hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr0821.txt

Episode: 821
Title: HPR0821: Why Android tablets suck !
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0821/hpr0821.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 03:04:44

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Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. This is Mr. Gadget.
Fresh Matt from the Ohio Linux Fest.
And I think probably this will end up probably getting published.
Give or take in a couple of weeks from the time that I am recording this year on October.
September the 12th of the year of our Lord 2011.
And it will probably be a couple of weeks if I am reading the calendar right and left.
It can have something more important in which I see will bump me and my neanderings.
And put on something that looks better to me and the hue.
But most of the topics I am coming up with here are not topical to a specific time,
but more long range and you can play them probably not any time.
As I mentioned, I got to get to Ohio Linux this year and had a great time.
I think pretty much there may have been one person I didn't know was there that I didn't hook up with.
I knew across the internet, the piecaster type or somebody that I connected with on the internet that I didn't get to meet in real life.
But I got to be pretty much everybody that I knew was going to be there,
myths and new people that I am going to stay in touch with and all that kind of stuff and had a great time.
And of course, as you might imagine, there was a lot of Android there in addition to just people carrying around notebooks and laptops with Linux installed.
As it was, these Linux tests, right?
The interesting thing about it was I thought that there were several people that were carrying around iPads and using those as their devices of choice.
Lots and lots of Android.
I'm sure that amongst this group of people, although I did see the case in my iPhone, that's what I carried in my pocket.
But that was probably a heavily oriented towards the Android crowd.
If you were to look at this crowd, you would of course think that Android had 99% of the market share or somewhere in the probably high 80s to 90s range of the market share phones out there.
And of course, when you add up all of the Android phones and put them all together, the Android has to pass the iOS platform in terms of the number of phones that are out there right now.
And that was mentioned several times in several different talks that I heard over the different talks that I heard about.
But I want to entitle today's episode as why Android tablets suck.
One of the advantages of podcasts is you don't have to worry about what it was at the 7th or the 9th or whatever it was in George Carlin, so that you couldn't play on radio, at least when he started in radio.
So, and I had a series I didn't see quite a few Android tablets, most of them in the 10 inch range, not my personal preference, which is the 7 inch tablet.
I have fallen in love with the 7 inch tablet form factor.
It is small enough to take with you relatively easily and have with you more often than the 10 inch tablet.
In fact, I even have a nifty, built-clip kind of a pouch that I purchased at a local science for you to store, which I may talk about in the future, that is just the right size for a 7 inch tablet.
I've known this series of 7 inch tablets and returned them, sold them off to other people after I use them.
And so, I know from which I speak in terms of I like this form factor.
As I say, much more portable.
And I can carry it around with me simple to slip into a bag and ways less takes up less room.
But likewise, especially with a little pouch, you know, I can just have it on my YouTube belt, right?
And put it out when I want to have a large experience.
In this particular case, the speed is wrong.
Mr. Jobs is incorrect when he has been asked about the 7 inch tablet.
And he says that, well, we have found that the 10 inch tablet is where you're going to get the best experience.
Of course, that's the standard line, right? They're always about the experience.
And, you know, a larger tablet, my daughter bought a iPad early on in its existence and has been enjoying it.
And, you know, really, it is a wonderful kind of interface.
As far as the iPad is concerned, you know, she had an iPhone at one particular point.
And when she was living down here, and she has sent food up to Missouri Montana.
And one of the things she had to do was move to an Android phone because Verizon is pretty much the only carrier to use up in that area of the United States.
That may be changing in the, you know, not too distant future, but at least as of the point when she moved up there last year,
that was pretty much the only choice.
And she switched over to the Android phone.
And it's enjoying it quite a bit, I asked her, was she going to switch back to the iPhone when it became available on Verizon?
And she said, no, I got some accessories for it.
And I'm really, really kind of enjoying the phone.
She is not, however, a person, it's mostly about the utility of the phone.
And if she doesn't need any support, she just can turn to her fiance sitting next to her on the futon.
And he can usually suss out whatever it is that's confusing her or frustrating her with the Android system and all that kind of thing.
And I will concede to people that in the mobile space, it's on your phone that you have with you constantly,
that is really the leader in the mobile space.
You know, the Android success on the phones is a good thing for the mobile space.
And tablets, at least at this point, are less important in terms of the mobile space overall.
