Earlier this year, I was lucky enough to meet Josh Clark at FOWD. I’d been reading his articles about flagship apps and content first, and I was very keen to have a chat with him about a discussion I’d had with a client. I had been discussing which platform they should be targeting, and depending upon who I was talking to at the client (and their opinions on the goals of the project) the decision on a choice of platform was different.

Josh, and his mobile vs native talk, positioned this decision as an “audience/content/budget” question, which matched the conversations I’d been having with my client. At the end of his talk I said to Josh, “this would make a great flow-chart, like that one that Jessica Hische did!”, “Yeah, that’d be awesome!”, said Josh.

I’m very pleased to say, that after some delay, it’s ready for public consumption.

With a lot of help from my company and colleagues Ed Hartwell-Goose,  Fin Edridge and Simon Dring we made an interactive flow-chart to guide our clients, other industry professionals and their clients through the minefield that is choosing the platform for your app. We called it, “So, you want an app?”.

It’s still a simplification of the whole process but, in researching it, three things became abundantly clear:

1. You must know your audience – there are no exceptions to this. People use different phones for very different things. Blackberries are used by teenagers for BBM and by corporations because of it’s security and low data usage; iPhones are very high-end consumer devices; and Android phones are thought of as being for very technically minded people, but they’re also entry-level smart phones. Picking a platform without knowing what your content and its audience is a recipe for disaster.
2. Your content needs to be simple to access – all end-points on the flow-chart will need some form of content platform behind them to drive engagement, re-use and to keep the app up-to-date. If you’ve got an old CMS, you may have to build a light-weight web service to let your app access the content easily, quickly and efficiently. People use apps to get at content, and whether they’re a game or social media, your content is king.
3. You cannot do this half-heartedly – and by that I mean you’ve got to have a decent budget. Also at FOWD, Matt Gifford was joking that the £50 website was now a £75 website; apps are suffering this problem. Apps are viewed as small, simple bits of functionality that you can knock-up in a weekend; this is simply not true. Apps are often full-sized websites with the added complexity of fitting the core content onto a tiny screen, but since they look small clients think they’re easy to make and do, and are therefore cheap. Stories in the news of 14-year-olds making games in the app store top 10 aren’t helping either. Start with a 5-figure sum, and keep going upwards if you want your app to really succeed.

I also mention PhoneGap a lot in the flow-chart, and that’d because I genuinely believe it’s a great solution to the “discoverability” problem. This is where you have a mobile web site that isn’t getting enough exposure as people think of “apps” as items in the “app store”. PhoneGap fills this hole nicely, and gives you access to device hardware as a brilliant bonus. The tools are easy to use and PhoneGap Build now takes all of the hard bits of building for Blackberry and Windows Phone away.

Still, there are gray areas in the platform selection process, especially when it comes to tight budgets and enterprise apps. If there’s only one thing you take away from this tool it should be this: Content is King, know your audience and how they will use your app. The rest flows from there.

You can find the tool here: www.paconsulting.com/so-you-want-an-app – I’ll post the full poster version here when it’s completed.

Please, let me know what you think, and let me know if you use it for a client as well, share your stories and share the tool with your friends.

If you liked this, you may also like:

1. Handling iPhone App Ideas
2. Easy iPhone Applications
3. Why iPhone Web Apps are Still Worthwhile

There’s one question that I get asked a lot:

I’ve got this great idea for an app…… what do you think?

I run the mobile development team at my employer, a role that I really enjoy and feel privileged to be doing. I get to work with cutting edge technology, forward-thinking clients and brilliant developers and user experience experts. There’s always a flip side, and for this role it is filtering out the bad ideas from the good ones.

The process
I have a simple process for capturing and evaluating ideas: listen, write it down and do a quick estimate of effort and benefits. If the benefits do not heavily outweigh the effort, say thank you and move on.

That’s it in a nutshell, but it’s a bit more complicated than that. Lets step through the process.

Ideas
An idea will come from one of two sources:

1. The media, or
2. A personal need

Ideas based in the media
The request goes a bit like this:

Hi Steve, have you seen this article about this cool iPhone/android app? Well, I think we could do something similar (for the other platform)! It’d be great for [publicity/marketing/a demo/this client I have/making lots of money]. What do you think?

