I must admit I'm somewhat of a gadget-whore. I used to switch phone fairly often when I was on a GSM provider. Ever since I switched to Verizon and got the Droid X, I haven't really felt the need to get a new phone, nor would it be very easy or as affordable to do so considering the significantly smaller number of devices to choose from. However, within a month I've had a Viewsonic GTablet (review on that coming soon) and I just got an iPad today (and yes, I do feel somewhat ashamed when I look at the big Apple logo on the back of it, but ah well).
One thing is clear though, your wallet will be shedding left and right not only for the upcoming Android tablets, but also for fancy new apps to go with them.
On the GTablet, once I got the full Market going that is, all my favorite apps scaled without a problem - unlike what Galaxy Tab users were reporting. They didn't really take advantage of the extra resolution and screen real estate, but they performed in the same way their phone variants did. There weren't more rows in Pulse, or a fancy message pane in Gmail, but they also didn't look blown out like iPhone apps look on the iPad.
Now it's clear that tablets are a different breed of device - ideally they will be more than just another gadget to lug around but more replacements for laptops. We're moving towards cloud computing anyway, so sooner than later storage space and RAM will become less of a concern. Also, Android has attracted some good Productivity app developers so I expect much more is to come. The one problem will be the cost of apps. We do frown right now when thinking about the cost of Office product licenses, but somehow it feels more painful to shell out $10 for a similar product on the iPad (I haven't, I'm just saying). I doubt that Honeycomb will bring out the full potential of what an Android tablet can be, but Google could at least integrate Google Docs more tightly into the system to get things started.
The same thing goes for game developers. Angry Birds looked perfect on the GTablet without an HD version for it. But I have no doubt developers will be offering overpriced versions for higher-res background images and a few snippets of code to extend the viewable area to take advantage of the resolution (I'm not a developer, but I can't imagine there's much more than that to making a game that's already out there work on a tablet, at least without adding new features). So get your wallets ready - at least they'll be slimming down after the holidays.
Image from: androidtalk.com
Fahad a
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