ubuntu-tablet team mailing list archive

[Chris Billington <billington.chris@xxxxxxxxx>]

The tablet PCs or special purpose devices that have shipped in significant
numbers are those where the manufacturer controls the hardware design as
well as the software. For example: iPad, Nook, Kindle Color. Of those, two
are USA-only. There are many Android tablets, but those (mostly) conform to
a hardware spec set by Google.

If we continue to chase the rest of the market by developing for
proprietary platforms that are 'owned' by a third party, we will be
consigned to playing catch-up forever, reverse-engineering and perfecting
hardware support just in time for the maker to replace the platform with a
new model.

As evidence of this, the 'reference platform' for ARM in 12.04 is the
Toshiba AC100- a nice little machine (I have one) but obsolete since 2010.
Now we are proposing to develop and prove tablet functionality on the
Transformer, which has already been superseded. It's an exercise of
academic interest only, commercially speaking.

Only hobbyists and technically-savvy enthusiasts are going to buy obsolete
devices and go through the pain of making Ubuntu work properly on them.
It's not a '95% certain to work' exercise on ARM like it is on x86. I would
suggest that unless an initiative to design/develop hardware and software
together with an OEM is organised, Ubuntu is going to remain what it is
now, a fractional-percentage player in the market, unknown to the vast
majority. That means organising marketing and distribution to selected
markets and setting up post-sales support too.

One potential for 'cheating to get to market faster would be to use the
Android hardware platform as reference specification, and release a
distribution that supports the most common 'China OEM' Android hardware
platforms as a drop-in replacement, but there are still the issues of
bootloader/kernel and hardware support to solve. However, without a serious
approach with potential to sell at least hundreds of thousands of units,
the OEM manufacturers are not going to do much beyond signing an NDA or
shipping a sample. Is Canonical doing anything about talking to OEMs?

regards
Chris



On 18 February 2012 20:19, brian mullan <bmullan.mail@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> 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 ?
>
>
>
>
>
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