I think over time that will probably change, but it is something that is, you know, pretty, pretty evident.
In fact, I've heard several people express the idea of, why do we even care about a tablet?
Why do we want a tablet? I would just carry it up, look, and use that.
Or, you know, I would, you know, have no laptop with me.
Anything I can't do on my phone, I would rather have a keyboard and a larger display than a tablet,
or if I'm going to have a 10-inch display, I could have a net book and it's, you know, cheaper than a tablet.
You can do more than a tablet, various and such reasons.
And for many uses, you know, a full computer is indeed the proper thing to have.
But one of the things about the iPad that I noticed when it was first coming out.
And the reason I mentioned my daughter is because the story I was wanting to relate is,
she sat across the living room from me on the sofa one night and she had been flicking things on her phone.
And after she had been doing that for 15 or 20 minutes, she looked up at me and she says, you know, Dad,
I want a touchscreen computer because I've been doing things in Gmail.
She had been going through Gmail and archiving things and leading things.
And she was frustrated with the small screen and she wanted the large screen.
So she said, I want a touchscreen computer to be able to do this in Gmail.
And I said, little, I'm not sure you really do because I didn't mention this at the time to her.
But, you know, all that stuff that they did in minority reports with, you know, moving their hands around and flicking things,
that works great when you're going to small theme.
But, you know, you're going to get guerrilla arms here from this whole thing.
Your irons are going to get extremely tired or extremely muscular or both in terms of doing that for a long length of time.
I think it's much more along the lines of a character in ounces, which is a new series on sci-fi.
And I'd recommend it if you can get a hold of that from whatever it means.
It's an interesting series.
It's kind of along the lines of, if you like heroes, you know, people with special abilities.
Well, this is people with special abilities.
But it's much more that they're, I don't know, somehow more human in the, there's
fallibility in their special abilities and stuff.
It's not a classic superhero's kind of thing.
And I know in, if you like heroes, there's a lot of fallibility there too.
But these are much more kind of people that are marginalized and on the edge.
You know, these are typically the people that would have been accused of being a witch.
If they had exhibited these kinds of mutations and abilities previously.
And one of the characters can literally see the electromagnetic spectrum, okay?
Gary, it's his name.
And he's high functioning autistic, probably, or in some way he's got lots and lots of social skills issues
and really use OCD.
He's probably like I say, high functioning autistic, or I can't think of the other,
the other diagnosed, you know, disease, I guess, is the proper term for it.
But the other diagnosis of children here don't like to be touched and all those kinds of things.
It's very much that kind of a character.
So he's kind of very, you know, he's kind of broken if you will in terms of his social skills
and in terms of his OCD nature and some things like that.
But he has the ability to literally see cell phone signals.
And, you know, he can hack into electronic systems and traffic cameras and things like that.
But he doesn't need the equipment to do it because he can literally tap into the electronic streams
and see the pictures from the camera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And of course this is very useful for the team of people who are trying to either find another alpha
or to, you know, do whatever their particular mission is at that particular time.
And Gary, when he is manipulating what he's seeing in terms of the electromagnetic spectrum,
just clicks his hand back and forth.
So think of instead of the minority for it where you're making big gestures, right,
he's just flicking on a giant track pad, you know, a magic pad from Apple or something like that.
And he's just doing these flicking motions with his hand, which he can do for extended periods of time
without straining its muscles to a greater extent.
And he can do all those kinds of manipulations.
And so I didn't go through all that with her, but I said, no, I really don't think you would
because your arms would get tired.
You said they're doing that for the 20 minutes you said, doing this.
I think what you really want is an iPad when it comes out because you have a bigger screen.
And when we found that they had life to have when she was a graduating from college from the University of Missouri,
that was indeed a graduation present.
And she's had that and has enjoyed it very much.
And this was, as I say, before the iPad came out.
And everybody kept on saying over and over about the iPad before we actually saw it
and before it became the phenomenon that it is.
I mean, one thing you can say, whatever else you say about these jobs, okay?
And you can stick her and you can say he didn't invent the tablet.
That, you know, Microsoft has been doing tablets for 10 years.
But especially folks, I owned Microsoft tablet PCs and whipped the pins,
the blackened pins and all this kind of stuff.
And those pretty much went nowhere, okay?
Whereas the iPad comes out and whether you like this whole magical device thing or not,
it is the tablet marketplace right now.
