Google to Sell Tablets on Its Own This Year

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052702303404704577312043639469540-lMyQjAxMTAyMDIwOTEyNDkyWj.html

by Slimy • 14 years ago

66 36 14 years ago

online.wsj.com

Zikes5• 14 years ago

After my experience with the Nexus S, any benefits regarding the "pure Google experience" and "first-in-line updates" will be taken with more than a few grains of salt.

It's hard to describe the frustration of putting my trust in them and then watching so many other devices coming out with and being upgraded to Android 4.0 all around me, while I'm left in the dark.

Google, phone manufacturers, and carriers all seem to have a distinct "fire and forget" mindset regarding phones. As soon as it's on the market they move on to the next one, and those of us locked into a 1 or 2 year contract are left in the dust.

ariwilson• 14 years ago

Are you talking about the Nexus S 4G? Because Nexus S (otherwise) is already updated.

shuzchen• 14 years ago

I can attest to this. My wife has a Nexus S and got the upgrade some time ago.

Zikes5• 14 years ago

I am. I should have been more specific, but at the time of posting the Nexus S rollout was volatile enough that the distinction didn't seem important.

Regardless, it took several months too long, for either model.

nextparadigms• 14 years ago

Was there any other phone that got upgraded to Android 4.0 before Nexus S? As far as I know only the Transformer Prime and I think Motorola Xoom got 4.0, but those were already Honeycomb devices, and I believe they were significantly easier to upgrade to 4.0.

But I understand your concerns. For me the actual disappointment came from announcing the Nexus One would not receive it at all. The internal storage and the GPU might indeed suck for 4.0, but I find it hard to believe that there was absolutely no way to upgrade it, especially from the makers of Android. I'd expect a Nexus device to get at least 2 major version upgrades (so a 4.0 device would get 5.0 and 6.0, in this case).

Still, the Nexus tablet is something Google should've done a long time ago, and I was very surprised they didn't release a Nexus tablet in the same time with the Galaxy Nexus, to celebrate the unification of the phone and tablet software. To me that seemed like a no-brainer.

The fact that they decided to take the low-end and try to increase the Android tablet market share quickly, is also a welcome strategy, but I still think they need to be very aggressive about getting tablet-optimized apps from developers to be really successful.

baconner• 14 years ago

Seems to me that the lack of a Google blessed tablet has a lot to do with why we're not seeing much in the tablet optimized app front. We need a stable development platform that's going to get updates at a reasonable clip. I don't want to have to buy a pile of devices or discard them left and right so I can dev on newer versions.

There are other reasons why tab apps are few and far between as well, but not having an n1 equivalent tablet held me back. I gave up waiting and bought a tf prime in December and am finally working on a tablet specific app, but I wonder how long before I'll have to replace it.

fpgeek4• 14 years ago

The Nexus One did get two major upgrades: Froyo and Gingerbread (after launching on Eclair). They just happened to be numbered 2.2 and 2.3.

ajross2• 14 years ago

Solid contender for most-unfortunately-timed post of the week. Factory images for the 4.0.4 went up for the Nexus S not 5 minutes ago.

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/android-b...

Zikes5• 14 years ago

I have the Nexus S 4G, specifically. Still waiting :)

mrinterweb• 14 years ago

To my knowledge no Nexus S 4G phones have recieved an OTA 4.0.x update. I'm still on 2.3.7.

telcodud• 14 years ago

It appears that software updates for even Nexus devices have to undergo some sort of carrier approval.

See Google employee Jean-Baptiste Queru's Google+ post and follow-up comments on this topic: https://plus.google.com/112218872649456413744/posts/LG8VK9NN...

Relevant snippet below:

As for the updates to flagship devices (including the Nexus phones), even though Google tries to get builds ready for all devices at the same time, operator approval varies from one operator to the other and from one device to the other. The 8-month rule of thumb doesn't apply to flagship devices, since all phases are designed to happen at the same time for those, but there's still a bit of operator certification and approval at the end that can't overlap with anything else, and that's what explains the slight device-to-device variance even for flagship devices.

Zikes5• 14 years ago

Was Apple not able to pave the way for a streamlined system to handle this?

If Apple could manage it then Google should be able to, at least if they tried properly.

javajosh2• 14 years ago

> Google, phone manufacturers, and carriers all seem to have a distinct "fire and forget" mindset regarding phones. As soon as it's on the market they move on to the next one, and those of us locked into a 1 or 2 year contract are left in the dust.

Amen. One begins to realize that the serious upside of a monolithic product (e.g. the iPhone) is that your reputation is tied to a single product. With Android, there is no single company to blame for poor software support or constrained upgrade path (Google? HTC? AT&T?)

My sense is that Google is giving OEMs far too many options. The message should be, "Hey OEM, here's the Android project. Do a git clone and install it on your phone. Then you can call it Android. If that's not good enough for you, do a fork and call it whatever you want, but don't you dare call it Android."

