The Android Bazzar: Toshiba Tablet 10" WIFI sneak peak

[RockdaMan]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

That isn't true, specs can tell you a lot about how a device will perform, how it can or cannot handle certain tasks, what browsing experience to expect, how smoothly everything will run, etc.

I just need to know if it will work well or not. Picking it up and playing with it...or reading reviews tells me that.

I know that my iPod touch, despite its small screen, handles large PDF's much better than my Pandigital novel. Why does it?

Don't care. I just know that I've found something that works...and I recommend it and the iPad to others who wanted a mobile device to keep up with the documents that my group uses.

If someone demanded an Android solution, I'd go into the store with our docs and try them out until I found one. But people don't care...when they see it work on the touch and the Pad thats good enough.

You don't sell tablets and cell phones the same way you sold PC's in the year 2000.

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by RockdaMan

I just need to know if it will work well or not. Picking it up and playing with it...or reading reviews tells me that.

I know that my iPod touch, despite its small screen, handles large PDF's much better than my Pandigital novel. Why does it?

Don't care. I just know that I've found something that works...and I recommend it and the iPad to others who wanted a mobile device to keep up with the documents that my group uses.

If someone demanded an Android solution, I'd go into the store with our docs and try them out until I found one. But people don't care...when they see it work on the touch and the Pad thats good enough.

You don't sell tablets and cell phones the same way you sold PC's in the year 2000.

You can't try out all future uses and situations you will encounter in a few minutes in a shop.

Yes, I agree that the manufacturers are trying to change the game and not sell tablets by specs (or even by obscuring specs). And it is a rather dishonest way of doing business. Sort of a second hand car salesman's technique. Specs matter, because performance will depend on them. (That doesn't mean that lousy software couldn't make good hardware perform sub par, but it better specs will mean better performance under normal circumstance -- comparing several Android tablets, for example).

[Andrew H.]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

Yes, I agree that the manufacturers are trying to change the game and not sell tablets by specs (or even by obscuring specs). And it is a rather dishonest way of doing business.

It's just as easy to be misleading with specs as it is without. Perhaps easier.

Is a 10.1" screen larger than a 9.7" screen? Is an 8mp camera phone better than a 5mp camera phone. Does a Xoom with 1GB of RAM perform better than an iPad with 512MB of RAM? Since some Android tablets support flash, should you get an Android tablet if you play a lot of flash games?

I do like to know specs, personally. But I also know that manufacturers tend to provide specs with no context, and that they are often used to compare things that can't be compared. Or that they just don't matter.

Back in 2003 or 2004, when the iPod was just becoming the dominant mp3 player, there were dozens of posts to usenet newsgroups (which still had some residual utility at that time) arguing that some other mp3 player was better than the iPod because it had more features, such as line-in recording or an FM radio...as if you could determine the best player by listing all of their features and the one with the longest list was the best. Ignoring the fact that: (1) virtually no one wanting an mp3 player had any use for line-in recording; (2) FM radios on MP3 players were horrible (I had one on my old Nomad II); and (3) for most people, iTunes (at that time a much tighter program) was vastly superior to the drag-and-drop software solutions other mp3 manufacturers offered almost as an afterthought with their players. And of course this was of much more fundamental importance to the actual experience with the player than the specs hyped by the manufacturers.

So, yeah, I'm interested in specs. But I also know that they can be very misleading when it comes to the actual use of a device.

[RockdaMan]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

You can't try out all future uses and situations you will encounter i

The everyday joes needs don't change that rapidly.

[RockdaMan]

Originally Posted by Andrew H.

Does a Xoom with 1GB of RAM perform better than an iPad with 512MB of RAM? Since some Android tablets support flash, should you get an Android tablet if you play a lot of flash games?

[Prestidigitweeze]

Originally Posted by Andrew H.

Back in 2003 or 2004, when the iPod was just becoming the dominant mp3 player, there were dozens of posts to usenet newsgroups (which still had some residual utility at that time) arguing that some other mp3 player was better than the iPod because it had more features, such as line-in recording or an FM radio...as if you could determine the best player by listing all of their features and the one with the longest list was the best.

Actually, certain of those players did sound better than the iPod. And the iRiver's digital line out gave it the ability to do something the iPod has only been able to do since the release of the Cipher Labs AlgoRhythm Solo this year: be connected to a small battery-powered DAC and amp for portable home-stereo-quality sound.

Don't misunderstand me -- I like the iPod and still own one which was modded by Red Wine Audio in exchange for a review. But I won't be buying a Touch.

Yes, iPods tend to be durable (in my experience) and inexpensive if you buy them at the right time, and acquire more features through third-party solutions than Apple's lockdown would ever be able to prevent.

But the Neuros II and the iHP140 were better sounding devices, and their extra features could be incredibly important. Portable digital recording, for example, which got me through the sonic abyss between DAT machines and the modern flash recorder (since Minidisc was a locked digital format until the very end of its life cycle).