It's the driving force that everybody else is trying to catch up and not doing a very good job of it.
And everybody was saying before it came out, well, as the specs came out,
it says, well, it's just a giant iPod touch, right?
It's just a giant iPod touch with Wi-Fi and maybe, you know, a AT&T or Verizon radio there,
so you can get 3G6.
But it's just a giant iPod touch.
And I kept them saying, yeah, that's what I want.
It's a giant iPod touch.
Because there's something visceral if you never try to tablet, okay?
There's something completely different about using a tablet to interact with an application
or just to go into your web browser and sort through your Gmail, okay?
It's hard to explain, but you get to touch the internet and click and do all these things.
And it's a different, more personal, more intimate kind of,
your connection to the internet is just different.
At least, that's how I find it.
And I wanted the larger screen.
That's exactly what I wanted.
I wanted an iPod touch that was bigger, right?
Steve is wrong.
I want a 7-inch one, though, because I want to be able to walk around with it, right?
Sorry, road drives when I'm varying off the road a little bit too much.
So, a 7-inch iPod touch, I think there would be a market floor.
But they do the 10 and everybody is chasing active the 10.
So, the 7-inch Android tablets are a little bit, you know, kind of,
you know, they try it and it doesn't work and they blame it on, you know,
everybody wants to finish tablet.
Probably the most successful one is the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7-inch model.
But my history with this is, oh gosh, two summers ago.
Where's the last summer?
It's not like I said it's last summer.
There were these rumors that there was going to be a 7-inch Android tablet
that was going to be sold by Kmart.
And it was a company out of Florida.
Kmart was their name.
But it was going to be a 7-inch Android tablet and it was going to be less $200.
Woo-hoo, you know what I mean?
This is going to be radical.
It's the right price.
And it's going to be a great thing.
And then they couldn't manufacture enough of them to stock them
in the Kmart stores.
Kmart literally had read and add, I guess,
and their national sales flyer.
And then they're going to have these things.
And then the company could get them.
And it was a minor kerfuffle compared with, you know, Apple news.
And everything else you see on the internet.
But if you follow these things, which I was following,
it was like it was there.
And then it was gone before it even got there.
And I didn't think much about it.
And then it came out that they were at some stores.
But of course this is Kmart stores.
And mostly what we have around here is Sears Grand,
which now they're converting all back into Kmart stores.
But that's an entirely different story.
For those of you who don't live in the United States,
Kmart and Sears are two large retail chains.
And Sears bought Kmart and then converted a lot of their locations
that were Kmart stores into kind of little mini sears stores.
And that kind of didn't work on a retail level.
But retail's a whole other discussion.
Maybe we'll have another discussion about that in the future.
So some stores apparently got them.
There's a few Kmart locations still around town.
I drove by one and they said, no, we didn't get any of them.
And I wasn't going to drive out of my way to go to the two or three Kmart stores
that I know are in the Kansas City area just to try to find one of these things.
So lo and behold, about a month and a half after all of this stuff happens,
I am in the Kmart store for another reason.
And I walk by the electronics just to see what they have.
Because every so often, you know, whenever I'm at the dining store,
I like to look at the electronics and get at the typical drug store here.
Because I think that's a pulse of where technology has gotten into our society.
Walmart, what can you get at Walmart any time you want?
That kind of thing.
So I decided I'd go by Kmart and see what I can see.
And they have one of these things.
So I bought it.
Oh my god, it is the worst piece of carp.
It's a nanogram.
I have ever used.
Okay? It's just, okay?
The great thing about all of the new devices is they have a capacity of a screen.
Okay?
All your phones have a capacity of a screen for, you know,
flicking and dragging and all that kind of stuff.
And that's really what has made all of these graphical user interfaces really usable.
Back in the day, when we were using Palm devices in the heyday of Palm,
I probably still around the house somewhere have a Palm 3.
And I used to have Sony devices.
Up until the time of Sony quit manufacturing in P3 devices.
I had a Sony device that used the Palm OS.
And I was really into the Palm OS.
But those are resisted screens.
The difference is all we did is click on buttons.
We didn't drag a lot of stuff, right?
And dragging and dealing with the Android interface on a resisted screen
will just drive you nuts.
Take my word for it.
Plus it had an old, old, old, old, old, old, old version of Android.
And I think I said enough old there.
I think it was 1.5.
