Two great articles on the shanzhai, the rapidly iterating, agile-oriented manufacturing companies in China that start with knock-offs and work towards becoming legitimate innovators in the own right:
I remember purchasing a Chinese MP3/MP4 player 4 years ago. It was a hell cheaper than the ipod. ipod costs $250 and that little "sony" player costs something around $30.
Troubles began with the charger, which finally went to trash and I have had to charge the player using the PC USB port. A few days later, half of the memory was damaged. If I put music (or any other files), I can't read it later on. I used it around 40 times and played may be 100 hours of music. The battery life has dramatically dropped from 2 hours to half an hour.
That being said, you pay what you get for. It's not because it was built in China so it's cheap. My HP computer parts were built in China and Taiwan and the computer was packaged in Brazil.
I'm waiting to see the HP slate with webOS or a cool/iPad-like Android powered device.
How is the screen? Even if it is not an iPad for that price it would make quite a nice versatile photo frame to keep on my desk: slideshow, streaming pictures, email and news. Pretty awesome.
Noone has 2.1 running on the M001 yet, and the speculation I've seen is that it doesn't have the RAM (128Mb) or enough graphics acceleration to do it well.
I was thinking about trying it myself, but I mostly bought it to put debian on it, and remove the board to use it as a robot controller. Not to mention that the Android build process looks tricky and extremely device-specific, from what I've seen :).
At this price, these prebuilt tablets are much cheaper than attempting to build something from the ground up(as with BeagleBoard which admitedly runs a much more powerful CPU)
No Debian yet, all I've done so far is put in a serial console to watch it boot (only had it 3 days.)
There's a photo of it running debian here, and some details for running debian on another device with the same SoC architecture (WM8505):
http://slatedroid.com/index.php?topic=152.0
The easy way is undoubtedly to use debootstrap and keep the current kernel it's running. I think that's more or less an easy and given possibility, because once you have the serial port connected you have a root console (or presumably you can unlock root access in software via Android.)
Building a kernel as well may be harder. From what I can tell, and it's hard to tell because most people (including Eken) aren't releasing source at the moment (sigh), this may be hard because of a bunch of proprietary M8505 modules in the current kernel. Not sure yet, though.
Over the BeagleBoard (and like), the appeal for me (given I'm ditching the screen) is that I don't live in the US. The price of the BeagleBoard plus shipping to Australia makes a big difference.
The M001 is $99 including shipping anywhere in the world.
I would think 2.2 might be appealing, though, given the substantial speedups some people have reported with it. Assuming those come from improved efficiency in the VM, that would be of most benefit to the weakest processors. There's nothing I can see from the CDD that suggests that at least 2.1 wouldn't be supported on these devices, even with limited (or no) graphics flare.
You're correct, I believe 2.1 will run on the same kernel it currently has, albeit sans graphical acceleration.
IIRC, 2.2 will at minimum require someone to build a newer kernel, which AFAIK noone has worked out how to do (see my post above about proprietary WM8505 modules.)
It's hard for a noob like me to work it all out though, because almost noone is releasing any source or doing their development work in public (I intend to post anything useful that I figure out.)
I'm curious. Even being a knock-off, it must be quite some work to get it to look and feel (if not function) like an iPad, no? It looks identical on the outside. The home screen, the icons. I'm actually amazed at how they are able to create apps and devices so strikingly similar, and that too so quickly.
Design is hard. Copying the superficial aspects of other people's designs is easy. For example, even I know how to get a photorealistic copy of the iPad home screen: Run the iPad emulator on the Mac, and take a screenshot. Chop it up with Photoshop if you want the individual icons.
When you don't have to think, making something is pretty easy. The measurements are all there, already optimized for manufacturing, you just need to build the dies. And you can build negatives from the real thing.
Innovation takes time, duplication takes what, weeks?
That home screen looked like the default Android 1.5 home screen that was originally on the G1 (the icon spacing is wider due to the higher screen resolution).
I think what makes the iPad the iPad is the AppStore enviroment - the software vendors, the suport, etc.
But take all that away and for $105, this does look like an uber awesome Linux hacking device! I would really love to get my hands on one. Even better if they beef it up and get some decent hardware in it.
