Quote:
Originally Posted by Fluribus
I have three frivolous and largely uninformed opinions about why Google (Apple and Amazon) dropped the micro SD slot...
1) The lack of storage pushes users into the company's cloud infrastructure. It encourages folks to obtain their music, movies, and etc. from Google. It may also encourage folks to buy cloud storage from Google for non-Google stuff.
2) It makes it less likely that people will root the device. Many people who root the Nook tablet use a micro SD slot. Pull out the card and the device boots to its stock OS.
3) If you find out that your whiz-bang 8gb tablet doesn't cut it, you can't simply go out and buy a 16gb micro SD card for $8.00 (current price on Amazon). You should have spent $50 more and gotten an extra 8gb from us. If 16gb isn't enough, maybe we'll let you buy a $400 32gb tablet from us later on.
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1) Yes, I'm sure Google is banking on users being drawn into using their cloud infrastructure, but that's more to do with their "enhancements" to Google Play (making the default home screen look a lot like the Kindle Fire's). As I mentioned before, the move to the cloud has already begun and really has little to do with Apple/Amazon/Google putting the squeeze on tablet memory.
2) You don't need an SD card to root an Android device, you just need to unlock the bootloader -- which has already been done in the case of the Nexus 7. Either way, given that the N7 is an open system (unlike the Nook and Fire) and already has the latest and greatest version of Android available, then nobody but the most fanatical hackers are going to want to root this device. What's the audience for a Nexus 7 running Ubuntu?
3) I agree that Google/Asus will profit from those who decide to go with the more expensive 16GB model. But given that they are selling what is the essentially a state-of-the-art 7-inch tablet at half-the-price last year's state of the art tablets were selling at, I'm willing to cut them a little slack here. As Apple has already shown with the iPhone and iPad, if the people like the device enough, they are willing to fork out a lot of money for a little extra memory. Yeah, it sucks, but Google is hardly the worst offender here.
I think Google has a lot of tablet manufacturers and retailers scratching their heads at the moment. I was looking at buying a cheap refurbished Acer A100 7-incher recently, but even the cheapest price I found of $169 seems extremely steep in the wake of the Nexus 7 announcement.
I'll probably wait until the end of August to see what the other tablet makers decide to do -- Acer, Asus, and Amazon -- but I will be very surprised if there's anything as good as the N7 for $200 that also comes with an SD-card slot and HDMI.