Gadgetory

what's up everyone John retinue from TechnoBuffalo here the four of you for you of the Android tablet that's kicking off the honeycomb craze full review for you of Google's first four in that world the tablets this is in the Nexus 7 brands new 2013 Nexus 7 this is the latest tablet to come out of Google it is the Nexus 9 I love a good fight iOS versus Android Samsung versus Apple Ford versus Chevy Lakers versus the rest of the NBA and those battles generally play out over decades with one company taken one round the next company taken another very rarely is very clear-cut winner and even more rare than that is a huge billion dollar company laying down their sword and saying I give up but that just happened Apple has won the tablet war Google officially threw in the towel so I hate to be clear this isn't the end of Android tablets it is the end of Google made Android tablets the Nexus line the pixel line and anything that came in between but how we got to this point is a fascinating story and we call it the iPad 2 April 2010 the surprise of no one rumored for years Apple unveiled the iPad which was essentially a giant version of the iPhone and consumers loved that they were bought by the millions and the iPad was a success so that model seemed to destined to translate over to Android that's what Samsung did in September of that year the Galaxy Tab came out and that was a larger version of Android on a bigger screen in fact in some markets it even launched with phone support so that's what it was at the time was a giant version of Android launched with Froyo but Google wasn't set on Froyo or even Gingerbread as the platform for Android tablets it wasn't until the next year 2011 that we saw Android Honeycomb and that was Google's response almost a year after the introduction of the iPad Google said here is how we envision tablets to be here's our version of what a tablet should look like so oddly this tablet wasn't made by Google it wasn't a nexus it wasn't a pixel was made by Motorola and it was called the zoom with an and this was a big deal this is how Google envisions the tablet interface they changed what widgets do they changed the homescreen they changed the look and feel of the OS I remember going into Best Buy to pre-order the zoomin I was pretty hyped down as were a lot of people it looked awesome on paper so pre-orders came in I went to Best Buy picked up my zoom I got home and started playing with it and it was very clear that it was not ready for primetime I had more app crashes than I ever had a new version of Android widgets weren't performing as they should but perhaps the biggest problem was it was being dubbed as an LTE connected device but if you walked the LTE to work Donald did you have to wait several months but you had to send the tablet back to Motorola themselves wait and then get it back and then LT would be working that was not a model that was built for success and Google to their credit recognized it honeycomb was made just for tablets and still goes on record as the shortest-lived version of Android ever but maybe that was a harbinger of things to come since honeycomb we never saw another attempt from Google to make a dedicated tablet OS after honeycomb and starting with Ice Cream Sandwich it was always that main phone os tweaked to work on a bigger screen so Google was clearly down after the zoom I'm going to call it a debacle but a little over a year later they answered and they answered big with the Nexus 7 Rock and jellybean this was the Android tablet experience that should have been from the get-go now I did work as advertised it was an amazing experience you've got giant widgets on a beautiful home screen you got a tablet that performed as it should and didn't have to be sent back to get features to be enabled and the unique thing about the Nexus 7 was it filled a niche that didn't exist if you wanted a tablet it was the iPad at ten inches this was a smaller tablet form factor before phones got gigantic you could see having a three and a half inch phone or a four inch phone and 7-inch tablet were very complementary and it made sense for a lot of people including myself to use in Nexus 7 so what started with the original Nexus 7 of being solid well made really good tablets continued there was another version of the Nexus 7 that was equally well received Google went a little bigger we saw the Samsung made Nexus 10 incredibly well-received tablet I enjoyed it I switched to it people liked the Nexus experience on tablets so I mentioned it at the beginning one of the beauties of Android is that it's open it can be whatever manufacturers want it to be but that can also be a detriment so Android works on different screen sizes by various manufacturers and by default it'll work it'll scale up and down depending on the screen being used and that was the case with the tablets - whether it was the Nexus 7 Nexus 10 whether it was a tablet made by a different manufacturer the apps would get big or small depending on what was being used and that sounds great on paper but the end user experience wasn't always so great who ended up with giant phone apps that weren't scaled properly and developers because Android scaled itself weren't really incentivized or perhaps didn't care to make their apps be tablet optimized and the ones that were was a much smaller field that we saw coming from Apple and the iPad so after the success of the Nexus 7 and the Nexus 10 that's when things started to go downhill for the Google made tablets 2014 the Nexus 9 came out and all its own was a fine tablet continued the lineage that the 7 and the 10 put out before it 2014 tablet market was very different the iPad was maturing there was various other Android tablets available there was nothing about the Nexus 9 that stood out the experience wasn't better than any other out there it was just one happened to be made by Google so if we move forward a little over a year to December 2015 Google shifted from the Nexus line to the pixel line we got the amazing pixel phone so it made sense they ultimately would see it so tablet that's absolutely what we got with the pixel see but this is where things got weird it's come out after the fact and it seemed very apparent anybody who bought one or used one this was made to run Google's relatively new at the time Chrome OS and Chrome OS still had some touch components but it wasn't yet optimized for full touch so Google instead opted to put Android on it what we got was an aesthetically beautiful tablet than any user experience that seemed half-baked so all these little negatives started to add up to a much bigger picture for Google but oddly what seemed to really be the death blow for the Google made tablets was Rome product lyon the rise of Chrome OS will be remembered as what killed Android tablets it wasn't until almost the end of 2018 October where we saw the next Google made tablet but in between and Google really started to cozy up to Chrome OS and make it a full-fledged operating system and we saw some amazing Chrome OS products come out from third parties we also saw Google make their own the pixel book for example is an amazing computer albeit very expensive but one that gave an excellent touch experience I love the pixel book I used it I recommended it it was an excellent end-user experience it was everything that the pixel tablets before hands weren't but the pixel book Walt did flip around was more of a traditional laptop that could do some tablet things October 2018 we got the pixel slate and this was not running Android this is sort of what Google always imagined tablets to be presumably running Chrome OS that also supported Android apps and in theory this sounds like the absolute best experience consumers can have you get an amazing Chrome OS experience with the incredible app ecosystem of Android it is a best of both worlds experience and on paper sounds incredible but like real life sometimes on paper doesn't translate what we ended up getting we got a buggy slow experience that didn't deliver on a promise to consumers of an excellent tablet experience and there are very few products that come out in the market that are universally panned and the pixels slate was one of those products and about eight months later Google announced what I think we all saw coming they were laying down their sword and saying we are exiting the tablet marketplace plain and simple Apple won there other manufacturers still making Android tablets if you look at their slice of the pie it's very small compared to the millions of units that Apple is selling all over the world so Google is out of a tablet battle but the war might not be over just the battlefront might be changing with Google exiting the tablet space they're free to refocus themselves again on the awesomeness that can be Chrome OS I mentioned the pixel book and how good that experience was they already told us a sequel to that is coming with that team focusing on what that pixel book can be and should be the potential for Chrome OS is wide open we might get that experience that we were promised the beauty of Chrome OS the app experience of Android married into one incredible beautiful form factor so a lot of people out looking for is it the answer to not having to use Windows or pay for a Windows laptop or not spend the money for a Mac laptop you might get the perfect laptop experience a little bit of tablet action thrown in