Thursday, March 10, 2011

Does the iPad 2's Lack of Revolutionary New Features Foretell Android Tablet's Upcoming Glory?

It has been widely noted that the new iPad 2 is an evolutionary release that doesn't bring many new features to the table. Instead it builds on the existing iPad's feature set or on features that are common elsewhere, such as cameras. Mostly, the iPad 2 is about making the device faster, smaller and superficially better while maintaining a relatively low price.

Still, in terms of overall user experience, the iPad 2 seems to keep its edge on every other tablets out there.

This prominence might however, be nearing its end. The lack of new features to catchup to means that in the near future, Google will have the freedom to spend significant time and resources fixing bugs, speeding things up, polishing the user experience and dealing with fragmentation issues.

Now I see Google, with it's geek culture, as a company full of people that want to work on leading edge new technologies, not fix bugs or obsess over UX details so it is not clear that this is actually going to happen. As a developer, I know these things can be rather dull to work on compared to inventing new things. It is however a strait forward and obvious path for Google to take. If it can manage to motivate a large enough portion of its engineers to at least temporarily concentrate their time on bug fixing, speed and polish, it should take little time for Android tablets to reach and maybe even surpass the quality of Apple's devices.

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