Which, believe it or not, for these cheap, Chinese, you know,
manufactured Android tablets that are under 200 bucks is a fairly goo version of Android.
Some of them are even older than that.
But I think it was 1.5 or 1.6.
And didn't have the marketplace and all kinds of things wrong with it.
But it was less than 200 bucks.
And I finally said that didn't have the marketplace.
Went out and found ways to get apps onto it by going out and searching for the apps and things like that.
Now, you would think that it would be easy, right?
Even though it didn't have the marketplace, you would think it'd be easy to get apps onto this device
because I should just be able to go to the site where they have actually written the app.
And surely they will have not only a little QR code,
but you can get all the little 3D barcode to get you to the right spot on the marketplace.
So you take the little picture and then it takes you to the right spot and you do what you need to.
For, wow, this is interesting.
There's something going on where there's one policeman on a motorcycle who's walking on the highway, walking back to his,
and another policeman who's driving slowly along behind him,
and all of the traffic on the other side of the highway is backed up for at least a quarter of a mile because of that.
I wonder what happened there.
Anyway, so you think you know you can get a little QR code,
now it'll take you to the marketplace or there's a link, right, if you want to go to the marketplace.
But surely there'll just be a link there because it's just an APK. It's a little tiny.
We're talking kilobytes, right, of data here for these little Android applications.
And surely they have a direct link.
So if you don't have the marketplace, you'll be able to get to their application.
Now maybe it won't run in my 1.6 version of Android, but you know, I can deal with that.
At least I can download the APK because that's what Android have like, not APK for their extension.
I can download the APK and I can try to see if I like it.
And guess what? Almost none of them do.
And this is one reason why Android tablets suck because most of them don't have the marketplace.
Because it wasn't a, you know, well for one reason or another they don't.
They didn't pay the money, they didn't do whatever it is.
And it was due to have the marketplace and Google didn't recognize it as a tablet operating system.
Whatever the reason, okay, they don't have the marketplace and you can't get applications directly from the developers.
Why I don't know, but it sounds mysteriously to me.
And what were my, you know, my kids to wander here is they want to push that traffic over to the marketplace, right?
Because as an Android developer, Google wants them, even if it's a free application, okay?
Even if it's a free application, Google wants them to push things over to get it from the marketplace because then Google has more applications in the marketplace.
It has lots of traffic in the marketplace and it makes them sound like they're being more successful with their marketplace that they would be if they let you download the free applications directly.
Now does that sound like a free and open source so everybody's happy to go lucky and, you know, we're all going to get together and think of my kind of world?
Or does it sound like Google wanting to complete against iOS and putting rules on to the applications developers that does not allow freedom of you can get that from any place that you want?
To say it, but it's up to own a tablet.
Pre honeycomb.
No, sorry, gingerbread, let's say.
So it was only gingerbread where the first tablets became available and there were nowhere near this $200, you know, kind of, or below price, which gingerbread, but that was the first one that I knew of.
Some of them follow on to that now basically what I did was I managed to find the candle apps and some other reader apps and the resisted screen is so horribly awful on that one that I did manage to find enough apps on it to make it into a little e-reader and make it a viable e-reader which the resisted screen will handle flipping pages fairly well.
And I cut my losses on that one, you know, and, you know, off and go.
Because I kept it too long to return it to the store.
So now I also came, I later on found an archives.
Now I have this low hate relationship with archives. I've owned archives devices in my I want to stay away from the iTunes universe and the apple way of doing things.
And I want to run some other type of device and I went with our coast because they had some nice design and, you know, had the ability to do video and even, you know, surf the web a little bit, you know, had a touch interface and all this kind of stuff.
Once again, I think it was resistive, but, you know, there wasn't too much dragging involved. I could do a little bit of Wi-Fi surfing the net with it.
And, you know, I tried it. I tried hard to like it, you know.
But the one thing with archives that I didn't like was the design was good, you know, I mean, it wasn't gorgeous, beautiful, you know, artistic, the way the, you know,
the Apple E6R and all those kinds of things, but it was a nice solid device.
It was not cheap plastic, it didn't easily break all those kinds of things.
Well, what I didn't like about it is it didn't have the ability to play certain video formats.
And that was an extra cost option that you had to purchase to do certain video formats like AVI, you know.
So some of the more kind kinds of video formats out there, wouldn't play those kinds of videos unless you bought the extra thing.
