Top Tech News

Dozens of newborn tablets were undraped at CES this year, most of them running Android -- Google's "organic," open-source operative system, that people and corporations can ingest without stipendiary a authorise fee. It gives them a nous start in creating devices you'd want to use, whether they're hot newborn toys in the spotlight (like the Motorola Xoom) or relatively obscure faith favorites (like the Notion Ink Adam).

Despite the excess of Android-powered options, though, the iPad ease dominates paper computing, with most 73 proportionality of the market. Its deal of that market's profits? Given Apple's premiums, it's belike higher than that. So ground is that the case? With every of these Android tablets around, how become there's no iPad dolphin yet?

Economies of Scale

As Fortune school blogger prince Elmer-DeWitt points out, Apple's got the numbers stacked in its favor. It gets Brobdingnagian discounts on components, because it buys so some at once. It designed its possess processors, instead of having to acquire them from others. And it sells iPads finished its possess retail and online stores, which gives it an modify large accumulate of the cash from apiece sale.

On crowning of every these advantages, Apple advisedly keeps the iPad 2's toll low, to attain things harder for its competitors. So when modify a "name-brand" paper same the Xoom comes out, it has some advantages over the iPad and a earnest toll disadvantage.

Virtuous feedback cycle

"We hit a Brobdingnagian first-mover advantage," says Apple COO Tim Cook, "and we hit an dumbfounding individual experience, from iTunes to the App Store and an enormous number of apps and a Brobdingnagian ecosystem."

The iPad 2 didn't meet become discover of nowhere. Whether it'd designed to or not, Apple's been antiquity up to it for years; prototypal with iTunes, then with the iPhone, and then with the App Store. Now there are over 65,000 apps for the iPad, every of them prefabricated meet for it and every of them exclusive acquirable finished Apple channels. Many app developers target exclusive Apple products, since there's inferior money to be prefabricated anywhere else.

From the Apple Store's retail cathedral, to the prototypal sync with iTunes on a Mac or Windows PC, to activity with newborn apps and games from the App Store, everything takes locate within an ecosystem that Apple's painstakingly built. Android, by contrast, has Google's apps ... but Google, which gives everything away for liberated and then "makes it up in volume" with ads, has never been able to replicate the seamless individual undergo that Apple fans ready stipendiary for.

Fragmentation

That's what it's titled when apiece of the Android smartphone and paper companies has to go it alone, disagreeable to compete with Apple on Apple's terms. They every hit Google's Android OS, but some of them alter anything added to the plateau ... same HTC's Sense individual interface, that it based on its work for its pre-Android phones.

Trying to plug every the disparate components into a logical whole is a hassle, and digit reason that Apple wins is because it controls every the parts that it uses. But Android's open-source nature offers a possibleness solution: What if Android element makers cooperated to attain the pieces that they were missing? Instead of every of them doing a slummy job, they could every do a great employ together, and differentiate based on their areas of expertise.

In a way, that's what they're doing right now. But as we've seen so far, the results leave something to be desired.

Jared Spurbeck is an open-source code enthusiast, who uses an Android sound and an Ubuntu laptop PC. He has been writing most profession and electronics since 2008.

Source