Team Android Tablet adds players

By Mark Milian, CNN
(CNN) -- The Android cabal is reuniting in a new territory.In the burgeoning tablet computer market, Google and its legion of hardware partners appear to be recreating the conditions that helped crown the Android operating system king of the hill in smartphones.


Two newer members demonstrated firm commitments to Team Android Tablet last week.


Sony Electronics plans to launch the S1 and S2 tablets, both running Google's Android, in the fall. Those devices will be Sony's first major tablet products. And together with Adobe Systems, Sony is hoping to breathe life into Android's tablet marketplace with a $200,000 competition for application developers.


"We understand that the Android market today hasn't been exactly what it was forecasted to be," Phil Molyneux, the president and operating chief for Sony Electronics, said during an interview with reporters on Wednesday.


While the total number of Android apps designed for phones continues to skyrocket, into the hundreds of thousands, apps designed for tablets remain a relative rarity. The total, by some estimates, is less than 300.


Compare that to some 90,000 apps made for the Apple iPad or even the 300 available for Hewlett-Packard's just-released TouchPad, which uses the proprietary webOS software. An abundance of apps is crucial to a platform's success, most operating-system providers agree.


A Google spokeswoman declined to make a representative available for an interview. At the company's developers conference in May, Google unveiled a new version of Android that would help app makers design their software to work on most Android phones and tablets.


"We know that high-quality apps are the lifeblood for Android," Android executive Mike Cleron said on stage.


Even Google's partners aren't satisfied in that respect.
"Consumers want more apps for Android tablets," Sanjay Jha, chairman and chief executive officer of Motorola Mobility, said in a recent earnings call. Motorola sold fewer than 250,000 units in the first few months, a far cry from the 300,000 iPads sold on its first day and the 25 million sold in the first 14 months.


Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang told the technology website CNETthat Android tablets have several problems, including pricing, marketing and app availability.


Over the next four years, Android tablets are forecast to gain market share but fail to overtake the iPad, according to a recent report from Gartner Research. Meanwhile, Google had already overtaken all smartphone competitors for dominance in that industry, less than four years after the launch of the iPhone and three years after the release of the first Android device.


But Android's rise to prominence in smartphones, likewise, did not start with a big bang.


However, its challenges were different then. The first Android smartphones were sold by smaller cellular carriers like T-Mobile USA, and there weren't many devices to choose from. It wasn't until Verizon Wireless threw its weight behind Google, with the Droid campaign, that Android blasted off in the United States and then elsewhere.
Consumers shopping for a tablet today can choose from a bevy of Android devices. Samsung Electronics has been producing tablets in various sizes since last year. The needle didn't move much when Motorola debuted the Xoom for telecom giant Verizon.


Industry analysts and executives are struggling to answer the question: Do consumers want tablets, or do they want iPads?


It's a question worth asking, and this discussion is similar to the portable-media players vs iPods debate. The answer in that case, as Microsoft and others learned, was the latter. People wanted iPods. Samsung isn't coming close to unseating the iPod Touch with its Galaxy Player, based on Android software.


Electronics manufacturers aren't waiting idly to find out the answer to the iPad-or-Android tablet question. They are banding together and again, betting on Google to turn the tides.


Toshiba released the Thrive last week. Amazon is working on a tablet, and the Wall Street Journal reports that it will use Android. Research in Motion's BlackBerry PlayBook tablet will eventually be able to run Android apps, RIM executives have said.


Many players will rely on the success of Android as a means to break into the tablet market, but they are still looking for the impetus that gets consumers onboard.

Rant: Android tablet pricing will kill the genre

By James Kendrick

Last month I shared what I believe to be true about the price consumers will be willing to spend on tablets, and with information slowly leaking out that OEMs are determined to price themselves out of contention I can’t keep quiet. My original rant was based on information at the time that the Motorola XOOM was going to be priced at an entry point of $799. I explained why I think that is too high, even for a well-equipped device. Now we are hearing that the XOOM will be retailing in Best Buy for $1199, an insane figure.
LG is showing off its upcoming Optimus Pad at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and it looks really nice with an unusual 8.9-inch screen. The insanity with Android tablet pricing continues, however, as word comes that the LG tablet will sell for €999 ($1350) in Europe. This is so far out in left field that it’s clear the Android tablet genre may be doomed for failure on a massive scale.
Is the problem that vendors are cramming too many high-cost components (or features) in tablets to try to stand out? If so that is a strategy doomed to failure, as it prices the device out of the range consumers will be willing to pay. Apple set the standard with pricing on the iPad, and no matter how any competing device compares with the iPad it better be priced similarly. That means $499 for an entry level model (Wi-Fi only), and well under $1,000 for a fully equipped version.
Tablets are a different class of product that affect how consumers approach the purchasing process. They do not replace an existing class of product, so no price comparison works. It becomes more of a marketing process to stimulate an impulse purchase, and $500 is the magic price point to make that happen. Android tablet makers may be killing the genre before it even gets started. As analyst Michael Gartenberg is fond of stating, a company can sell 50,000 of anything, a point of view I share. But that sales volume is nothing in the consumer electronic space.

Report: Motorola Xoom Tablet to Cost a Hefty $800

• By Mike Isaac

We knew Motorola’s tablet release would make waves upon its release. But with a hefty price tag and data plan strings attached, it may be more of a cannonball.