So that was a whole 4-inch device. It didn't have the internet kind of things, but it had the ability to play stuff, right?
So then later on, the only thing I liked about it was they had a good size drive there. They had little hard drives in them.
So I had a, you know, a good size drive to have some videos and music and all that kind of stuff stored on the device and, you know,
view those at my leisure when I was on the plane, that kind of thing.
So I forward a little bit, that device is, you know, off doing other things for other people and up comes the 6-inch device that has the internet capabilities, right?
So I come to find out from our coast that when I purchased and paid extra for the video format capability on the 4-inch device, that was tied to the device.
And in order to have that same capability on the 6-inch device, I would have to re-purchase it again.
And that pretty much ended my, you know, intercourse, if you will, with Arcos.
That was, you know, pretty much the end of my usage of that device because I wasn't going to pay them another, you know, pound of flesh to get to the other video kind of formats and things like this.
But Arcos had come out with some interesting, you know, kinds of things as far as the, you know, pads are concerned.
And so they had a 7-inch pad, and I found it once again in K-Mart, you know, K-Mart, surprisingly enough, having this technology there.
Now, the Arcos did not have the regular marketplace.
It had this really kind of not that good Arcos marketplace that they were claiming, you know, oh, that we've got our own marketplace, but, you know, the Arcos marketplace never was even coming close to keeping up with what was on the Google marketplace.
And so if they had their own thing, once again, I don't know what licensing agreements or other kinds of things are involved here.
Is it, once again, because it's running Frollo, and Frollo is in the tablet operating system.
So Google will let them put it on somewhere or other.
There's somebody exercising some control that doesn't, you know, seem like the typical kind of thing that they have in an open source.
I can install stuff and do what I want with the kind of world here, which Android is supposed to be, right?
So I didn't know, however, because I looked into these Arcos devices before, they have a whole line of things.
They're all the way from a small of 2.8 inches, which I read the spec sheets on that, and I can't tell whether that's resistive or capacitive, but it's teeny tiny little screen.
So it's not really good for doing anything good as far as internet browsing or anything like that.
But it's a little player that can play all kinds of formats, and they give it up on this whole, you had to pay extra for video formats.
I mean, this doesn't play everything, you know, AUG, and FLAC, and you know, all kinds of formats, everything.
ABI, you know, the whole gamut of things.
And so it was an audio player, and then they got like a little three inch one or three and a half or something like that.
They got a 4.3 inch one.
And then I think a five, a seven, and a 10 whole line of internet tablets.
They had a five and a seven for a while that were resistive, and I avoided those.
But all these, except for the teeny tiny little one, the 2.8 were capacitive, right?
And so I was kind of following these kinds of things here, and they had a way to, you could hack it without having to do a major like rooting kind of a hack or that kind of thing.
But you could hack it to get the real Google marketplace on this.
And most of those, you know, you could do a little simple kind of a hack and get the Google marketplace onto them so that you could actually get to some apps because, of course, they're all on the Google marketplace, you can just download them.
And so I went ahead and bit the bullet on this one and, you know, fell for another sub 200, you know, kind of a device that didn't really have the marketplace, but I, you know, I did some searching around figured out that I could get it on there.
And so I purchased it and brought it home now.
This one's a little bit different because it uses a different chipset.
And apparently, maybe the chipset in it wasn't the same chipset that everybody had been working on for true roots and all that kind of thing.
But at least there was a way that would, you know, allow you to do this.
This is their second iteration of a seven inch tablet capacitor screen, right price, and I tried it out.
Somewhere along the line here, Android has come out with it. I'm sorry. Amazon has come out with it. Android marketplace.
And I had, you know, been using that on a, another little Android device that I have, and you think it was quite a bit of success.
For some reason on the ARCOS, the Amazon marketplace literally won't work properly, okay?
And so, you know, I thought, well, now the Amazon marketplace with the Android apps is there.
I'm done. My, you know, tablet experience is saved because you just like don't have the Google marketplace on them.
I can run the Amazon, right? So that's what I tried initially. And for some reason, I don't know what to do.
Something screws up. And the Amazon marketplace literally will not actually do anything except come up to the first screen.
And whenever I click on anything else to actually download an app or even go to apps that I've already got, and it, you know, should automatically be downloading them to the true device, no go.
It flips back to the opening screen. For one reason, I have no idea.
