Before I get flamed by a bunch of Android users, let me say that I have both iOS and Android devices. The first reason is that Apple had a head start. Apple is an innovator and although it wasn’t the first to create a tablet, it was most certainly the first to create a tablet that just worked out of the box, with a complete ecosystem.

Apple have the right ecosystem, they have 400,000+ apps at time of writing this, Android have around 200,000 apps and Apple had a head start in the tablet arena over Google.

The biggest thing after talking to both Apple and Google fans that everyone seems to want is a device that’s upgradable. This is one thing that Apple gives all customers for a good 3-4 years. If you take a look at the iPhone 3G it’s still popular and upgraded to iOS 3, iOS 4. Okay, maybe it won’t be supported by iOS 5 perhaps, but there’s a good 3 years usage out of the device. Now take a look at Android. Samsung botched most of their upgrades for the Samsung Galaxy S, most customers couldn’t upgrade their devices because you had to connect it to Samsung Kies PC software, which just didn’t work properly.

Take a look at Sony Xperia devices, most of these wouldn’t see the light of day for an upgrade. Likewise some HTC devices although more lately have been upgradable, it’s only been because of customer pressure. HTC weren’t going to upgrade some of their phones to Gingerbread until customers forced them.

People want a device that isn’t going to be a brick or die of death in a year or two. Although people change their devices they still want to be able to use them or sell them and get a good return. This is the big problem so far with Android, it’s down to the manufacturer and sometimes not even the manufacturer, sometimes it’s down to both the manufacturer and the mobile operator. Where some customers see upgrades in some countries for a given device but not in others, or sometimes some in the same country get an update where others on another network don’t.

Another good reason as to why Apple have such a good run at the tablet market is if you take a look at other manufacturers, Microsoft still after all these years haven’t produced a single tablet (well if you exclude the WinCe devices), and look at HP, they’ve been in this market space several times in the last decade and pulled out. Palm although they weren’t yet competing in the tablet market, were in the mobile market with WebOS which was then bought up by HP, HP then decided to take part in the tablet industry (again), and have now recently decided it’s going to pull out of the tablet market.

Customers also want a device that’s going to work out of the box, not be complicated to use. Apple have this down to a tee. Likewise if you have previously owned an iPod Touch or iPhone then there’s a zero learning curve if you go to the iPad. With Android however, although it works out of the box, there’s a lot of customisation that can be done, things that can be accidentally turned on and off, or from a user perspective (broken) and that also puts off the non-technical users.

Apple have aimed their sales not at the technical user, but the non-technical user, where Android manufacturers seem a lot of the time to be targeting their products at the self confessed techy.

The other thing to think about is it’s fine to provide a device for every single kind of person out there, but this creates massive fragmentation in the operating system. That in turn makes games and apps break, not just once or twice but regularly. Bad news spreads quicker than good news, and although Apple don’t provide things like flash, the average person out there believes the devices tend to be more stable.

It’s also interesting to see how tablet manufacturer’s try to advertise their product. I have to smile when I keep seeing this advert for the Asus Eee Transformer where they actually show the tablet on the TV advert running out of battery. No worry, just plug it into the keyboard to restore some power. If you have a tablet that is capable of something like 10 hours battery power like the iPad, why would you even want to think about advertising that it WILL run out of battery power? That immediately puts me off buying the Asus tablets and I’m sure it puts off a lot of other people too.

At some point the eco seesaw will change, and it may tip in Googles favour or other manufacturers favour, but currently it’s still tipped towards Apple.

Suggestions are that this new tablet is going to be an impressive device supporting a 1280×720 (720p) resolution using a dual-core NVIDIA Tegra 2 processor with capacitive multi-touch screen. Also to include up to 32gb Solid State Disk, 2gb RAM, and all the normal features like WiFi, Bluetooth and GPS.