If I get a request like this alarm bells start ringing in my head. Clearly, someone else has already done this, and therefore has 3-6 months development time ahead if we were to start developing a rival app. Requests based on the media tend to be for porting android apps to iOS, and unless it’s an android-only developer, there’s likely to be a good reason why there’s no iOS version. Take the BBC 3G strength meter app. It’s only on android and I was asked if we could do an iPhone version. The answer was simply “no”. The long answer was, “do you really think the BBC wouldn’t have tried to make an iOS version? Of course they would have. It’s not possible. iOS doesn’t allow you that level of access to the phone’s hardware.”

The only time that an idea from the media would meet the benefits/effort threshold is if there was a direct client opportunity and the idea came from demand, rather than porting an app. Augmented Reality was a big buzz topic a few years ago, but finding a useful application for it for a client was a challenge, hence I didn’t make an AR app.

So, unless there’s a direct need for an app, it’ll go into my big black book of ideas for a rainy day.

Ideas from personal need
The best ideas for apps come from genuine need. You can quote me on that. When someone comes up to me and says,

I’ve got this problem, I need to …… I thought it could work as an app?

I listen and I’m always much more hopeful. If someone has a need, then you can bet that other people have that need too. It may be something like large manuals or reference information for a specific sport e.g. SCUBA diving, or an app that collects a lot of information together and displays it usefully. These are the kinds of apps that I like people to talk to me about, and that straight away get to the top of the to-do list.

Which app to do first?
This is a tricky question, but it should be one that you can answer. Follow this formula:

Potential audience * USP / effort

1. Your potential audience, on a scale of 1-10 where 1 is “just you” and 10 is “every phone owner”
2. USP (Unique Selling Point) on a scale of 1-10 where 1 is “It’s a twitter app” and 10 is “best idea ever, never been done before, it’ll revolutionise the way we live”
3. Effort is a 1-10 scale of how long it’ll take you to make the USP work (1 is short time, 10 is long time). It is not how long until you can get a first release out, it is how much effort will it take to create the hook for users.

So, for a basic twitter app, you will end up with a formula of 8*1/4 = 2. For an app for flight controllers, you’d get 3*7/7 = 3, so you’d be better-off spending your time on the flight controllers app. Either way, they’re both not very high scores, so you may want to keep looking for better ideas.

Yes, I know it’s a contrived example, and that it won’t apply in every case, but give it a go if you are given a few ideas and don’t know which one to do.

What next?
Once you’ve got your good idea, don’t ignore any other ideas that come your way. Keep writing them down, keep doing the analysis, and you’ll always have an idea in your pocket to fall back upon. You may have so many good ideas that you’ll have to hire some more developers to work on more apps, and that is a very good problem to have.

If you liked this, you may also like:

1. So, you want an app?
2. Why iPhone Web Apps are Still Worthwhile
3. Easy iPhone Applications

Over the last few months I’ve been making a web site for my wedding. Emily (my fiancée) and I didn’t want your run-of-the-mill wedding website, hosted by someone on an unrecognisable domain (for example, ewedding.com or gettingmarried.co.uk sub-domains). I wanted something that I had control over, that I could make as the perfect website for us, not a nice template that thousands of others have. We wanted something personal.

Secondly, these pre-packaged themes aren’t suited to modern web standards. They just-about work on small screens, and quite a few of them use flash, or they take 5-10 seconds to load (lots of people, heavily shared servers, you do the math). Don’t get me started on the ones that play music in the background.

So I started with a solid foundation of responsive web design and HTML5. This is how I did it.

The spine of this site is:

• WordPress for the CMS
• 320 and up for layout
• Tangerine and Scriptina font
• Appcache to increase performance

WordPress
I used wordpress because it’s easy to make great themes quickly. You’ve got full control of the output in a simple CMS. Job done, but for one thing: the default theme doesn’t use HTML5 semantics.
I took the WordPress html5 boilerplate from Jeffrey Sambells and used that as my base, giving me a good template for responsive web design.

320 and up
The choice of layout framework, 320 and up, comes from seeing Ethan Marcotte present at Future of Web Design, showing off the Boston.com re-design. I thought it was a wonderful talk and seeing how a site responds to screen size and context on such a high profile site made me rethink my views on responsive design. I used to think that for large, image-heavy sites, it just wasn’t economical to make a site work with media queries.
It’s a change in mind-set to design for mobile first. Thinking like that, instead of retrofitting a smaller design onto your UI, makes the whole proposition a lot more appealing. Andy Clark took this concept and made a framework out of it, and that is 320 and up.

320 and up works on the principle that you code a mobile site, and layer additional layout on top with media queries for each of the sizes you want to support. Coding this way also makes you very aware that the content is very much the purpose of the site, and that nothing should be left out, no matter what screen size you’re on.

