The first successful Android tablet was the 7” Samsung Galaxy Tab. It was based on a skinned and heavily modified version of Android for phones. Then came Honeycomb and the big push to compete head-to-head with the mighty iPad. After a few successes and many failures to make a dent in iOS market share, the next flavor of Android, Ice Cream Sandwich was launched. It looks like it melted considering its slow rollout, low adoption rate and numerous QC issues.
My Asus Transformer has never been the same since ICS arrived, even after four (count ‘em) maintenance updates. I don’t know who to blame: Asus, nVidia or Google--or all three. In any case, it isn’t cool to release an alpha grade OS and expected to compete with the highly-polished iOS. Nor is it wise or particularly competitive.
Amazon released a game-changer with the Kindle Fire and the Android world was taken by surprise. Several million sold around the holidays and the 7” gold rush was on. Suddenly, announcements were flying around about all kinds of 7” Android tablets from Motorola, Toshiba, Acer, Samsung, Asus, and even Google. Reportedly even Apple wants a bite of the mid-size tablet market..
I managed to pick up a Galaxy Tab 2 7” recently which has a 1.0 GHz dual-core TI OMAP processor and a stingy 8GB of RAM. Thankfully, it also has an SD card slot, allowing me to add another 16GB to make it a very workable traveling companion. It also has a Touchwiz skinned and more mature version of ICS based around the Linux 3 kernel. I had previously owned an original Galaxy Tab 7” wi-fi and was well aware of how compelling the 7” form factor really is. The little GT2 has become my regular traveling companion since it is so small, light and powerful.
With the rumored release of the Google/Asus 7” tablet within the next month, it will be interesting to see if the 7” Android tablet becomes the new standard.
