Would you buy an iPad Mini ~7inch ??

[cmdrdredd]

The actual benefit to Microsoft's strategy is if you don't like what Microsoft is offering in the Surface, you have some decent options in the Windows 8/RT world. With Apple, there's just the iPad and nothing else. With Android, the only thing worthwhile is the Nexus 7 and no one really buys anything else (I consider the Kindle Fire a color e-reader and an Amazon front-end, not a tablet).

There are plenty of tablets out there that aren't worth buying regardless of the cost. No one would say that the original Galaxy Tab set the world on fire back in 2010, and boy how far we have come from those times...

I own an Asus Transformer Infinity and it does everything I wanted a tablet to do. Funtions as my news reader, comic book reader with the marvel app, links me to facebook and the like, functions as my e-reader, my mobile movie viewing portal. Hell there are even a few decent games that take advantage of Tegra 3 (although I am well aware of Tegra 3 issues).

Surface RT won't even run my copy of photoshop so it's not going to do anything more than what I have now and I sure as hell am not paying $1,000+ for a Pro version. I sold my laptop because I never used my desktop applications on it. Thought I would, but nah...I just ended up reading email and surfing the web. Both are done on my lighter, more stylish, and easier to carry tablet.

If Microsoft wants to wow me, they need a tablet for well under $1k that runs Win8Pro. Maybe Samsung, Asus, or Dell will come up with something like that in time. Right now Microsoft is not swaying me to them.

For the record the Nexus 7 is not worth buying at any price due to the onboard memory limitation.

 

[kaerflog]

I think as usual, people are under estimating how much the ipad mini will sell.
At a $499 price point for every generation of ipad, it sold like crazy.
At $249, it will bring in more people that never gave the $499 a 2nd thought.
I know 8gb is low for us geeks but for most people, they just want a tablet to web browse, play games, read books, etc....
Personally, I love the size of the Mini.
Same height of the Nexus 7 but a bit wider making it 7.85" vs 7" and Apple is making the side bezels much thinner so you can still grasp it with 1 hand.
I had the iPad3 and liked it but it was too big and got heavy at times when I'm playing games, reading books.

 

[BenSkywalker]

Another thing that people seem to forget is that iOS tablet apps are miles ahead Android tablet apps.

Someone completely ignorant to the 7" tablet market would likely agree with you, no doubt. The difference between Android and Apple now when talking about the 7" market is fragmentation. Apple has shattered their devices all over the place while Android from high end phones through the 7" tablet market has fairly well been standardized at 720p resolution with a 16:9 physical form factor. Yes, Apple needs to have custom tablet applications due to their heavy fragmentation at this point, those apps that target the Galaxy S3 work perfectly smoothly on the Note 2 which translates well to the 7" Android offerings.

 

[bearxor]

Someone completely ignorant to the 7" tablet market would likely agree with you, no doubt. The difference between Android and Apple now when talking about the 7" market is fragmentation. Apple has shattered their devices all over the place while Android from high end phones through the 7" tablet market has fairly well been standardized at 720p resolution with a 16:9 physical form factor. Yes, Apple needs to have custom tablet applications due to their heavy fragmentation at this point, those apps that target the Galaxy S3 work perfectly smoothly on the Note 2 which translates well to the 7" Android offerings.

What now?

That only makes sense if you're complaining about iPad apps not working on an iPhone, I think.

 

[BenSkywalker]

That only makes sense if you're complaining about iPad apps not working on an iPhone, I think.

480x320, 960x640, 1136x640, 1024x768 and 2048x1536.

If you are making an app for iOS today, what do you target for a resolution? What about form factor? You can drop 480x320 for devices currently in use. For Android you target 1280x720 and it works on all of the top handsets and most of the 7" tablet market. I would imagine that 1280x720 on Android is actually more commonplace then any single resolution for any iOS devices.

The tablet application issues that people bring up have as much validity as Steve Jobs telling us all that noone will buy an iPhone 5 when it comes to the 7" tablet market. The apps that are designed for Android phones work perfectly fine on their tablets. While Apple has been busy working hard at fragmenting their form factors, Android has been solidifying around one.

 

[dagamer34]

480x320, 960x640, 1136x640, 1024x768 and 2048x1536.

If you are making an app for iOS today, what do you target for a resolution? What about form factor? You can drop 480x320 for devices currently in use. For Android you target 1280x720 and it works on all of the top handsets and most of the 7" tablet market. I would imagine that 1280x720 on Android is actually more commonplace then any single resolution for any iOS devices.

