The mall is an easy place to see what’s doing with the tablet business. It seems like every other shop has some Honeycomb-based Android gadget on offer. Telling, though, is the fact that they’re all 10-inch models. So much for the notion that cheap 7-inch tablets would eat the iPad’s lunch. Ironically, the rumblings about the new Amazon Kindle based on an Android fork are making me interested in the 7 again. A 7 might fit in a jacket pocket. An iPad or its imitators? No chance.
Sony has some new tablet that’s thick and round at one edge, a bit like a folded magazine or a regular tablet with it’s cover open. My immediate reaction, unfortunately, was to blurt “You’re not serious.” I don’t think a wedge-shaped tablet is the key to consumer electronic resurrection for Sony, alas.
All these tablets – whether at T-Mobile, AT&T, the Sony store, the Verizon kiosk or the Samsung display – are a widescreen 10.1″ that strongly suggests they are meant to work horizontally first. The vertical orientation was not comfortable for the DSC-in-law and I suspect the round side of the Sony was an attempt to cope with that.
Maybe Ice Cream Sandwich is the answer. Having a unified Android release for all devices might help clean up some of the fragmentation issues – and hopefully put an end to the custom UI blight. But the fact that Amazon is choosing to fork – and the Great Mentioner is higher on the putative Kindle tablet than any iPad competitor yet – suggests that once again, the key to a mobile device is cutting out the carrier and designing the whole widget yourself.