Motorola 'flagship' Honeycomb tablet to ship sans Flash Will Brits who choose to splash out on Motorola's 10in Android tablet, Xoom, be able to view Adobe Flash-encoded content? Americans won't. According to US network operator Verizon, the Xoom's Flash support is "expected Spring 2011", and not when the tablet goes on sale on this coming Thursday, 24 February. The omission would …
...I ain't buying one. Waaaay too expensive for a fondleslab that does even less than an iPad, which is itself waaay too expensive for what it is - an entertainment device good for simple apps, games, browsing, music and photos.
Loads of people have responded to previous tablet articles, clarifying their hardware/operating system/price expectations and I agree with them all.
Well I may consider buying one when it is liquidated stock, after it has bombed bigtime due to the issues already discussed umpteen times over.
The words "Bwah" and "Haha" spring to mind. iPad 2 will be out before anyone brings out anything remotely competitive. The tablet market needs good kit from a range of vendors, only rather than making tablets that are good products by their own right, everyone is doing the exact same "Let's do stuff the iPad doesn't do!" bandwagon, and then failing to actually make good on the promises. The android lot need to both ship a good tablet between them (and prove that they will honour the upgrade paths), RIM needs to shut up and just ship ANYTHING, given that they have already introduced the playbook right up the 3rd generation without a single unit in anyones hands, and the WEBOS one needs to arrive on time with the announced spec. Anything else is just handing the market to apple on a plate. And let's not mention Nokia, eh...
Looks like HTC have actually tried to do something different with the HTC Flyer, the 'magic' pen and kid mode stand out as things I've not seen on any other tablet. I've enjoyed using the HTC sense and it really seems to want to challange the other phone/big phone makers. Hopefully the Flyer will be as good as it looks.
Link provided in case you're too busy to search:
http://www.htc.com/www/product/flyer/overview.html
One of the reasons that Apple gave for not supporting Flash was that it would leave them at Adobe's mercy for updates. I assume the issue here is that Flash for Android 3.0 isn't ready yet. While this is borderline tolerable on Android, where users do not usually expect or get timely OS updates, it would clearly be unacceptable on iOS, where users generally get the update a few hours after it comes out. Imagine if Apple had to hold back iOS 5 by six months because Adobe was dragging its heels on Flash!
I bought an Advent Vega from PCWorld (spits) 2 weekends ago.
The Android flavour that came installed on the device was hideously locked down, and apart from not having a decent app store, it didin't support Flash or the BBC iPlayer App.
After about 15 minutes Googling, I found the MoCaDo ROM which replaces PC World's locked down Android with a more "full fat" version which includes Android Marketplace, some other goodies and... Flash 10.1
One hour later I had a properly fully featured Andorid 2.2 10" tablet
It works perfectly fine. the Flash player is perfectly stable. It is nice to be able to watch video content from iPlayer, news.BBC and 4OD on my tablet PC. Very happy.
And it cost roughly half as much as an iPad.
My iPad arrives when I buy a second hand iPad from ebay off an eager fanboi in April. ;)
It is with the proprietary software model. This is what has kept the world locked into the cold dead arms of Wintel for all these years.
If the Flash code were open then nobody would need to wait for Adobe to get around to recompiling Flash for them and everybody could get around to actually making better tablets.
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