Android marketplace is not very different from the apple store. In fact it's better if you consider that your apps are not going to be removed from one day to another because the boss decided so.
I'm very curious what Mr. Jobs thinks about this. Was the likelihood of this (and the lack of legal recourse) considered before manufacturing iPads in China? How much does it bother Apple? Are they far enough on their next products that it's not a big deal?
Far from a threat. The arrival of clones on the market is expected and is necessarily a part of the plan -- everyone knows that a successful new product will be physically cloned overnight, which is why so much energy is expended on the brand, the associated services, the software, etc.
Meanwhile, this thing is a positive embarrassment for the Android brand. Or it would be if the word "Android" were ever publicly associated with the thing. Something tells me that Google's trademark lawyers -- and perhaps even this knockoff's manufacturers -- will make sure that this fact is not mentioned out loud except on tech news sites...
I would say it's a tribute to Android that it has such wide applications. It's a cheap and mostly functional device. Android devices aren't fashion statements; they are commodities.
I'd agree, the only real threat would be one which masquerades as the iPad well enough to run iPad software & access the app store. Then they'd have a support / image nightmare on their hands. Right now, all they have is something which feeds on a market Apple barely exists in, if at all.
When you add everything up, there's no way that Apple can maintain dominance here. I mean, Google's Android is going to kill Apple's mobile OS. It costs manufacturers virtually nothing to license and use it on their hardware. And China is going to keep on shipping the cheaper hardware.
I think quite the opposite. When you build something expensive and sell it for higher prices, you are attracting wealthy people, who will spend more and more if they like your products.
This is why Apple launched iPod, iPhone, iPad. They have a small/wealthy audience, which makes them profitable more than the larger audience.
I thought this was a thread about a competitor to the iPad, no?
Does nobody subscribe to capitalist market theory anymore these days? sigh
There will soon be many competitors to the iPad. These competitors, unable to compete solely on features or polish (read: quality), will most likely compete on price -- i.e. Hyundai vs. Honda. Competition of this nature can drive down prices on the entire market. It's clear that Apple makes considerable profit on each iPad ( https://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2010/04/how_much_does_it_cos... ) so they have quite a bit of room to maneuver on price in order to put pressure on the market -- i.e. if they make it harder to compete on price, then competitors will have to compete on other differentiable areas, like features or marketing, and very few competitors will be able to do so. A $100 price drop, while eating into profit, is still a profitable price for the device.
Finally, prior to launch, Apple indicated that it could be "nimble" about iPad pricing should if flounder in the market or come under heavy competition ( http://www.techdigest.tv/2010/02/apple_to_lower.html ). See the point above about profitability. The market is extremely open right now and it's Apple's to own and dominate. 2 Million iPads, while a lot, is only a fraction of the potential market. Apple needs to absolutely dominate the market now, and make it that much harder for competitors to move in. They'll either have to iterate with the next version of the device soon, and include obvious features people want, like USB, SD Card slots and a Camera. Or they'll have to cut prices. Considering that the original device pointedly omitted such obvious I/O capabilities, it appears the philosophy will not be to release a new version with those minor modifications. So price seems to be the other logical conclusion.
Common, it's not that hard. Sometimes I swear I feel like I'm speaking moon language.
The UI looks very crude. Slow, jumpy, graphically unpolished and unappealing, and gives a very bad feeling about the over-all product, but this should very well be expected considering how astonishingly short time this knock-off has been brewing since the recent release of the iPad. Very agile development indeed.
But the important, related questions are, with this short development time in mind, what underlying quality in the hardware and software can we expect, and what backing-up of the product in terms of support etc. can we expect from the producer?
My experience is that these Chinese knock-offs are always crap akin to just being "use once" gadgets (have to cost next to nothing to develop and to manufacture), always short-lived, always made only to follow the current hottest buzz, just to sell shitloads, and then quickly being discarded as per the traditional way of Chinese business - once money has changed hands, everything is just great, couldn't be better, and the deal is flawless, done and over with.
http://www.tigoe.net/blog/category/environment/295/
http://www.strategy-business.com/article/09315?gko=0d73e&...