Today, Daring Fireball linked to a fantastic piece by Seth Clifford, entitled "Why yes, that is a Galaxy Tab 10.1 in my pocket". While the whole blog post is worth a read, this bit at the end resonated with me:
"I guess I'm really most saddened by the fact that I still don't see a contender in this market. I love Apple stuff, but I want so badly to be able to have something else that's as good, if only for a change of pace from iOS. I'm a demanding geek, and that's not going to change. As of right now, Apple's still the only company giving in to those demands."
I'm also a huge Apple fan, but I feel that Apple is at their best when they have strong competitors in the market. This is why I had been thinking about buying an HP Touchpad — I'd love it if the iPad had a strong competitor in the market, and webOS appears to be so well designed (as opposed to Android), that I think it would be great of HP/Palm occupied the #2 position. And so when HP knocked $100 off of the Touchpad over the weekend, I switched from being a "potential customer", to an actual customer:
And while I'm normally pretty judicious with my gadget dollar, and I certainly don't need two tablets, I know that I can't sit around and just hope for a viable, competitive "Post PC" market to appear. I need to vote with my dollars, and so I did. And I'm hoping that a lot of other people did as well. Because while the Touchpad is far from perfect (but it is getting better), I'd really hate to go from a 20-year Microsoft monopoly to a 20-year Apple monopoly. Even though things under an Apple monopoly would be better designed, they also wouldn't be nearly as flexible, or as easy to tinker with.
And so I'm going to be tinkering with a new OS, and a whole new ecosystem that goes along with it. And maybe if I get really into it, I'll blog about it along the way.
-Andy.