The tablet application issues that people bring up have as much validity as Steve Jobs telling us all that noone will buy an iPhone 5 when it comes to the 7" tablet market. The apps that are designed for Android phones work perfectly fine on their tablets. While Apple has been busy working hard at fragmenting their form factors, Android has been solidifying around one.

I take it you're not an iOS developer (or developer on any mobile platform really), as unless you are making a game, you don't need to explicitly target resolutions.

Here's what an iOS developer really needs to deal with:
1) 3:2 classic ratio for every iPhone up until the iPhone 5 - extremely easy, all developers should be familiar with it. The difference between 480x320 and 960x640 is using @2x assets, which your graphic designer should have high resolution artwork anyway.
2) 4:3 ratio for iPad. Again, the difference between 1024x768 and 2048x1536 is so trivial that most developers who were expecting a retina iPad already had those assets ready (I certainly did). It was as simple as a recompile to turn those graphics on.
3) 16:9 ratio for the iPhone 5 and iPod Touch (5th gen) - autoresizing masks cover about 99.9% of what you need to setup to correctly adjust for the aspect ratio. Obviously, if you have completely custom interfaces, you'll have to adjust your game, but that's no different than if you were on Android.

Oh, and the iPad Mini? Should be absolutely no different than an iPad 2 from a developer standpoint, so zero work there.

There isn't any fragmentation on the iOS platform, where there is plenty on the Android side. I myself can see in the Android console that the most popular phones for my app are still the Galaxy S2 and Droid RAZR, which have screen resolutions that are not 720p. And most of the world has phones sold that aren't 720p either, so no one is consolidating around that resolution (the high end may be flashy, but it's certainly not what sells the most).

 

[BenSkywalker]

I take it you're not an iOS developer (or developer on any mobile platform really), as unless you are making a game, you don't need to explicitly target resolutions.

Black bars a feature now on iOS are they?

There isn't any fragmentation on the iOS platform, where there is plenty on the Android side.

Of course because every iOS device has..... hmm..... a screen?

I myself can see in the Android console that the most popular phones for my app are still the Galaxy S2 and Droid RAZR, which have screen resolutions that are not 720p.

Instead of installs for your app, which is cute anecdotal and all, we can look at sales numbers. 720p devices are fairly dominant for Android devices, iOS devices are selling a bunch of, uhm, what would be the dominant resolution for iOS devices?

I know, black bars are a feature! Android sucks because it doesn't have black bars for its' apps!

 

[zerocool84]

There isn't any fragmentation on the iOS platform

There is definitely fragmentation on iOS. Obviously not to the same degree as Android but it's obviously there. A 3GS or a 4 can't do the same thing as a 4s or a 5 even with the same OS version. That's fragmentation.

 

[cheezy321]

480x320, 960x640, 1136x640, 1024x768 and 2048x1536.

If you are making an app for iOS today, what do you target for a resolution? What about form factor? You can drop 480x320 for devices currently in use. For Android you target 1280x720 and it works on all of the top handsets and most of the 7" tablet market. I would imagine that 1280x720 on Android is actually more commonplace then any single resolution for any iOS devices.

The tablet application issues that people bring up have as much validity as Steve Jobs telling us all that noone will buy an iPhone 5 when it comes to the 7" tablet market. The apps that are designed for Android phones work perfectly fine on their tablets. While Apple has been busy working hard at fragmenting their form factors, Android has been solidifying around one.

Sometimes that makes it a much worse experience. Case in point: Flipboard.

Flipboard on the iPad is an insanely better experience than on the iPhone. The version of flipboard for android tablets is the same as the android phones (and the iPhone). It makes for a sub-par experience. Flipboard is probably a top 3 program on my iPad and I find the experience very second rate on my gtab 7". This is also a downside of the same app for two different hardware choices. Sometimes the experience can be much better (and much different) when you are talking about optimizing an app for a 10" or 7" screen vs a 4" screen. Two apps both optimized towards screen size. Sometimes it works better.

Twitter for android tablets used to be absolutely terrible as well.

 

[bearxor]

New pricing leaks:
http://9to5mac.com/2012/10/20/apples-smaller-ipad-to-likely-start-at-a-minimum-of-329-in-the-u-s/

Basically $329/429/529 +130 for cellular, $459/559/659.

I have to say, I buy this pricing structure better than the other 249/349/449/549 one. Just feels right, if you know what I mean. If the $329 is a 16GB model and not an 8GB, it's cheaper than the original leaked pricing and only $10 more per model for cellular.

