
I did buy two however (and at a slightly more expensive price), one for myself and one for a mate. However I’ve since found out that he managed to order two as well – but his order hasn’t been confirmed yet. So I guess I’ll just wait and see if his order is honored or not before returning my unopened order.
Things would have been a lot simpler if people hadn’t had got greedy and thus spawning a whole load of panic buying
Yuck. What an abomination they are. I played with the Xoom and Acer tablet and the OS feels like utter crap with nice hardware wrapped around it. Lagging all over the place and juvenile 1980s gui effects going on everywhere.
I can’t afford a tablet at the ~ $400 price point, but I would have gotten two at $99. Obviously there are many would-be consumers for quality low cost tablets since they beat me to the punch.