I think that the tacit assumption when you buy a "Google Phone" is that it will have an upgrade path similar to the iPhone, and so free of the dysfunctional interplay between Google and the OEM (and, thanks to Google's weight, maybe even the carrier). But this has proven not to be the case. (Google still has a lot of explaining to do as to why the N1 doesn't get Android 4).

fpgeek4• 14 years ago

> Google still has a lot of explaining to do as to why the N1 doesn't get Android 4

No, they really don't. Google has been clear that, in their opinion, the Nexus One hardware doesn't support ICS. And while we all know someone will shoehorn a version of ICS on there somehow (after all, someone did it for the G1), there's plenty of evidence that Google's opinion is reasonable:

- the limited internal storage (512 MB) [ICS distributions are substantially bigger than Gingerbread ones and there were plenty of Nexus One users pinched for space on Gingerbread]

- the relatively weak GPU [less ability to support and probably less benefit from the new rendering architecture]

- no front-facing camera [i.e. no Face Unlock]

- no NFC [i.e. no Android Beam]

- ...

Feel free to complain that Google and HTC made bad choices when designing the Nexus One, if you want. In retrospect, they clearly did. But it isn't at all hard to explain why the Nexus One isn't getting ICS.

jeffool• 14 years ago

How did the Chromebooks do?

I don't ask with snark, but with genuine curiosity. I heard lots of people happy they got the free ones... But didn't hear about many people buying them.

I actually think they WOULD do better off if they made it themselves. Or at least just let Motorola do an exclusive Google-branded model akin to the Nexus.

recoiledsnake• 14 years ago

They sold very poorly, only about 5000 or so for each model after many months after launch.

The Motorola Xoom was a Google experience device but the initial high cost seems to have scared buyers away. Google does not have experience making hardware so it's better they let Motorola make it, but with Google branding.

ryanhuff• 14 years ago

I have one. I can't imagine any modern, budget laptop performing worse than a chrome book. As a last resort, I tried it with my 6 year old son, and he said it was too slow. It now sits in a pile of books.

jahmed2• 14 years ago

If you havent used it recently its much better. I've been using mine since the day I got it and I'm using it right now. Considering this is $200 hardware from 15 months ago I could see this doing really well on $200 hardware today. I always took Google's approach to the CR-48 as making CrOS run well on the least powerful platform possible. If they can make me happy with this it can only get better with cheaper more powerful hardware in the future.

Zikes5• 14 years ago

I have one of the original Chromebooks, from their pilot program.

It's a great device for what it is, and the built-in 3G has actually saved my bacon on a couple of occasions. It made a great loaner device for when my girlfriend's parents had to drive halfway across the country with just a candybar pay-as-you-go phone.

Google's failing was twofold, in my opinion:

1) They initially said the device would sell cheaply, in the $200-300 range. Instead, the two launch devices were $500+, a price range which encroached on territory already covered by other, more powerful, and more featureful devices.

2) Lack of proper marketing. The Chromebook may have been less powerful, but it had a battery life like you wouldn't believe. I used mine daily, taking it to meetings at work to take notes on, browsing the web on breaks, yet I only had to charge it every few days, sometimes just once or twice a week. And that SSD! Every time I showed it to my coworkers, the first thing I did was close the lid to put it into hibernation, then re-open it and show how it was instantly back at its previous state. It truly behaved as though it remained powered on throughout the process, despite going into a low-power state that could last for weeks. Unfortunately, these and other great features were unknown to the average consumer.

As far as updates, however, their setup is top-notch. It automatically downloads and installs updates just like the Chrome browser does, and they update fairly often. I only wish they could do the same with their phones.

harisenbon• 14 years ago

I never got one of the Chromebooks (I don't believe they're even available in my country), but I can understand why they failed at that price point and feature set.

If they were $200-300, then they not only are a great value for a laptop, but would provide fair competition against tablets, which many people want just as a cheap laptop.

But when you get to the $500 price point, you lose any advantage over the ipad, and start to encroach on the $900 price point of the macbook air, who's ssd and battery life is just as amazing as the chromebook, with better support and better specs.

peterfschaadt• 14 years ago

As the owner of a Nexus One I've had some frustrating experiences with Google's customer services. They frustrated a lot of users [1] and it was obvious they were unprepared to handle support issues and angry customers. HTC and Apple both offer exemplary customer service and Google will have a lot of work to do to match them in customer satisfaction.

[1] http://www.pcworld.com/article/186399/google_faces_deluge_of...

veb• 14 years ago

In my opinion, if they had sold it for much cheaper, then that trade off (next to no support) would've been fine.

cageface2• 14 years ago

Support is Google's greatest weakness. If they want to be a successful consumer electronics company they need to step it up fast. Apple is leagues ahead of them in this.

jinushaun• 14 years ago

Unlike phones, tablets shouldn't need carrier approval—at least not to the same extent. Google should have an easier time selling tablets than the ill-fated Nexus One.

cageface2• 14 years ago

They have to walk a very fine line here though. If they push their own hardware too hard they risk driving the other vendors into the arms of Microsoft. If they're too timid then the current excesses of the vendors go unchecked.

Personally I think they're going to have to bite the bullet and become a real consumer electronics company but that's going to be a very painful transition.

phreeza• 14 years ago

Phones really shouldn't need carrier approval either, that's what standards like GSM and LTE are for, right?

ZeroGravitas• 14 years ago

How exactly is this different from the Xoom (and the Nexus phones)? The implicit frame for this news is "Google copying Apple due to failure" but I don't seem to find any information beyond that.

Google to Sell Tablets on Its Own This Year

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