HTC don’t do devices without cellphone usage and although there’s been no mention on whether it may or may not sport a 3G chip, the chances are that it most probably will. The rumours suggest that HTC will be releasing the tablet in early 2011 running the latest Android 3.0 Gingerbread. Although Chrome OS might also be a contender and I wouldn’t rule that out yet.

1) I wanted to get the iPad from the US before it was released in the UK and at that time the iPad WiFi version was the only one available at that time.

2) I typically find 3G too slow, and if I could find a HSDPA router and create a WiFi hotspot just for myself from that router then I could achieve much higher speeds on the iPad when surfing the internet, downloading photos, music, blogging and much more.

If you take a look at the speed test image below, you’ll see I managed to get 3.21 Mbps on 3G. This is typically what the iPad WiFi +3G will achieve as standard.

Now if I hook up my HSDPA router to the iPad, I am able to now get a whopping 9.06 Mbps. Which is actually faster than my 8 Mbps ADSL line at home.

I use the HTC HD2 as a HSDPA / 3G router with an application called WiFi Router for WinMobile 6.5. It means I have to carry two phones, my main iPhone 3GS along with the HD2 but it gets me the speeds I want. Most of my apps are on my iPhone and not the HD2 so I still can’t replace my iPhone with the HD2 yet.

HTC’s Droid Eris was arguably the most affected by the death grip, where apple showed the signal bars dropping to zero when held in a particular way. HTC shared it’s percentage of antenna complaints to help clear the air. Where as Apple claimed 0.55 percent of customers called AppleCare with reception related problems, HTC’s Eric Lin told Pocket-lint the Droid Eris technical support rate was 0.016 percent. That’s almost thirty four times lower, although HTC probably didn’t sell similar volumes within a three week period like Apple have.

Whether this was a wise move or not by Apple, they are definitely trying to show the world that this is a normal phenomena and showed a loss of signal to Nokia, RIM Blackberry and HTC phones depending on how you hold the phone in your hands.

By ousting both Nokia, RIM and HTC is one thing to try and deflect media attention, but by doing so you can be sure that both Nokia and RIM would come back with a lashing of words, and Nokia and RIM did just that…! No word yet from HTC who will probably want to stay under the radar at this point.

Nokia’s response was…
“Antenna design is a complex subject and has been a core competence at Nokia for decades, across hundreds of phone models. Nokia was the pioneer in internal antennas; the Nokia 8810, launched in 1998, was the first commercial phone with this feature.

In general, antenna performance of a mobile device/phone may be affected with a tight grip, depending on how the device is held. That’s why Nokia designs our phones to ensure acceptable performance in all real life cases, for example when the phone is held in either hand. Nokia has invested thousands of man hours in studying how people hold their phones and allows for this in designs, for example by having antennas both at the top and bottom of the phone and by careful selection of materials and their use in the mechanical design.”

RIM’s response was…
“Apple’s attempt to draw RIM into Apple’s self-made debacle is unacceptable. Apple’s claims about RIM products appear to be deliberate attempts to distort the public’s understanding of an antenna design issue and to deflect attention from Apple’s difficult situation. RIM is a global leader in antenna design and has been successfully designing industry-leading wireless data products with efficient and effective radio performance for over 20 years. During that time, RIM has avoided designs like the one Apple used in the iPhone 4 and instead has used innovative designs which reduce the risk for dropped calls, especially in areas of lower coverage. One thing is for certain, RIM’s customers don’t need to use a case for their BlackBerry smartphone to maintain proper connectivity. Apple clearly made certain design decisions and it should take responsibility for these decisions rather than trying to draw RIM and others into a situation that relates specifically to Apple.”

Reviews so far seem to be pretty good, most reviewers seem to be claiming really great and fast performance with the UI. So far the 4G performance is also looking really good when there is 4G coverage available. So it sounds coverage might be an issue for the moment, but that should improve.

Many people are already chipping in with their comments on how bad the battery drain as 4G only lasts for about 3 hours, hopefully this is one thing that Sprint and HTC can improve upon. One thing I notice on the Desire is the widgets that are on the home screen really drain and suck the lifeforce out of the battery the more you add to the home screen.