The Xoom tablet will debut on February 24 at an $800 price, according to a leaked Best Buy ad. And in a small disclaimer line underneath the picture of the tablet, the ad claims that “a minimum of one month data subscription is required” in order to unlock Wi-Fi. If the ad is accurate, that means even if you don’t want to go 3G, you’ll have to buy the 3G service for a month to unlock Wi-Fi access on the tablet.

The ad provides a list of rates for different data plans, with 1GB/month costing $20, 3GB/month at $35, 5GB/month at$50 and 10GB/month at $80. Surprise surprise, there are no unlimited data plans on Verizon’s network. But we’ve been expecting it, as Verizon has been saying for some time that it would eventually do away with its unlimited data package.

As the flagship tablet for Android’s upcoming version 3.0 (Honeycomb) OS update, Motorola’s tablet has received lots of attention from the tech community. Motorola has positioned its tablet offering as a direct challenger to the iPad’s extremely strong 75 percent hold on tablet market share, recently taunting Apple in a Xoom-focused Super Bowl commercial.

The Xoom touts an impressive spec sheet — a 1-GHz dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 processor, 10.1-inch HD display screen, 5-megapixel back facing camera with 720p HD video capture and 2-megapixel front facing camera for video chat.

But even with admirable hardware, the company may find it difficult to get the tablet off the ground if customers feel bogged down with a hefty initial price tag and strings-attached data plan options.

Requests for comment from Motorola were not returned as of this article’s publishing.

Android 3.0: Five Features Your Enterprise IT Manager Will Love

By Eric Lai

Android 3.0 HoneyComb is Google’s attempt to make Android tablets finally competitive with the hot-selling iPad. That primarily means goodies for consumers and developers. But there were some notable features that your IT admin or CIO will love.

Some enterprise features, like strong support for security certificates, remain missing. But the ones added may still be enough to help jumpstart mass adoption of Android tablets in the enterprise. Here they are, ranked from most to least important.

1) Full disk encryption. For protecting data from prying eyes, when passwords and PINs aren’t enough. HoneyComb will not only offer encryption, but it will also allow IT administrators to set policies that force corporate workers to use it (since some workers might skip encryption for performance and battery life reasons).

RIM has long offered device encryption, though BlackBerries have historically not stored much data locally (which is why RIM also offers encryption of data while it is in transport, i.e. sent through the network). So HoneyComb still doesn’t match BlackBerry out of the box, though it does beat iOS 4. iOS’s “Data Protection” feature only automatically encrypts data in its Mail app. For other app data, iOS developers must rewrite their apps to enable encryption. On the other hand, there is no shortage of third-party software that enable policy-based disk encryption on iPhones and iPads (including, full disclosure, the market-leading Afaria software offered by my employer, Sybase).

The downside of encryption, as mentioned above, is a drain on both CPU and battery, though it’s unclear how much. Google does warn that those running encryption for the first time should be plugged in or have a full battery. What’s also unknown: the type and strength of Honeycomb’s encryption, and if/when this feature will migrate to smartphone-oriented versions of Android.

2) Stronger passwords. Android 3.0 offers security-focused administrators three key features: 1) ability to make passwords expireafter a certain time period; 2) ability to mine the password history so as to force users to pick new ones; 3) ability to force users to use complex characters to strengthen their passwords.

3) App compatibility between smartphone and tablet. While Android 3.0 includes many features to make the OS run sweetly on larger-sized tablets, it remains ” fully compatible with applications developed for earlier versions of the platform, or for smaller screen sizes,” according toGoogle’s developer site. “Existing applications can seamlessly participate in the new holographic UI theme without code changes, by adding a single attribute in their manifest files.” This is a boon for developers of all stripes, but especially enterprise ones. That’s because developers of games and other consumer apps where the user interface is a key competitive advantage will still need to rewrite their apps as the screen size shifts. Apart from analytic dashboards, most enterprise apps are more data-driven than UI-driven. Rewrites won’t be needed in most cases.

4) Better user interface. Thumbnails at the bottom of the Android screen that displays all of the running apps, which you can easily switch among. Easier cutting-and-pasting of text. More subtle notifications (bottom right of screen, rather than smack-dab in the middle, passively-aggressively demanding to be acknowledged ala the iPad). Tabbed browsing in Google Chrome. Need I continue?

5) Web-based Android Market. Strictly speaking, this is not a part of Android 3.0, it just happened to be announced the same day. And strictly speaking, nothing’s yet changed for enterprises. What has happened is that users can choose/buy apps via the online Android Market, and then download them straight to their device over-the-air. Contrast that with an iPhone or iPad - if you buy an app via iTunes on your PC, you’ll have to physically tether your Apple device to your PC and sync. Not Apple’s most elegant solution.

The important thing is this: by shoring up the consumer side of its house, Google is now free to focus on improving app distribution for enterprises. Right now, businesses appear to have only two alternatives: 1) post their app on the Android Marketplace or some otheroverly-public app store, and then invite their employees to go and download the app; 2) Point users to a company Web server hosting that file.

Problem is that neither of these channels allows IT managers toproactively push apps and needed updates to employees over-the-air. BlackBerry Enterprise Server has been able to do this for years, whileApple introduced this feature last summer in iOS4.

Google will need to offer this soon to be truly competitive in the enterprise, or some third-party vendor will need to pick up the slack.