Adding 320 and up to the HTML5 WordPress baseline wasn’t as easy as I’d have liked. No offence to Malarkey, but you don’t need all of the 320 framework to make a great site, so I cut a number of the hacks out and updated the respond.js library. Still, it solves many of the gotchas for you, so use it

320 and up has these screen size stops built in: 480, 768, 992, 1182, and a high-dpi option for retina displays . For my this site, I added in 768 and orientation: portrait to deal with iPad portrait mode problems. It’s up to you what stops you use, but these worked for me. If you want to support the galaxy tab and other screen sizes, more media queries are easy to add in.

The Design
There’s a lot of CSS3 that’s gone into this site. The background and header uses CSS3 multiple backgrounds to allow the layout to flex without the overhead of another div to layer the extra backgrounds on. Note, I did chicken out and add those extra divs in as it just didn’t look as good on IE7/8 and that’s what 30% of people are using on my this site.

The font choice was very important for me and Emily, and FontSquirrel came to the rescue. It’s got a great selection of script fonts that just aren’t available in the standard set that comes with computers these days. Text shadow adds to the effects but isn’t essential, so it doesn’t look out of place on IE.

My use of box shadow is basically in place of borders. It makes the whole theme pop off the page with slight shadows and a red tint that matches the theme really well. However, box shadow on the iPhone and small screen devices slows down scrolling, and should be used sparingly. Lovingly, responsive web design lets me turn it off for small screens

There’s lots of other little things, like using CSS3 selectors so that class names don’t have to be used all the time, and some nice stuff for the first letter, and also border radius (as standard).

Performance
The site uses appcache to speed up the site loading, and it makes a massive difference. The cache is around 1MB, that’s data I’ll never have to download again. It works on all of the latest browsers and mobiles (where is makes the most difference). I can’t recommend it enough.

For the useful information section, I used local storage to keep the different sections open/closed so that it’s the same when you come to the page next time.

Summary
In summary, this site has allowed me to showcase responsive design, mobile first, lots of CSS3 and make it work in IE7/8. Take a look at the source code, and learn. Oh, and wish us well on our wedding

If you liked this, you may also like:

1. Re-design
2. A Week in Web – May 17-21st
3. Future of Web Design Sketchnotes – Day 1

Over the last few days I attended the Future of Web Design conference in central London. It was a great two days meeting some of my peers and heroes of web design. Here’s my notes from Day 2, featuring Ethan Marcotte, Femi Adesina, Josh Clark, Bruce Lawson, Martin Beeby (from #LWSIE the day before), Elliot Jay Stocks, Sarah B Nelson and once again, Josh Clark!

Sketchnotes for Day one can be found behind this link.

Thank you once again to everyone involved.

If you liked this, you may also like:

1. Future of Web Design Sketchnotes – Day 1
2. The Future of Web Typography with Richard Rutter (LWS Future)
3. The Progressive Web with Andy Hume (LWS Future)

Over the last few days I attended the Future of Web Design conference in central London. It was a great two days meeting some of my peers and heroes of web design. Here’s my notes from day 1 including talks from Aaron Walters, Mike Kus, Rachel Andrew, Robin Christopherson, Daniel Rhatihgan, Sarah Parmenter, Dan Rubin, Matt Gifford and Aral Balkan.

Day 2 sketchnotes can be found behind this link.

If you liked this, you may also like:

1. Future of Web Design Sketchnotes – Day 2
2. Sketchnotes from #LWS3D – A 50-line WebGL app
3. The Progressive Web with Andy Hume (LWS Future)

The iPad 2 may be an “all new design”, but Apple attended the same school as Porsche, making few changes on the surface and lots under the hood.

Does anyone here own a Porsche? No, me neither. However, I have been lucky enough to have driven one and I watch top gear all the time (which clearly makes me an expert in such matters). I can confidently say that since 2003, two “new” Boxster models have been released, and the shell shape, which apparently is better than ever, has not changed. In the same way, the iPad 2 is a complete redesign, and yet nothing has really changed. Though that’s not a bad thing.

What changed on the Boxster is the same that has happened on the iPad, the engine and electrics got a big tweak, and it’s whats under the hood that really matters.

