Last week, I discovered that a good friend of mine owns a Segway. I was pretty surprised by the news. I’ve never seen him riding it. I’ve never even had reason to say “Hi, Terry. That’s a handsome, ultra-long new overcoat you’re wearing. And congratulations on mastering the skill of walking at speeds up to 12 miles per hour without moving your legs in any perceptible manner.”
He told me that it was a secondhand one that he’d acquired on impulse. A local promoter had bought it new for an extremely high-profile city event and afterwards, sold it to my friend just to get rid of it.
(Hang in there. I promise that this has something to do with CES.)
I’ve ridden Segways and have found them to be both Fun and Cool. Buy would I ever actually buy one?
A new Segway i2 costs more than six thousand dollars. At that price? Oh, hell no.
My friend bought his barely-used secondhand Segway for five hundred dollars. At that price? Oh, hell, yes.
This tale has been on my mind this week. As expected, many major companies have unveiled working samples of their new slate computers at the Consumer Electronics Show. All of them look a lot like iPads. Almost all of them are designed to run Android 3.0. And the last line of each product announcement reads “... pricing is yet to be announced.”
The prices of these slates are (God-willing) three-digit numbers, when rounded to the next dollar. It’s just three characters of ASCII text plus a dollar sign. And yet without that one bit of data, these announcements are barely even useful. The first well-engineered $250 tablet will set the world on fire. Any Android tablet that costs more than a comparable Intel i5-based notebook computer is only of value when set on fire for the insurance money.
None of the CES slates even have ship dates and many of them aren’t even available for sampling on the CES floor. By and large, these slates have only been shown off by senior company executives at highly-orchestrated, keep-your-distance-please events. None of these executives exploited the opportunities to walk us through the key features of a company’s 2011 tent pole product. Each one of them smiled and held their slate a little nervously, and seemed eager to get to the end of the demo before The Bad Thing They Were Told Could Happen, happened.
(Anyone who’s ever seen the host of a local morning TV show cuddle a zoo porcupine knows exactly what I mean.)
Well, if we can’t see any of these devices run, we can at least admire them as they get lined up inside the starting gate.
I talked a bit about ASUS’ slate lineup in a previous post. They introduced two 10.1-inch Android models, a 7-inch Android, and a 12.1-inch Windows tablet. I’ll say this about that last one: I’m not bullish about Windows slates but if any company can produce a usable 12-inch Windows tablet and sell it at a reasonable price — even with a for-real Intel processor like the i5 — it’s ASUS. If they can sell them for just $500 or $600, it’ll put even more pressure on all the other slate makers to find an aggressive and attractive price.
Windows is in no way optimized for touch input, but the ability to run any Windows app is a nice plum. And a fullscreen-maximized version of the Kindle app or any other app doesn’t necessarily require a multitouch-savvy OS.
There’s a definite machinegun approach to ASUS’ other slate offerings. They’re trying everything. Their two 10.1-inch models are the Slider (with an integrated slide-out keyboard) and the Transformer (which offers a slim detachable dock with an integrated keyboard and battery extender). My nine months with my iPad have taught me that when I don’t intend to use a keyboard, I don’t want to carry one ... and when I do want one, I want it to be big and comfortable and I want to be able to angle the screen however I want. So I have to be a little skeptical about the Slider.
Otherwise, the hardware is identical: they’re built around the Tegra 2 processor with a GeFORCE graphics unit, front and rear cameras with HD recording, and an HDMI port for 1080 HD video output. 3G will be an available option. They’ll ship with Android 3.0.
Finally, ASUS announced the 7.1-inch MeMO, another tablet that ships with Android 3. It’s one of a few different high-profile 7-inch Android devices, which can offer two things that the iPad can’t: jacket-pocket convenience and a price that’s closer to that of an ebook than a notebook. I’d love to see a company do something fresh with this kind of device, or kit it out to do one thing exceptionally well (there’s definitely a market for a device that promises to be the best mobile email device anybody can buy). But it’s possible that a successful 7-inch slate needs only be an Android 3.0 device, and $250.
So many of these iPad-ish 10-inch tablets are like the women on “Real Housewives.” They’re all aiming to emulate the same ideal of beauty and have undergone so much work from so many hands towards that single goal that they’re mostly indistinguishable from each other. And they’re all made mostly from the same inorganic EOM components. I’m looking through my notes and count five that merit little more notice than “10 inch screen, Android 3 OS, Tegra 2 processor, front and rear cameras, HDMI out.”
I’ve marked two Housewives as standouts, based solely on their networks. LG’s G-Slate will be sold through T-Mobile as the carrier’s flagship 4G device. They’re committed to getting this device on the streets ASAP and hitting speeds of 42 megabits per second from day one.
Verizon is a little less edgy about the Motorola Xoom. It’ll communicate at 3G speeds when it originally ships, and then can be upgraded to 4G later on in the year. Verizon’s certainly my favorite network, at least. I’d never choose a piece of mobile hardware based solely on its data network but with so many slates of (apparently) (for now) equal specs, I have to note that Verizon is my favorite network. Whenever I have devices from multiple carriers and developersin my pockets, Verizon is the last one I expect to not find a usable signal. If I get zero bars, I know I’m either in a Faraday cage or the state of Vermont.
I trust Motorola to make a good piece of hardware. I’m also keen to see if Verizon will press the advantage of being able to provide a consumer with both national mobile service and home broadband. My iPad can connect to my home file servers and even control and mirror my Windows and Mac OS computers from anywhere in the world via the AT&T network. The VNC process is though often fails. If Verizon were to release a slate that could have an implicitly unbreakable connection to my home network – gads, including my entire music and video library – then this slate would quickly become an Item of Intense Interest to me.
Source: www.suntimes.com
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