ubuntu-tablet team mailing list archive

[brian mullan <bmullan.mail@xxxxxxxxx>]

Why not target a favorite distro to a couple of the most popular existing
tablets

Low-priced media tablets showed tremendous sales growth in 2011, with an
estimated 7.5 million units combined from *Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
*
iHS found that tablets from those two companies accounted for 11 percent of
the TOTAL tablet
market<http://www.isuppli.com/Display-Materials-and-Systems/News/Pages/Apples-Toughest-Competition-in-the-Fourth-Quarter-Tablet-Market-Was-Apple.aspx>.


B&N and Amazon's Nook/Kindle tables rapid market-share grab didn’t hurt
Apple iPads sales but it did appear to hold back sales of other Android
tablets.

I own a Nook Tablet and its hw specs include OMAP4 dual core, IPS displays,
graphics hw accel, wifi bgn, bluetooth, 1G ram, 16G internal storage,
supports usb, 32GB uSSD, no camera or HDMI.

I'd love to get a native linux onto this tablet which is great hw for $249
with Ebay happening to have a sale of new from B&N for just $200 through
this weekend.

Canonical's ARM work has really accelerated over the past year, work with
Linaro.org's ARM effort and I think they are going to support OMAP4 as one
target.

Why not focus and target the most popular existing market leaders...  Nook,
and Kindle Tablets and maybe Samsung and/or ASUS.

Those tablets are all popular for a reason... price, quality of components,
hackability (Nooks are great at this), or hw specs... sometimes its just
because of the OS (android v3.x versus v4.x).

HW manufacturing is expensive even if its outsourced for any new tablet.

Why not build Distro support for what could be an existing community of
potential tablet users and enable others to just go buy one of those and
install linux easily ?