The Chair - Hackdot

Re:The Chair by dhh on Friday March 04, 2011 @12:18AM (#2287093)

Unfortunately I found it to be, well, shit compared to the iPad. I bought one for the lure of speed and returned it the next day when I realized that speed was very low on the list of properties that actually mattered. The total user experience is just far worse.

The Xoom feels like a PC that has better specs than a Mac. Yes, the frame rate is higher but the game sucks.

I seriously wish that webOS is going to show Apple some real competition. It's not healthy for one company to be so far ahead. Power corrupts.

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Re:The Chair by edderly on Friday March 04, 2011 @12:38AM (#2287117)

Strange really because I've found the iPad to be a dull clone of an iPhone where the Xoom seems to have a UI which exploits the size of the screen.

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Re:The Chair by Johngibb on Friday March 04, 2011 @01:30AM (#2287203)

Honestly, I had a similar first impression. But as I used it more, and saw iPad-specific apps begin to appear, it really is it's own device. If anything, the iPhone is a smaller, less functional clone of the iPad.

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Re:The Chair by edderly on Friday March 04, 2011 @01:41AM (#2287228)

I can grok that, though for me I found myself going back to my MacBook Pro because the iPad needs propping up and is too slow (browsing). Ignoring slowness, admittedly a problem for any tablet in my opinion.

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Re:The Chair by Johngibb on Friday March 04, 2011 @01:53AM (#2287256)

Kind of funny that iPad 2 directly addresses both of your complaints: performance, and the new case which seems to make a pretty good stand.

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Re:The Chair by Tyrannosaurs on Friday March 04, 2011 @04:09AM (#2287529)

I don't think it's funny, I think it's a case of Apple identifying genuine weaknesses with the product and addressing them - it's what they should be doing.

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Re:The Chair by Johngibb on Friday March 04, 2011 @09:01AM (#2288006)

I didn't mean funny as in 'haha'. I guess 'notable' would have been a better choice.

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Re:The Chair by Tyrannosaurs on Friday March 04, 2011 @09:33AM (#2288094)

Ah, fair enough.

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Re:The Chair by rbarooah on Friday March 04, 2011 @01:27AM (#2287196)

What UI? The UI of the 65,000 full screen iPad specific apps, or the UI of the 16 Android Tablet apps?

Have you actually tried a Xoom?

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Re:The Chair by edderly on Friday March 04, 2011 @01:33AM (#2287210)

Yes, I've tried a Xoom today, I also have bought an iPad a while back. Have you tried a Xoom yourself? I don't really see the relevance of the number of applications to the the UI experience.

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Re:The Chair by rbarooah on Friday March 04, 2011 @01:39AM (#2287223)

I have tried one myself otherwise I wouldn't have asked.

The relevance is that the apps are what provide the UI.

For the iPad there are 65,000 of them customized to utilize the full screen. For the Xoom, there are 16 customized for the full screen, and the rest are literally just blown up phone apps, many of which don't even rescale properly.

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Re:The Chair by ekidd on Friday March 04, 2011 @06:58AM (#2287780)

There are 16 featured tablet apps in the market. Search for HD, THD or tablet, and you'll find considerably more. I'm working on one of them.

Google could stand to refine the UI for finding tablet apps, though in fairness to them, showing off 16 good ones on launch week was probably a reasonable move.

(Written on a tablet-adapted HN reader that isn't one of the 16, on a Xoom.)

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Re:The Chair by smackfu on Friday March 04, 2011 @04:07PM (#2289797)

Actually, I have been pretty disappointed with iPad apps. Many, many iPhone apps haven't been ported over, and the iPhone app experience on the iPad is pretty shoddy, not even using the Retina graphics.

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Re:The Chair by jrubyer on Friday March 04, 2011 @03:53AM (#2287507)

>> I don't really see the relevance of the number of applications to the the UI experience.

This is silly, without apps what value does it offer?

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Re:The Chair by deong on Friday March 04, 2011 @06:52AM (#2287767)

How many apps do you need? Don't get me wrong, I think the iPad is very, very good. I use mine every day. But I just took it out and counted the apps I actually use really ever, and apparently 64,987 of those 65,000 apps could be deleted tomorrow with no apparent loss of functionality for me. Of the 13 remaining, at least half run everywhere (Kindle, Twitter, etc.), several others are nice-to-have ways to access web sites (Alien Blue for Reddit, Instapaper, FeeddlerPro for Google Reader), and only one by my count has no suitable replacement outside of the iPad (Papers).

Yes, everyone will have a different set of apps they use, but there's no realistic justification that "SearchEngines.ru Forum" (from the recent release page I just looked at) is adding much value to the platform. A lot of those 65,000 are apps like those. Realistically, if you have maybe 1500 of the most popular apps, you have enough to pretty well serve the market.

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Re:The Chair by jrubyer on Friday March 04, 2011 @08:23AM (#2287926)

>>Realistically, if you have maybe 1500 of the most popular apps, you have enough to pretty well serve the market.

Yes, that's the point. It's just that iPad now has so many good quality apps compared to Android. It _may_ change in future, but for the time being iPad wins. (The total number of apps never matters, most of them are crap anyway)

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Re:The Chair by abecedarius on Friday March 04, 2011 @11:11PM (#2290795)

Even with no apps at all, for me it'd trump Apple with this one feature: I can program my own tablet without begging anyone's permission.

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Re:The Chair by rbarooah on Saturday March 05, 2011 @01:48AM (#2290987)

That's a reason for some geeks to buy one. It's the reason I looked at buying one - not so much for Android, but for something to build a DIY dynabook on. I still probably will when someone makes something closer to Apple's industrial design, but I don't think that's going to help a whole lot with market share.

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Re:The Chair by alecperkins on Friday March 04, 2011 @01:12AM (#2287174)

Most of the Xoom is available now. I'm amazed they deemed it sensible to ship it with a non-functional SD slot, and "promised upgrade" to a 4G radio. And then there's the touting of Flash as a major selling point, even though it's not yet available either.

"And here are the keys to your new car. By the way, the windshield wipers don't work, yet…"

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Re:The Chair by lloeki on Friday March 04, 2011 @03:17AM (#2287447)

In the US. The Galaxy Tab took like 6 months to appear in France.

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