from the One-OS’s-loss-is-another’s-gain dept.
Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
Android O and iOS 11 are both set to release in a matter of weeks, but I'm sorry to say that only one of these new operating systems seem to give tablet users much reason to get excited.
If you want a tablet that offers PC-like productivity and a thriving app selection that bears more native, made-for-tablet apps than it does upscaled or incompatible phone apps, you're probably going to buy an iPad equipped with iOS 11.
And while Android O in general will bring a slew of tweaks that we're excited about, including some interesting features like picture-in-picture mode and faster boot times (all underlined with a promise to make updating easier in the future), Google hasn't made enough changes to impact tablet users in a comparably meaningful way.
Of course, this isn't to say you can't still purchase a capable Android tablet that will likely serve your desired purpose. And yep, it's certainly possible that Google might have a few tablet-specific tricks up its sleeve for the software down the line. But as it stands, iOS 11 capitalizes on Android O's seeming lack of focus on tablet chops in a few key ways, all of which Google can improve on.
Source: http://www.techradar.com/news/ios-11-versus-android-o-on-a-tablet-its-not-even-close
Related Stories
Android 8.0 Oreo system images have been released:
Android 8.0 Oreo is shipping out across all the usual distribution methods. The Android Open Source Project (AOSP) is getting the 8.0 code drop. OTAs will begin to roll out "soon" to the Pixel, Pixel XL, Nexus 5X, Nexus 6P, Nexus Player, and Pixel C, and system images should be up on developers.google.com soon. Any device enrolled in the Android Beta Program will also be upgraded to these final builds.
Thanks to several developer preview releases, we mostly know what's in Android 8.0 Oreo. The update brings a big revamp of the notification panel, with a new layout, colors, and features, like "snoozing." Google is clamping down on background apps for more consistent performance and better battery life. There are new, updatable emoji, a faster startup time, all new settings, and plenty of security enhancements, including the new "Google Play Protect" malware system. Most importantly, Android 8.0 brings Project Treble to new devices, a modularization of the OS away from the hardware, which should make it easier to develop and roll out new Android updates.
Google blog. And "When will your device actually get Android Oreo?"
Previously: iOS 11 Versus Android O on a Tablet? It's Not Even Close
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 18 2017, @05:51AM (5 children)
Sure let me pay the Apple tax to purchase a horrendously overpriced device to run iOS. But wait. If Apple Inc doesn't pay taxes, ever, why the fuck should I pay the Apple tax. That's like giving money to Scrooge McDuck when you know the only fucking thing he's going to do with the money is hoard it in a money bin and swim in hoarded money. Hell no.
Fuck Apple.
Fuck iOS.
Fuck You.
(Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Friday August 18 2017, @06:10AM
I don't think so. Halfway through your first step, you'll die of exhaustion**
(grin)
--
**believe me, I tried
still grinning - comes natural when you face is actually a bonny skull
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday August 18 2017, @06:29AM (2 children)
I also advertise linux and embedded, but get nary an inquiry for them.
I recently bought an iPhone 7.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 18 2017, @02:14PM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday August 19 2017, @05:47AM
... on my behalf.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday August 18 2017, @08:28PM
I actually thought he spent a lot of time travelling the world on adventures with his nephews. Those plane flights add up, you know.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Sulla on Friday August 18 2017, @06:06AM (2 children)
Always love Apple advertisements, but I felt the summary lacking in showing off the true benefit of iOS compared to its competition. The greatest feature of this is the extra ~500 you get to spend that puts you in a unique club of attractive Apple users that will really put you ahead of the game when writing your book at the local coffee shop.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday August 18 2017, @07:10AM (1 child)
Writing a book on a tablet? *shudders*
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Friday August 18 2017, @04:40PM
What would you find inconvenient about it? For typing more than a paragraph, sure, you'll want to pair an external keyboard to your tablet. And according to the featured article, iOS 11 will address the iPad's longstanding inability to have both the source material and the text you're writing open at the same time, as a writer will be able to "snap" a text editor to the side while reviewing the source material on the rest of the screen.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by physicsmajor on Friday August 18 2017, @06:09AM (7 children)
They are good for consuming content, and games. These things are just not for productivity. Phones can also do a passable job at pruning email, quick responses/staying in touch with other folks. That's really it.
Why anyone would evaluate their device choices with this as the criteria makes absolutely zero sense.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday August 18 2017, @06:48AM (4 children)
Markedroids and slideshowmen think of them as productive.
The today's tech jornos vomit their pages using info from fed by them (if it wouldn't be so, one could never present MacBook Wheel [theonion.com] as an enough bordering-plausibility satire subject).
Not such a deep mystery, is it?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Informative) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday August 18 2017, @07:12AM
I worked for a Mac productivity software publishers in the early nineties. Whenever we introduced a new product or even just a new version of an old product, we issued a press release.