So that's out. Google has come up with a web version of the marketplace.
So there's some kinds of things there that I can get to. Plus, like I said, there's the hack here.
But, you know, should I have to do this much work to get a sandwich tablet that just works?
And then only now you can buy something Galaxy Tab. You can get it with Gingerbread.
And it'll have the Google marketplace on it. And it's 350 bucks, which if you shop around and wait, you know, long enough, you'll be able to find a
tablet in that general vicinity, probably four or bucks or so. You can buy a teenage tablet, unless you really want this at an inch.
You know, by the time I am recording this little thing here, I noticed today I've been anxiously following along with it because the iconia from Acer has had a
chin edge version and I kind of like the interface on that and it's running honeycomb, which really you have to be at honeycomb now to get the latest app.
There are certain things on the marketplace that you can't order from a Samsung Galaxy Tab with Gingerbread because it's not compatible with that.
So I'm assuming it's honeycomb that it wants, right? And so there was going to be a seven inch coming out. And just today, when I refreshed Amazon, I noticed that it was available.
And it's in that general neighborhood, also 329 something like that. I was really anxious for the HP touchpad to come out in the seven inch version.
And of course, just about the week that I was anticipating that people were corrected, it really wasn't going to come out.
The HP did indeed make an announcement about the touchpad and it was, we're going to stop making touchpads and we're going to fill them all off at 99 bucks a piece.
I think, or do whatever you're saying, now they're saying, well, that's it. You've got to get this price point of 99 bucks. Now, I don't think they can make them and keep on making a profit for 99 bucks.
It's just too much stuff in there to do that. In fact, I don't think anybody's price gouging too much on the user making too much of a profit. I doubt seriously, you can make it for much less than 300 bucks if you really want the device to not be a total loss leader.
And to lose money on every single one that you build. Now, maybe somebody will figure out how to put WebOS because I really like that interface. I thought it had a lot of potential. It'd be something that there's a one external way underneath there and there'd be something to be able to use there, but that's not going to happen in any kind of early or very soon.
Who knows what's going to happen to WebOS and I think probably the minimum that anybody can make it for is in a price range where you can buy a full size tablets in that same price range.
So there's not much of a difference between a smaller tablet and the larger tablet. Lord knows you can pay way more than that for a tablet.
Rumored is the Amazon tablet. And you know, the Amazon tablet, at least if you're to believe the rumors right now, is going to come out sometime in the Christmas shopping here of 2011. It's going to be seven inches and Amazon can afford for it to be off leader.
So it'll probably be somewhere in the 250 range. It'll have the Amazon app store and I'm thinking it's going to work because it's in the Amazon device Amazon app store and it'll have the Kindle reader on it because that's where Amazon makes their money, right?
And they can afford to make it a loss leader because they'll make up the money and all the stuff you're going to buy because it'll be so easy to just click on it, buy it right there through your Amazon and it'll be this whole little close Amazon world.
And you won't have real Android underneath it, but you'll have all these apps, but what does real Android mean?
All I hear about from the Android phone people is complaints that whoever it is, whether it's the carrier they're on or the manufacturer of the phone never updates the phone fast enough for them and sometimes they never update the phone.
So you buy a phone in a concert fro you and you never get gingerbread or you get gingerbread, but it's after months and months and months.
I know they're developing the interface and you'll notice I never even mentioned what my opinion is of where the interface for Android is compared with the iOS interface.
I'm not talking about usability here in terms of who has a better idea for how the interface should work and how well have they implemented them.
This is just getting apps to the device so that I can use the device besides just running web apps.
So what I really want, I may very well get myself an Amazon tablet as a Christmas present to myself, but what I really want is my Linux tablets.
I want a tablet that I can install whatever distro that I want of Linux or just install a standard kind of a distro that I can actually have control over.
I learned at the Ohio Linux stuff that apparently you can do that with some tablets right now, but somebody needs to do some work on the software keyboards.
Because the software keyboards all suck.
You do indeed have a tablet PC that has a Intel cell processor so that you can install a standard kind of Linux onto that device, but your keyboard is going to suck.
Kind of is the string of all the tablet where you have to set the tablet on to a desk and carry around a Bluetooth keyboard or a portable keyboard and plug it in or do the type of thing into it.
I'm a lottery nut box.
What I want is my Linux tablet that is the fully conceived tablet with a capacitive screen, a decent touch keyboard so I can hold it in one hand and type with one finger of the other hand.
