On July 21st, at approximately 9:07 PM, I bet Rushabh one dollar that no Android tablet would come out this year, and receive better than a 5.0 when reviewed by non-partisan site (I chose Engadget).
Well, the review on the new Samsung Galaxy Tab is in, and I lost.
But, what's going on here? Why did I make this bet, and why in the hell, if I was so confident as to wager one whole American dollar, did I lose?
While I can quibble with the particulars of Engadget's review (on the podcast, some of the editors admitted that they might have gone a bit easy on the first Android tablet which has not completely sucked), my basic thesis on this bet is that producing a quality, true iPad rival comes down to software, not hardware. I think reason why it took Apple so long to make the iPad, and the one thing that was the most difficult for them, was the software.
During the announcement of the iPad, Apple's head of iOS, Scott Forstall, basically admitted that for the iPad, they went back and re-wrote almost all of the software. They didn't start from scratch, but for each application, they had to make an entirely new UI layer. Which, for a modern graphical application, represents the majority of the code, and thus, the majority of the work. And this is why I've been extremely pessimistic about the notion of Android tablets (or any non-Apple tablet, for that matter). With Android, Google has been working overtime just to get the software optimized for phones. It's not really clear if they want Android on tablets, but if so, they would clearly want to polish Android some, so that it can make a great experience on a tablet. And to their credit, Google has been trying to dissuade vendors from making Android tablets. The rumors indicate that Google is trying to produce a version of Android that is optimized for tablets (this is potentially the next version — 2.3, a.k.a. Gingerbread). But until that happens, I felt confident that the Android tablet experience was going to suck, for the foreseeable future.
And even though Engadget has given the Samsung Galaxy Tab a 7 (while the iPad only scored an 8), they noted some problems with responsiveness, battery life, and 3rd party apps. And TechRadar was a bit more savage in their conclusion. I think that in reality, for most consumers, there is an extremely wide gulf between the two products. I mean, if you're standing in the AT&T store, and you have a Galaxy Tab in one hand, and an iPad in the other, which one do you think most consumers will pick? I feel pretty strongly it'll be the tablet that has all of the advertising behind it, has the smoothest experience, the most apps, etc. So, I'm pessimistic that Samsung will find any sales for this thing, beyond the Android fanboys.
At this point, it isn't clear how this whole tablet market is going to turn out. Is it going to be like the phone, where Apple is mixing it up with a variety of other vendors, who each have their own strong products and market alliances? Or is it going to be more like iPod, where Apple has clearly dominated all comers, for nearly a decade? I haven't made up my own mind yet, but maybe I'll get around to that in some future post.
But in the meantime, Samsung, bless their hearts, are predicting sales of a million Galaxy Tabs in 2010. If anybody wants to take the other side, I'm willing to wage another dollar that Samsung is going to miss this target.
-Andy.
* Actually, this title is inaccurate. I owed Rushabh a dollar, seeing as to how I made good on the bet last night.