For the iPad, they have a new processor, the heart of the beast. It is (likely to be) a ARM Cortex A9 dual core CPU, meaning it can multi-thread better and reduce power consumption per calculation thanks to architecture improvements. This gives it the same 10 hour battery life as the old model. That means it’s faster too, a bit like every new Porsche is faster than the last. It’s also a bit lighter, thanks to improved manufacturing processes meaning they can get rid of the wall and taper the edges of the device. it’s not a big improvement there, only 60g saved, but the feel of the thing has changed for the better, another thing that Porsche will tell you makes the new model an essential purchase.

Yes, the iPad 2 has new features: the cameras and gyroscope. However, these are sanity factors and the iPad is simply catching up with it’s older siblings. There was nothing unexpected in the announcement, a very nice looking cover and an HDMI connector being welcome but nothing out of the ordinary. This is very much a “tock” product, with the innovation to come in the next version.

Is it worth it?
Is it an essential purchase? Well, like with the Porsche, if you already have one and want a new one, you have more money than sense. But if you don’t, like all Porsches, it’s very, very tempting and will make you the envy of your friends for the next 6 months until the next one comes out

If you liked this, you may also like:

1. What do you want from a re-design?
2. I could really do with an iPad right now
3. Emily vs the iPad

I’ve been experimenting with browsers for the past few days. Ever since Firefox 4b11 blew up (literally couldn’t do anything, even with a re-install) I’ve been playing with other browsers. I’ve been an Opera user since 9.5 and I’ve been very happy – but you can’t help thinking, “is life greener on the other side of the fence? Is Chrome better?” So, I tried to answer that

No, it’s not.

After setting my default browser to Chrome 10 dev channel, I set about finding extensions to match what Opera gives you out of the box. I end up with the speed dial, gesture and colour picker extensions, as well as a funny little flag icon that is supposed to tell me where a server is from, but doesn’t work. Overall, none of these extensions were as good as Opera’s default functionality. The speed dial slowed my computer down more than sped it up and it didn’t have the Ctrl+(num) navigation that I love so much. The gesture plugin was good but not as quick as Opera. The colour picker was fine and matched Dragonfly fine.

Just, in general, browsing seemed slower. Tabs seemed slower to change and page rendering wasn’t as smooth. Font rendering wasn’t as smooth and, although it was GPU accelerated, didn’t feel right.

So, what was better in Chrome? Well, the web inspector has a better UI, but Dragonfly has come on leaps and bounds in terms of performance. Neither of them are as good as Firebug, but web inspector currently trumps Dragonfly. To be honest, that’s about it. The Omni-bar is good but just as good as Opera’s. Weirdly, Chrome works better on my company’s network. I guess software designed for windows just understands NTLM authentication better than browsers designed for Unix.

So, for me it’s back to Opera. Have a go with both yourself, download Opera and Chrome today and see which you like best. Let me know in the comments.

If you liked this, you may also like:

1. Opera Dragonfly – Some Suggestions
2. Why I Use Opera – A case for the browser underdog
3. Opera 9.5 Released

It’s Mobile World Congress 2011 this week, and amongst the throngs of Honeycomb tablets, Nokia and Microsoft square dancing on the showroom floor, there are a few announcements that may not be hugely exciting to the general public, but that the tech community should be giggling with glee about.

I’m talking about this:

Kal-El benchmark, courtesy of Anandtech

This is Nvidia announcing the Kal-El SoC (System on Chip), a 12-core Tegra 2 GPU mixed with a quad-core ARM Cortex A9 CPU, all on one chip. Even better yet, this chip will be seen in tablet computers in 6 months time. That’s an incredibly aggressive timeline considering the brand new Tegra 2 chip is only 9 days old, and yet it’s performance has already been doubled.

The even bigger news that has slipped by, is that that’s not all.

Tegra 2 roadmap, courtesy of Anandtech

Notice the scale on the left hand side. Whilst the new chips are rising in a linear fashion, that’s a logarithmic scale, so every year, these chips will double in power. By 2014, we should have SoCs in mobile computers that are 4 times as fast as a Core i7 CPU and 25 times faster than a Core2 Duo. That’s an amazing amount of computational power in a chip the size of a peanut with a TDP of ~1W.

Modern UIs need this power
So what are we going to do with all this power? Whilst it’ll be like having an XBox 360 in your pocket, games aren’t the only thing that will use this power.

Just take a look at Microsoft’s Beauty of the Web demo site, showing off IE9′s hardware acceleration enabling it to make blizzards with HTML5 web technologies. That’s just the start of what we’ll be able to do with this power. Think how useful Honeycomb’s 3D Google maps will be, and think how it can be used to empower a mobile workforce, being able to take your entire desktop with you and have it work like your desktop pc. It will enable the mobile user to process huge data sets which previously would have been a server job, letting the workforce make complex decisions quickly and on the move.

