[Galaxy Tab General] buckwheat.phd:
Ipad3 is about to hit, and it'll have at least a 2000x1500 display. The little 4.5" android phones now have 1280x800 displays and look fabulous - plus the new ones announced at the show in January. The little 11" Macbook Air (I know, a different monster) boasts a 1400x900 display - and that was 2 years ago. And they'll get a tech refresh in April that will likely come close to doubling that. As my boss told me -- "It's all about the screen, stupid".

Half of the current run Tablets have soldered in batteries, half don't even have an SD slot. Those that do use Micro SDs and not the full SDs - which are 3x in capacity and much cheaper. The file systems are archaic, and most don't even use journaling.

Most tablets are stuck on 1GB of usable OS ram, some only 512M - circa 2007. Most come out of the factory "locked" so we can't even improve them ourselves. Any improvements are laughingly done by some pretty smart anonymous developers that are doing your job - something you should have done on the drawing board in the first place. (Give HTC an A+ for unlocking the majority of their equipment - despite the threats from ATT and Verizon lawyers). Some of the tablets are locked into cell companies contracts, and most make pitiful phones anyway.

Most are stuck on cell phone processors, with cell phone graphics chips, cell phone IO controllers, and cell phone memory controllers. None have SDDrives (Ipad3 will blow us away with those too in April - watch).

Some are narrowed down to one vendors files types for reading, and reluctantly include other reading s/w (pdfs etc) as if someone twisted their arms. And non-native formats are ALWAYS just awful on these machines (Nooks, Fires etc).

None have Linux as a base, although with enough trouble we can do it ourselves sans the majority of broken functionality (drivers don't work, bugs, lags, bluetooth, batteries etc). And most can't run in the little 1GB of RAM put in these devices anyway.

These manufacturers just don't get it. They're all about to get their collective butts kicked with the new Ipad, and they'll sit back and scratch their heads saying "Why, we didn't know you customers wanted hi-res displays - nobody told us that - it's not our fault".

Ok guys, and that includes you, Samsung. And you, Asus. And Sony and LG and HTC and all the others. You're in for the azz-kicking of your life and you were warned. You're stuck in your closed-door 3x5 room in Communist China, and your products are all ball-and-chained. Jobs was slick enough to make the China-US thing work, and it took $billions to pay off the gov'ts and build production facilities. He made it look easy - but that certainly doesn't mean just anybody can copy that same manufacturing model and make it work as well as Apple did.

It'll take you about 6 months to even come to terms with your incompetence, re-design this mess, and production is another few months after after testing. In the meantime, iPad3 will dominate for the majority of 2012. So maybe next Christmas we'll see some decent Android tablets, or at least the announcements.

Problem is, is you're terrified. You're afraid to do anything similar to what Steve did. You're scared you'll be fired next day. You have neither the capital nor the balls, nor the competence to produce decent equipment. So if I were you I'd just give it up until October - that'll give you ~1/2 year of humility to get your act together. In the meantime, please don't put out yet ANOTHER 1024x768 tablet with promises of OS upgrades someday on the shelves with fanfare. Besides, the Samsung Note cellphone makes a much better Tablet than anything you've produced to date