Stuck in the middle

Well here we all are at some kind of mobile half way house. It’s the 28^th of January and the dust has finally settled from CES. Past the casinos and the neon lights CES bought so many other exciting things to the table this year. My personal, if somewhat predictable, highlight was the glut of (Android) tablets, mostly powered by ARM CPU’s. Motorola’s Xoom appears to be Googles flagship device, which they hope will go head to head with iPad2. The UI so far looks slick and intuitive. However, there is always the worry that with a company like Apple, they’ll pull something special out of the bag with its 2^nd iteration, and its possible the others will look like they are playing catchup. Interestingly, while we saw a number of tablets being demoed, there is still a lot of unknowns when it comes to Honeycomb and any small tidbit still seems to have the tech news sites clamouring for coverage.

HTC – one of Androids pioneers, produced on of the more mystifying things to come out of CES. The ‘Flyer’ a tablet based on 2.3 Froyo. Quite why HTC think anyone would knowingly purchase an Android tablet based on a shoehorned OS just a few months before honeycombs release is beyond me. Maybe they are counting on mainstream consumers not knowing the difference. Perhaps true, but a little insulting all the same. NEC on the other hand, made their claim for the most backwards and forwards tablet in the form of their dual screen Android tablet – imagine a large Nintendo DS. Not a bad way to protect the screen but being limited to 384mb of RAM and Android 2.1 is just asking for negative press and more concerningly for Google at least, a negative user experience. If consumers get hold of devices that are a pain to use, it’s going to push them away from Android for generations to come. It’s all very well Motorola and Google getting Honeycomb right, but if everyone else is getting it wrong, especially in the more mainstream price sectors, then all that hard work is undone. At least once Honeycomb is finally released it should signal the deathknell of tablets running 2.xx.

Just around the corner in February is of course Mobile World Congress – this year being hosted in Barcelona. I expect 4G phones to be prolific but this raises some interesting questions about the technologies penetration outside of the US – or lack of it. It will be very interesting to see how this plays out, especially for Apple, who traditionally release a ‘one size fits all’ iPhone and will be keen to take advantage of the speed increase that 4G offers. Other manufacturers can potentially scoot around the issue a little more easily as they often release different phones for different territories.