Scoble keeps making the "only 16 apps" claim, but it's absolutely false. To be fair, there are currently 16 featured tablet apps in the Market. But if you search for "HD", "THD" or "Tablet", you'll find a great many more, including a Hacker News reader that I'm currently working on. :-)
What's my take on the Xoom, as an owner and developer?
- The weight and size don't bother me at all, but I've got big hands. I can hold it for hours when reading. The power button, however, is definitely weird.
- Honeycomb and the Google apps are just amazing. I love the application switcher, the notification system, the tabbed browser, the Google Calendar client, the large, interactive widgets, etc.
- There is a shortage of good tablet apps. To be fair, this will be true of any two-week-old tablet platform that tries to compete with the iPad. If we want a two-player tablet market, somebody's got to go through the "no apps" stage.
- The lack of Flash and Netflix is painful, because it means there's very little video content to consume on the Xoom. And the Xoom would be a killer device for watching video. Flash will be fixed Real Soon Now, and Netflix is making very vague noises.
All in all, I love my Xoom, and I enjoy writing software for it. I think that once Flash arrives, and more apps become available, that the inevitable 87 Android tablets launched in 2011 will stand a decent chance at making up some ground against the iPad. And this would be a good thing; even for iPad owners—Apple needs credible competition. And the Xoom is definitely a more credible device than the Android 1.5 phones ever were.
How are you supposed to know to search for "HD", etc? What makes the iOS store easy is that there are completely separate tabs for iPhone and iPad apps. And when you do search, it displays results for both in separate boxes on the results screen. These things make it incredibly easy to find iPad specific apps.
If the android market does these things, that's awesome, I legitimately don't know.
The Motorola Droid has slightly more pixels than other Android phones. This led to a bunch of apps coming out in a "Droid" edition which put those extra pixels to good use. The new tablets have 1280 x 800, 1024 x 768, 1024 x 600 etc. resolutions, so should each one have its own tab?
If tablets are going to be a big part of the Android ecosystem, then I would still argue that they would need some kind of special section in the market.
Would the market app be able to read your devices resolution and then denote which apps are optimized for that? I have an older Android phone (Sprint HTC Hero) with a smaller resolution, can I see/install tablet apps from the market? If yes, that's a bad experience, if no, then it would seem that they can do some sort of detection.
I'm just spitballing here, so this might not even be half baked.
> Would the market app be able to read your devices resolution and then denote which apps are optimized for that? I have an older Android phone (Sprint HTC Hero) with a smaller resolution, can I see/install tablet apps from the market? If yes, that's a bad experience, if no, then it would seem that they can do some sort of detection.
The Android Market already has the ability to hide or filter apps based on the capabilities of your device (eg, features, OS version, etc), and the feature requirements defined by the applications' manifests. If your device doesn't have an accelerometer, you aren't shown any applications that require use of the accelerometers. [1]
For your specific example, you won't see any apps made for Honeycomb on your phone's market just for the simple reason that you aren't running Honeycomb. As for resolution, any application can (and should) be designed with multiple screen resolutions in mind, and the Android API's give developers ample help with this task. [2]
So in all honesty, you shouldn't even have to distinguish between a "tablet app" versus a "phone app"; developers should be making apps that have both segments in mind.
I feel like Netflix is being strangely unproductive on the Android platform. They have clients for both iOS and Windows Mobile 7, but nothing for Android. Honeycomb has built-in support for DRM, yet no Honeycomb announcements.
Now seems like an excellent time for Amazon/Redbox/Blockbuster to throw the doors open on a Netflix competitor (and not just the streaming part) and scoop up the Android market.
What's my take on the Xoom, as an owner and developer?
- The weight and size don't bother me at all, but I've got big hands. I can hold it for hours when reading. The power button, however, is definitely weird.
- Honeycomb and the Google apps are just amazing. I love the application switcher, the notification system, the tabbed browser, the Google Calendar client, the large, interactive widgets, etc.
- There is a shortage of good tablet apps. To be fair, this will be true of any two-week-old tablet platform that tries to compete with the iPad. If we want a two-player tablet market, somebody's got to go through the "no apps" stage.
- The lack of Flash and Netflix is painful, because it means there's very little video content to consume on the Xoom. And the Xoom would be a killer device for watching video. Flash will be fixed Real Soon Now, and Netflix is making very vague noises.
All in all, I love my Xoom, and I enjoy writing software for it. I think that once Flash arrives, and more apps become available, that the inevitable 87 Android tablets launched in 2011 will stand a decent chance at making up some ground against the iPad. And this would be a good thing; even for iPad owners—Apple needs credible competition. And the Xoom is definitely a more credible device than the Android 1.5 phones ever were.