Quite commonly the trade rags would print our PR's verbatim, but with the name of one of their reporters as the byline.
Are you familiar with the term "Feeding the monster"? The monster is Hollywood's incessant demand for new scripts. When a script has been used just once to produce a TV show or a movie, it's no good anymore.
The trade press is just like that.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 18 2017, @08:11AM (2 children)
Are you saying that markedroids and slideshowmen avoid them like the plague? Like they avoid anything productive.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday August 18 2017, @08:22AM (1 child)
Of course not. Because markedroids and slideshowmen even think of themselves as productive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday August 18 2017, @06:51PM
For marketdroids and slideshowmen, waving shiny things around IS being productive.
(Score: 5, Touché) by Marand on Friday August 18 2017, @07:04AM (1 child)
What you really mean is "I don't have a use for this, so I don't understand why anyone else would." Whether a tablet is good for productivity depends on what "productivity" means for an individual.
The larger tablets with active pens (meaning things like Wacom or N-trig) can make excellent notepad / sketchpad devices, and there's a fair bit of decent art-oriented software made for these devices because of it. They also do pretty well, if paired with a bluetooth keyboard, as thin clients. Android's especially good at the latter, since it has things like Termux [google.com] that take advantage of the Linux kernel underpinnings to provide a decent (albeit incomplete / imperfect) GNU userland. I get a fair bit of use out of an aging Galaxy Note Pro tablet (with a 12.2" screen) between the two use cases.
Termux specifically is noteworthy, at least for the crowd here, for providing a Debian-esque repository setup, so I get things like mosh and emacs, and can copy over most of the config files from my desktop's $HOME and have everything configured just right. Also, since my tablet can show multiple applications in a split-screen view (something Google finally copied from Samsung after years of fighting it) it's easy to keep email or a browser visible while using Termux on the other side.
With one small device, I can write notes, sketch, have a small Linux environment, connect to remote machines and work from them, plus all the usual email/web stuff that tends to get mixed into any sort of productivity, like checking documentation, references, etc. Doing the same things with a laptop requires a larger device, usually with a battery life trade-off, and in most cases, an extra device (wacom tablet) carried with it because there unfortunately isn't much of a market for pen-enabled laptops. Is it perfect? Nope, but neither is lugging around a laptop, pencil, paper, and possibly a wacom tablet just to cover the same tasks. At that point I just start wishing I had my desk, and my desktop.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 18 2017, @08:24AM
So true. I mean, look, producing data points for Facebook is clearly ... production. And with tablets you can really produce them much easier, thus in higher quantities.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday August 18 2017, @06:28AM
I've been working on it since 2009 [warplife.com].
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by julian on Friday August 18 2017, @06:36AM (5 children)
I still recommend iOS devices to everyone who asks me. It will guarantee to reduce the amount of time I will have to spend supporting them later. My father's desktop PC runs Linux (Xubuntu, latest LTS release) but he lives 200ft away so I don't have trouble supporting his occasional issues. For everyone else I tell them to buy an iPad, or a Mac if they're a bit more sophisticated. Anyone more sophisticated than that wouldn't be asking me for advice.
For myself, I use an iPhone. I administer computers every day for my job so I don't want another computer to baby. It works, always, and never has to be fiddled with.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ledow on Friday August 18 2017, @07:48AM (1 child)
I administer computers all day, every day, have for twenty years. Hundreds of iPads, dozens of Macs, hundreds of PCs.
I can't imagine a worst piece of advice, the only redeeming feature is that you can just go "Oh, it's Apple, yeah, nothing I can do, take it back to the shop".
I'm sure that works for some people, but honestly they are the biggest wastes of money ever.
The tech is cheap and under-performing, but irreparable.
Everything that you need to buy for it is twice as expensive and has little substitute, from a charging cable upwards.
Though it can "run Windows"... good luck explaining how to do that to people who don't know what computer to get themselves.
I see Apple as what you buy when you don't know anything, but the Apple looks flash and some people regard them as "ooh... fancy", and you want to buy "the most expensive". It's like the people who can't drive but have an enormous 4x4 monstrosity to take their kid to school in.
I can tell when someone buys themselves an Apple - when those people start emailing documents out, and it's all in Apple Pages format and they have no idea how to save it. So they go buy Office, and then realise it's not quite the same.
And, like all the actual-IT guys I know (i.e. people who manage, repair or service machines) - none of whom would touch an iPhone, iPad or iMac - when they break we just look at shrug. The repair will cost you, we probably can't do it ourselves (iPhone screens are shittily fragile, even when cased, and NOTHING "just opens" - you have to crack open screens to replace drives and all kinds of shit), and if something doesn't work there's almost nothing we can do about it.