There was custom (linux-based) firmware that could theoretically turn 3rd-gen iPods into recorders (Podzilla, I believe), but you needed a custom hand-built dock to make it work at all. And no third party ever offered such a dock for that generation, which tells you something about how well recording was likely to work.

[GreenMonkey]

Originally Posted by Andrew H.

Back in 2003 or 2004, when the iPod was just becoming the dominant mp3 player, there were dozens of posts to usenet newsgroups (which still had some residual utility at that time) arguing that some other mp3 player was better than the iPod because it had more features, such as line-in recording or an FM radio...as if you could determine the best player by listing all of their features and the one with the longest list was the best. Ignoring the fact that: (1) virtually no one wanting an mp3 player had any use for line-in recording; (2) FM radios on MP3 players were horrible (I had one on my old Nomad II); and (3) for most people, iTunes (at that time a much tighter program) was vastly superior to the drag-and-drop software solutions other mp3 manufacturers offered almost as an afterthought with their players. And of course this was of much more fundamental importance to the actual experience with the player than the specs hyped by the manufacturers.

So, yeah, I'm interested in specs. But I also know that they can be very misleading when it comes to the actual use of a device.

They were right. I never understood what was so special about the ipod. I never liked it as an mp3 player, and I never liked itunes - I think the interface sucks and the organization is terrible - it's terrible for anyone that knows what they are doing at all IMO.

The ONLY good ipod in my book was the ipod touch (which I did use my wife's hand me down for a year or so).

[Prestidigitweeze]

Andrew: With all due respect, the jury seems to be in on your iPod analogy. I'm fairly certain you'll need to choose another. If you doubt it, go to an audiophile site like Head-fi and post your thoughts about early iterations of the iPod there.

You're on much firmer ground comparing the Touch and iPhone to current Android devices, as Apple's iOS is now fairly seamless but Android will be jerking about and force-quitting on any number of devices for quite some time.

Even so, I'm happier with my Epic than I'd have been with the iPhone 4 -- which I know because I borrowed a friend's first.

[Andrew H.]

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

Andrew: With all due respect, the jury seems to be in on your iPod analogy. I'm fairly certain you'll need to choose another. If you doubt it, go to an audiophile site like Head-fi and post your thoughts about early iterations of the iPod there.

I don't think that the jury is out on the iPod analogy (although the jury may be out on my explanation of it...). The jury came back long ago with its verdict on the iPod; it has more than 80% of the market. And the remaining part of the market seems to consist mostly of ~$50 players like the sansa clips that are competing with the nano on price and size.

But the main point is that specs like line-in recording or marginally better sound quality do not matter to normal users. They were offered and they failed in the marketplace. Failed may be too weak of a word; they were utterly destroyed. I'm not sure that iRiver even makes mp3 players anymore.

I think the fact that these specs don't matter to the market is even beyond discussion; at least in this case the market has spoken clearly. (Even though what the market wants is maybe not what the tiny audiophile and DJ part of the market wanted).

The interesting issue to me is why these specs did not matter...and what the iPod offered that did matter.

My take on sound quality is that: (1) most people can't tell the difference in quality while using iPods with the provided headphones under usual listening conditions (i.e., while doing something else). And it was always possible to increase the quality of the sound somewhat by ripping at a higher bitrate than the 2003 standard of 128k. As for the people who use $150 headphones or who run their mp3s through their high quality stereo system? They are probably less than 1% of the market.

My take on inline recording is the same, except that's going to be an even smaller group.

Again, my take on these groups is not that they were in any way wrong - it's just that what matters to them does not matter to most people.

Which raises the question of what does matter to most people. My suggestion, mentioned above, is that most people were much happier with iTunes integration than with competing systems, all of which were more "fiddly." With iTunes, you could rip 10 cds at a sitting, come back 3 days later and plug in your iTunes, and they would all be on your iPod - automatically and mostly properly labeled. You could download a song, plug in your iPod, and the song would be there. You could also easily create playlists, even fairly powerful smart playlists. (And of course the most important part about this functionality is that it happened almost automatically - once you installed iTunes, it worked like this).

Competitors to iTunes at the times were afterthoughts - the moral equivalent of, say, the free scanner program (having a name like "EZScanlite") that comes bundled with your printer. These programs, when they worked at all, which was rare, tended to be very buggy and you basically couldn't rely on them at all. Sony's software was particularly bad in this respect, although not as bad as Sony's decision to eschew mp3s in favor of Atrac.

Other programs tended to be "drag and drop" programs. These had the great advantage of actually working. And people who were fanatical about organizing and categorizing their music files preferred this system to the iTunes system (which takes this out of your hands). But doing this was more time consuming, sometimes a lot more time consuming, especially if you wanted to edit the metadata on the mp3 itself.

And so most people seemed to prefer just letting iTunes manage things.

And, again, I'm not really arguing that people who want to manage their own music files are wrong, or that iTunes' way of doing things is better. But it does seem to be what most people want.

And all of this just to make the point that usability often matters more than specs...