And I can have a real Linux on it and I can install real stuff on it and I can run scripting languages on it and it's really Linux.
Not a Linux kernel with a bunch of proprietary Java applications that Google every so often decide they're done enough with the code to release it to the world to let them port it.
And then of course, I'm, you know, dependent on somebody else to do the port because I don't have the programming skills to exercise my software freedom with that.
I know the big joke in the, you know, in the Android deraughty, you know, world when somebody was claiming that Android was an open and the guy on the Android team basically published the single one.
That you could use to download from get, I think it was the get repository, the Android code that was currently released, okay.
I know it's open and I know I can exercise myself for freedom by hiring somebody to do it, but I feel like a leech, okay.
And I feel like I'm not contributing anything to that because I can't participate in that software freedom of taking that code and getting it to work on my device because there's always something specific to that device from that manufacturer.
I just want somebody to give me a plane vanilla kind of a tablet, I'll install Linux on it and I'll deal with it because I know how to do that.
And that's what I want. That's probably the world we're getting to because if you look at Unity and if you look at known three, everybody's complaints about them that it's done down, that it's, you know, a lot of people's complaints about it is it's different.
And people hate change fundamentally, they hate change and they don't like this because it's not like it was before and it's not like I have spent years developing the muscle memory to deal with, you know,
how I want to get to my stuff, okay. But if you look at those and you keep an open mind, what they're perfect for is if you had a tablet and your finger just goes up there to the top left and you click on something and it shows you a group of things and you flick over to the left and there's the thing you want and you tap on it and it opens it up.
So once you're with a nice big thing so your big fat fingers can hit them.
It's really designed for a tablet. You can still get to everything. You can still design your own filters that give things there to you faster than you could off of a menu system.
And of course you can always install XSE or, you know, any of the other lightweight kind of, you know, desktops if you don't like that.
And I know a lot of desktops are going to go that direction because that's what people want, that's what they, and that's the beautiful thing about the open source Linux will, right.
You can customize, you can have whatever you want. And what I want is a Linux tablet.
I don't want to add right because Android tablets suck.
Unless you spend the big bucks for the one that comes out and then you have to wait and wait and wait and wait until that one is and then you've got it and then you're never going to get the one for the new version of Android that's going to come out in six months.
And the manufacturers never update the one to that new version that you have. So you're stuck there at gingerbread forever or you're stuck there at hunting home forever or you're stuck there at what's the new one ice cream sandwich forever.
Especially if you don't pay the turbulent fund funds that the carriers want for a 3G or 4G radio in there and paying them, they're monthly fee for connectivity that way.
And then you say, Lord forbid that you buy the Wi-Fi only version and don't get it subsidized because you're paying through the nose for your data because that one lags even farther behind in terms of getting any updates.
And this children is why I say Android tablets suck the phones maybe a little bit better because at least every couple of years your contact is up and there's been 17 new models just from that manufacturer that happened in the last two years and you can be watching and though here's the new one that's going to come out and when the contacts up I get a new faster phone.
But you're always dependent on somebody else. You're always dependent on the manufacturer. You're always dependent on the carrier if you've got a carrier based device.
You're always dependent upon somebody who understands how to use that get repository download all the code when Google Danes to release it and then figure out how to hack it to work on various devices.
And I want a little more flexibility on using latest version. Heck, if I had my Linux tablet, I could put something on there that was a rolling release and then I would never have to worry about every six months there's a new one because when I hook in it just download the latest stuff and change over time and I customize it over time and that's what I want to do.
And I should quit fetching and complaining here because in six months or a year maybe that'll exist.
But it doesn't exist right now at every real Linux tablet that they talked about at any of the electronic shows because believe me, I follow this.
All those Linux tablets that they talked about over the last year said sometime mid 2011 none of them are out.
And you hear about them once and you never hear about them again.
So I don't know whether it's just impossible to do. There's no money in it. I'm not sure exactly what it is, but that's the tables that I want because Android sucks and I'd love to be able to carry around Linux with me, hopefully in a seven inch one factor.
So this is together talking tablets and wishing and hoping that he could get the tablet he would like underneath the Christmas tree this coming December, but I doubt it.
Okay, everybody be careful out there and don't say I didn't warn you if you go out and buy an Android tablet, you'll see him. Bye now.
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