“ To make our schedule to ship the tablet, we made some design tradeoffs. We didn’t want to think about what it would take for the same software to run on phones. It would have required a lot of additional resources and extended our schedule beyond what we thought was reasonable. So we took a shortcut.”
Android head Andy Rubin on Honeycomb.
It’s looking like the Apple’s biggest advantage is that it caught everyone so unprepared. The pressure from the pundits, partners and Wall Street forced other companies to spend big and rush incomplete tablets to market to beat the iPad 2’s launch. This lead to empty promises and wonky builds: Honeycomb is half-baked*, the Xoom’s much touted Flash abilities arrived way after its ship date, and the Playbook is still just a claim. (Via GigaOm)
* And by half-baked I mean: it won’t run on many devices, it doesn’t support MicroSD, and Google just said it won’t release the source code. Between the Xoom not running Flash and Android’s source not being released, it seems the claimed differentiators of the iPad’s competition are iffy at best.
