[Discuss] Google's Nexus 7

[Richard Pieri]

On 7/11/2012 9:52 AM, Stephen Ronan wrote:
> One reason I asked... my impression (pls correct me if I'm wrong) is
> that you think that iPad's dominant position in 10" tablets is quite
> secure.

I do.  I don't think that Jellybean is going to unseat iPad in that
space for one simple reason: iOS has never been technically superior to
Android.  It doesn't matter how much better Jellybean is to either iOS
or prior versions of Android because the technical superiority of the OS
has never been a factor in the public's eye.  Consumers don't care about
technical superiority.  They care about convenience first and maybe
affordability second.  Cases in point:

VHS vs. Betamax:  VHS won for the simple reason that you could get 2-4 
times as much recording time per cassette than you got with Betamax.

Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD: Streaming beat them both because of the convenience 
and instant gratification of click and watch within a few seconds.

Consoles vs. PCs: Consoles keep beating PCs for gaming because of the 
convenience that the gaming appliances offer: no need to worry about 
hardware compatibility or viruses or anything.  Just push a button and play.

Silly Ungainly Vehicles vs. everything else on the roads: 'nuff said.

iOS is doing the same thing in the mobile spaces.  Sure, Google 
activates twice as many Android devices a day as Apple activates iOS 
devices.  That makes for a nice press release but it's not the whole 
story.  The most recent figures I can find (Feb 2012) place HTC at about 
16% of all Android activations daily, Samsung at about 11% and Motorola 
at about 10.5%.  Apple is beating the top three Android OEMs combined in 
terms of activations per day.


> If you've still got your crystal ball handy, Richard (or anyone
> else), how long do you think it'll be before we see a sub-$200 tablet
> able to do voice to voice language translation, including at least
> one pair of languages offline. As a monolingual guy living and
> working in multicultural neighborhoods, that'd be a very appealing
> app for me.

Twenty years?  Conversational voice recognition is hard.  Really, really 
hard.  It's one of the most challenging problems in computer 
programming.  Machine translation isn't much easier.  Run this message 
through Google's translator to the language of your choice and then back 
to English and you'll see how the best in the world fails.

-- 
Rich P.