Of course, don’t expect things to change overnight. The first things to happen will be “true” multi-tasking, then a proliferation of HD video including Skype. It’s taken years for web developers to embrace CSS3 functions, it’ll take another few years to truly embrace canvas, SVG and WebGL.

The future vision is coming
At CES 2009, Microsoft showed off a video for their Office of 2019 concept (below). The hardware announced today will drive this forward and enable developers to make these UIs of the future. I can’t wait to be part of this future

Images in this post are from Anandtech.com

If you liked this, you may also like:

1. Dangers of an open mobile OS
2. Is WordPress putting whitespace in your XML? Here’s how to fix it
3. What Would the Best Mobile Web Toolkit Do?

Emily and the iPad

Aaargh! I hate this stupid thing! Why won’t it do what I ask it to do!

I heard this cry coming from the living room one evening. My fiancée, Emily, was trying to use my beloved iPad to write an e-mail. “What’s it done this time?”, I politely inquire in response.
“Everything!” came the reply, “All I want to do is send an e-mail, how hard can it be!”

Always wanting to help (like the loving husband-to-be I am) I show her how to copy and paste, move the cursor and find the comma key on e-mail layout keyboards, but then it struck me, why is this so hard? So, I asked her to sit down with me and tell me all of the problems that a real person(tm) has with Apple’s latest gadget.

“Firstly, before I met you, I hadn’t ever used a Mac. I had heard they were just for designers and arty-farty people, but they’re just normal computers for every-day use. This is not about not understanding Macs, this is about the iPad. Also, I love the long battery life, and I really like the screen, it’s brilliant.”

“I’m a Hotmail user, and I can’t get more than 50 messages when I’m using the Mail app. Your GMail account works fine, searches on the server and everything, but Hotmail is a second-class citizen and doesn’t get all the features it should. It also doesn’t sync read/unread items back to the web interface (which I use most of the time) so I don’t know what I’ve read and what I haven’t.”

“There’s no iPad app for Facebook. The iPhone version on the iPad looks rubbish, as do all iPhone-specific apps. The visual quality is really poor and not what I’ve come to expect from the iPad.”

“I’m left-handed, and sometimes the iPad doesn’t pick up the gestures that I make. Tapping on an icon sometimes sends me to the search screen! The whole interface seems to have been made for right-handed people.”

“Moving the cursor around when entering text is painfully slow and really inaccurate. When I’m moving it the magnifying glass is right under my finger so that doesn’t help at all! When my wrist touches the screen the whole screen moves and suddenly jumps to the bottom which is infuriating.”

“It’s heavy. For a girl, it’d be nice to have it in a handbag, but the iPad is too large and heavy for that. It wouldn’t fit in 80% of my handbags and any it would fit in would also take a 13″ laptop, which would be far more useful.”

“I’ve not played many games on any platform so I can’t compare the iPad to anything else like that. Still, the games I play on it are fun, if a little pointless.”

“Getting stuff on to it is hard. iTunes is an issue and if you don’t use Google/MobileMe, something like Dropbox or have your work e-mail on it, it’s even harder to put stuff on it. It needs a USB port to load documents on. The camera connection kit is good, but it’s pretty slow.”

“There’s no Flash support for it, and to me that’s critical. For example, checking the weather on the BBC, I can get the basic information but the radar weather map doesn’t work. Sites that have their own video player, like Wedding TV¹ don’t work, and for me, that seriously hampers its usefulness”

“I want web sites to work the same on the iPad as they do on the PC. These ‘Mobile-optimised’ sites are suitable for the iPhone, but not for the iPad and they shouldn’t come up (N.B. this is referring to the Hotmail mobile web interface). I don’t want to have to learn another interface. If I wanted just e-mail, I’ll use the Mail app, but since I want the web site in the browser, show me the actual web site!”

“It’s just not an improvement on a laptop for the situations where I’d use it. If I wanted something that size I’d take a laptop instead as it’s has a DVD drive, all my music and all my web sites.”

“All that said, it’s a brilliant device that has its purposes and has generally replaced the laptop for general Internet browsing, but for what I want something that kind of size to do, it just doesn’t do it.”

¹ Yes boys, it exists, it’s on Sky.