Some guy once tried to tell me how much more powerful Macs are. So I ran the same version of MacOS he was running, in a VMWare virtual machine, on an 8-year-old laptop, allocated it the same resources it would have on his Mac, and then used it while it also played a Windows 3D game in the background. It literally out-performed his real Mac still.
Apple are a designer brand. And like designer brands, they have no clue about actual design and think it means "make it look good". People buy it because it looks flash, and others have one because they thought it looked flash, and "look at this, isn't it flash".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 18 2017, @08:00AM
Thank you. I'm not sure why I read the whole thing, but I feel better now.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 18 2017, @12:16PM
The whole 'it does what I need' mantra is very strange to me these days. Even the cheapest Chinese junk is generally good enough to do its job. I find that what spend all my time is fighting to force device to NOT do what I don't want or need them to do.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jmorris on Friday August 18 2017, @01:51PM
This reminds me of a tagline from the BBS days:
If he is an idiot I send him to the Mac Store.
When you recommend a computing device, unlike with any other product recommendation, it seems to imply a lifetime support contract for free. The beauty of Apple is you can explain that "Apple stuff is for non tech users like you. No, I don't have one so I can't help you."
But I will never pay for one because that is all you can do, pay. Under no circumstance will you ever own one. Our choices dwindle. Google is now openly Evil, Microsoft is Stupid and a lot of Linux distros are going Insane.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Friday August 18 2017, @04:47PM
Including people who are learning to program or who program as a hobby? I haven't seen any indication that Apple plans to introduce an iPad counterpart to AIDE [android-ide.com], an IDE for developing full Android apps on an Android tablet. Or ought Swift Playgrounds to be enough for anyone?
Oh.
The one flaw of an iPhone for administering computers is that Settings is the only iOS app allowed to see nearby WLAN access points. There's no public API in iOS for enumerating nearby SSIDs and MAC numbers, which is why the WiFi-Where app had to be pulled from the App Store and Mozilla Stumbler was never added in the first place.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 18 2017, @07:56AM (5 children)
Why do we have an Apple ad barely disguised as a story on Soylent?
PC-like productivity means tons of third party software, not being locked into a single app store, not needing a developer account to develop software, and having a keyboard and mouse, NOT a touch screen.
If I can get ANY of that in an iPad, Apple has done the biggest 180 since the time they offered MacOS to third party hardware builders (and that quickly became a 360).
FFS, the PlayStation 3 originally provided more PC-like productivity than any iPad/iPhone/iPod ever has. Until Sony removed the OtherOS functionality anyway.
(Score: 5, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday August 18 2017, @10:42AM (4 children)
Two reasons:
1) An "Apple is Awesome" story is always going to generate some fun discussion.
2) The submissions queue was almost entirely full of political bullshit.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 18 2017, @02:45PM (3 children)
AKA Stories that highlight things your personally disagree with.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday August 18 2017, @03:05PM (2 children)
Show of hands here: Who all wants SN to turn into an all politics all the time bitchfest?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Funny) by bob_super on Friday August 18 2017, @06:58PM (1 child)
Agreed, we need to occasionally relax from the politics by having rational tech discussions about Emacs and Vi, Apple and MS, systemd, and the ratio of gender-specific bathrooms in LEO vs Mars space stations.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday August 18 2017, @07:40PM
Exactly.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday August 18 2017, @10:47AM (1 child)
Unless the device features a unlocked bootloader to make it possible to install a real OS [soylentnews.org] then don't buy these shit products. They just spy and break on you.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Friday August 18 2017, @04:51PM
I agree with you that one ought to avoid computing devices with Restricted Boot where possible [fsf.org].
But technically, you don't even need an unlocked bootloader to get a real OS. The GNURoot Debian and XSDL apps [xda-developers.com] turn even an unrooted Android tablet into a GNU/Linux tablet. Still, you do need more capability than Apple's iOS Developer Program allows.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Friday August 18 2017, @02:16PM
Okay, so if your entire world consists of wanting only two things, "higher number of native tablet apps than of universal or phone apps" and "a tablet that seems subjectively similar to a PC in terms of productivity", and you care about and consider nothing else; and you impose the further restriction that you artificially reduce your choice to selecting either Android-O or IOS-11, then under these precise hypothetical conditions, the author predicts that you will choose the IOS-11 device. Carefully hedging his bets with the word "probably."
This is, at best, damning the iPad with faint praise.
But of course, there are other considerations. Cost/Value (what you get divided by what you pay). Free Software & tinkerer basis vs. Black Box Inside Be Proprietary Dragons basis. Go with what you know vs. strike out with an alien-to-you system.
And then, the interesting combination of the below:
... okay, which one? ...
... So the one you're excited about is the Android O, okay, got it ... so this means?
Wait, what?