If it's $329 for an 8GB model, I won't be getting one. A 16GB, if it comes with the A6 (or a derivative, I would take a SGX543MP2, for instance) and 1GB of RAM, I'll bite. If it's the rumored iPad 2 with a 8" screen, I'll pass.

 

[zoiks]

Nah. Too expensive for something that is essentially just a bigger ipod touch.

 

[boomhower]

There is definitely fragmentation on iOS. Obviously not to the same degree as Android but it's obviously there. A 3GS or a 4 can't do the same thing as a 4s or a 5 even with the same OS version. That's fragmentation.

No it's not, that's called aging hardware. Just because an old piece of hardware doesn't have the CPU power to take advantage of all the latest software features is not fragmentation. At least they get the latest software updates. Good luck getting Moto to release ICS/JB on the OG Droid. Or HTC on the Hero, or any other phone from the same era. Hell you can't get it from the 2010 era of the iPhone 4 either. Both platforms have fragmenting in differing ways.

 

[dguy6789]

There isn't any fragmentation on the iOS platform

By making that statement you are claiming that all iOS apps work perfectly on all iOS devices. That is extremely far from reality.

That said, fragmentation is a buzzword that has no point in being mentioned. Every major OS that has been around for any significant amount of time has it. It's just how things work; you can't have backwards compatibility forever considering how fast things advance.

 

[dagamer34]

By making that statement you are claiming that all iOS apps work perfectly on all iOS devices. That is extremely far from reality.

That said, fragmentation is a buzzword that has no point in being mentioned. Every major OS that has been around for any significant amount of time has it. It's just how things work; you can't have backwards compatibility forever considering how fast things advance.

There's nothing you can do about older hardware. The iPhone 3GS isn't suddenly going to get the same GPU as the iPhone 5. It's just aging hardware.

To me, fragmentation is shorthand for "Android OEMs are so slow at updating Android on their devices, if at all, that most developers see little reason to make apps using the latest SDK APIs, they need a suite of devices to test older versions on because OEMs are allowed to change the kernel (so the emulator isn't enough), and users get angry when an app like Chrome only works on Android 4.0, but most of the world is still running Android 2.3"

I think John Gruber (and I rather dislike most of his comments) said it best paraphrasing "New Android versions are like previews of what features most of the world will get next year because that's when they'll get them on their device (if at all)."

 

[lothar]

No it's not, that's called aging hardware. Just because an old piece of hardware doesn't have the CPU power to take advantage of all the latest software features is not fragmentation. At least they get the latest software updates. Good luck getting Moto to release ICS/JB on the OG Droid. Or HTC on the Hero, or any other phone from the same era. Hell you can't get it from the 2010 era of the iPhone 4 either. Both platforms have fragmenting in differing ways.

I'm sure an iPhone 4 doesn't have the CPU power to do maps due to it's aging hardware.
What good is a software update if it doesn't provide one with the features of said updates?

 

[dagamer34]

I'm sure an iPhone 4 doesn't have the CPU power to do maps due to it's aging hardware.
What good is a software update if it doesn't provide one with the features of said updates?

Developers can write apps using the latest APIs with a large enough customer base to actually buy the app.

With iOS, making a paid iOS 6 only app means you are on the cutting edge and can do some pretty cool stuff.
With Android, making a paid Android 4.1 only app is suicide if your goal is maximum sales.

 

[zerocool84]

No it's not, that's called aging hardware. Just because an old piece of hardware doesn't have the CPU power to take advantage of all the latest software features is not fragmentation. At least they get the latest software updates. Good luck getting Moto to release ICS/JB on the OG Droid. Or HTC on the Hero, or any other phone from the same era. Hell you can't get it from the 2010 era of the iPhone 4 either. Both platforms have fragmenting in differing ways.

An iPhone 4 is more than capable to use Siri. Also calling it the same OS version but stripping out features depending on the phone, doesn't make it the same. It's just reality that all phone platforms get fragmentation when they mature so much. That's why I said iPhone has it just to a different degree.

 

[lothar]

Developers can write apps using the latest APIs with a large enough customer base to actually buy the app.

With iOS, making a paid iOS 6 only app means you are on the cutting edge and can do some pretty cool stuff.
With Android, making a paid Android 4.1 only app is suicide if your goal is maximum sales.

Except when the iOS 6 only app is not compatible with the iPhone 4 that has iOS 6 on it that is.