These aren’t the typical usability problems that his lordship Neilsen came up with, they represent problems of someone who uses Macs, works with a computer every day, and still has issues getting things done on the iPad. To be honest, some days I do too (discovering that yet another web site uses Flash is a classic).

What gets me is that many of these can be resolved by Apple and their close partners: making Hotmail work better with Mail, doing more testing with left-handed users, Facebook releasing an iPad app, Hotmail turning off the mobile site for the iPad, making the iPad render pixel-doubled iPhone apps properly (I refuse to believe that text can’t be made smooth), and finally making iTunes work better for file management (or enabling people to use explorer/finder).

The moral of the story is whilst you can’t please everyone with your designs, don’t think solely about your target audience. Try to think about the people around them who will use the device and make sure it works for them too. If you’re after a more practical use for this story, learn that the iPad isn’t perfect, in fact, it’s far from it. I still believe it’s the best that’s out there, and I’d love Emily to get her hands on a Galaxy Tablet to compare the two. We’ll have to wait to see what 2011 and Android 3.0 and the BlackBerry Playbook can bring to the table to gauge if the iPad has a real competitor which can make my fiancée happy!

If you liked this, you may also like:

1. I could really do with an iPad right now
2. Droid Doesn’t do tablets
3. iPad 2: the Porsche school of “all new design”

As a developer and iPhone fan, nothing pleases me more to say that Android has caught up with the iPhone. Android hardware has been great for a while, the Motorola Droid and Nexus One being the first in a wave of great devices, but the software hadn’t been right. Android took its sweet time to develop but finally has all the great features iPhone users have enjoyed since the iPhone 3G and more (wi-fi hotspots for example).

Thing is, the iPhone, and iOS, has moved on.

Since the launch of the iPad, every Android-lover has been waiting for a tablet with Android on it. They want the brilliance and openness of Android on a more useful (day-to-day) form factor. To those people, I say wait, it’s not ready yet. In order to put iOS on a tablet, Apple had to fork the code base into two versions, iPhone 3.1 (later 4.0) and iPad 3.2. To date (though that may change at the September 1st event), these two branches have not converged, nearly 9 months later. Apple did this for a very good reason: the native controllers and views are not suitable for tablet devices and new paradigms needed to be created.

The SplitView Navigation controller, necessary for much of the good UI interaction on the iPad. Courtesy of Apple

Android tablets, on the other hand, are content with throwing the same old mobile-centric code at tablets. For example, today Archos unveiled five new Android 2.2 devices from 2.8″ to 10.1″ and Samsung is about to unveil their Galaxy tablet which is a 7″ Froyo device.

So, why isn’t this a good idea. For one, the Android developer API says it doesn’t support screens larger than 4.3″. That should be a pretty good first clue. Take the iPad HCI guidelines for a second clue. It states that full screen transitions are bad, interfaces have to be tailored to the device, and you have to do more than just blow up the interface to twice the size. Take a look at how iPhone apps look on the iPad for that one.

iPhone app on an iPad, now think of an Android app, just blown up.

Truthfully, the current Android SDK just can’t cope with the demands of a tablet UI. Little things like smooth transitions when rotating to big things like having universal apps which cover multiple screen sizes well. Android has support for multiple screen sizes, but it relies on relative positioning for this and is an inelegant solution compared with Apple’s interface builder.

A bigger screen will accentuate the differences in the quality of iOS and Android apps. If you have a mediocre Android app and put it on a tablet, it’s going to look poor, but put a mediocre iPhone app on the iPad, and it’s at least usable. Take a look at this video of a $50 Android tablet from India Do you want a UI like that on your tablet? Didn’t think so.

So, my advice, is wait. Wait until Android 3.0 (Gingerbread) comes out in Q4 this year, then wait until 2011 for some good hardware. 3.0 has set precedent by disallowing vendor customisation, forcing a much-more Apple-esque standard set of controllers which will suit more purposes. Acer and Motorola have already announced that they’re delaying the launch of their Android tablets until 3.0 is available.

Still, when that time comes around, the second generation iPad will be out, and then Android will be playing catch up again.

Update: Just seen the ViewSonic ViewPad 7, a 7″ Froyo tablet. Take a look at the video in the link: it’s full-screen all the way, sluggish and, I quote “a plastic rebadge me-too Android tablet”. When you’re watching the video, think about how that’s going to work on a tablet the size of an iPad (or the Archos 101 for that matter). It’s not going to be pretty.

If you liked this, you may also like:

1. Why tablets aren’t working
2. Why iPhone Web Apps are Still Worthwhile
3. Emily vs the iPad