Android And The $99 Eken Tablet
With all the recent press iDevices have been receiving, I thought Android deserved a bit of press and, having just received the famed $99 tablet, I began to wonder: can an OS be great without a great device, and can a device be great without a great OS?
When discussing the hardware, there is no way that this can compare with anything on the market. In terms of hardware quality, it is dwarfed by the much larger iPad and the smaller iPhone 3gs and 4, as well as the Blackberry Storm. To put it bluntly, this is not a high quality device.
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But Android, on the other hand, even if it is only 1.8, is something else: intuitive and snappy, well organized and the notification system is above everything else on the market.
I’m a big fan of the long press system, and the lack of multi-touch in the lower versions seems mandatory given the number of earlier/lower level devices with capacitive screens.
So can Android make a crappy device good?
I understand that this isn't a yes or no question, but if Android can make a very average device into something useful, if not an iPad competitor, then surely Android is the way of the future. Apple certainly didn't hit the bull's eye with the iPad, so have Google (albeit indirectly) done it here?
In short, no. For one thing, people are constantly parading the fact that the iPad has no multi-tasking and Android does, but on a 600mhz processor, using multi-tasking is so slow and painful you might as well be trying to run Crysis. Methinks people should stop focusing on doing what Apple doesn’t, and start focusing on what their device and software can. This sort of negative development simply isn’t good for any industry, especially the technological industry.
So, to answer the aforementioned question, Android doesn’t make a crappy device good, but it makes a good effort at it, and, with Froyo, has finally made itself into the power-user mobile OS that everyone wants it to be.
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