Some of the prime features of the handset are 2.1 stereo Bluetooth, 8 MP built in camera with dual flash, Android 2.1 OS, 4.30 inches TFT screen.

If you’re state-sde and want to pick this phone up, you will not only have to pay for the cost of handset which is $200 but will also have to spend $80 per month for unlimited data in addition of mandatory $10 Premium Data add-on for 4G connectivity. Also bearing in mind that only a handful of cities are currently covered with WiMax coverage, it could be a bit of a bumpy ride to start with.

It gets a lot hotter than the iPhone and I thought the iPhone at times when CPU usage was high and on charge got quite hot.

I having the devices/batteries get hot really can’t be good for the long life usage of the battery. I guess time will tell though!

There are currently two types of navigation systems out on the market today, one is called onboard and one is called offboard.  Onboard basically means that the maps are installed to the phone memory or SD card.  Offboard which is what Google are using doesn’t install maps at all but downloads them over an active 3G data connection whilst you drive.  There’s varying arguments to which is best, e.g. the overall suggestion is that offboard maps should be more up to date as they’re on a server where as onboard don’t get updated possibly as often depending on the provider, also with offboard if you go out of cell phone coverage then you can be stuck because you can’t download the maps you need to continue your journey.

Driving for 1h 45 mins, Google did drive me to my destination (door to door) but I did receive frequent GPS drop outs on the HTC Desire which I hadn’t previously on the same route, same day using CoPilot SatNav.  I don’t believe the GPS dropouts were related to GPS coverage in the area or problems in receiving a signal locally as I had 3x other devices in car and the GPS dropouts were for around 10 mins at a time on the HTC Desire but the other 3x devices suffered no GPS dropouts whatsoever.  This led me to believe that Google might be experiencing problems when they can’t download a map or route you possibly.

The google voice announcements are TTS (Text To Speech) which read out full street names which is good. So you get something like “Turn left onto Southampton Row”.  Unfortunately with all TTS engines on mobile devices the TTS engines are much lower volume than regular pre-recorded audio which can be sampled and enhanced to increase the volume. For me whilst I was listening to the car stereo (Leo Laporte podcast from my iPhone) I was having great difficulty hearing the audio and had to keep turning the car stereo down every time I was getting close to a junction or turn so I could hear the audio. The big problem I hit was that the TTS voices strung out the audio.  Although it was great to hear the long road names, in most cases the first audio instruction came too late which meant the TTS didn’t complete talking until after I had made my turn. This mean if I didn’t know where I was and relying completely on the SatNav then Google would have had me driving in circles because I would keep missing my turns. Ultimately on a long trip and having to get to my destination by a particular time would have had me use more petrol/gas and stressed me out massively by the time I reached my destination, more importantly I would most likely be late for my meeting.

Google street view is a nice touch and although I really like it I’m a little torn by it as I equally found it very distracting.  I really only think it’s useful for when you are close to your destination and for the most part it didn’t show me Street View when I was driving.  The distracting part is that if you’re driving along and Street View does pop up you see cars on the Street View that aren’t actually in front of you.  I’d much prefer to have seen a live feed from the in-built camera and triangulating my position with the GPS and overlaying something on the camera feed that showed me where the location was I was driving to.

Google maps is a free alternative to a paid navigation system, and there’s the old saying as there’s no such thing as a free lunch. In this case there is, but Google provides a very basic navigation. Google don’t, have the more enhanced services like you would see on a full blown navigation system on the same device, e.g. If you compared it to say CoPilot Live v8 then Google are missing ClearTurn junction screens, Lane Assistance, Safety Camera notification, Traffic Avoidance notification, navigate to Favourites, no driver safety screens, no live tracking or live messaging (being able to track the device from another computer over the internet), no fuel prices, no roadside assistance, no intelligent re-routing and much more…

What google does have is free basic navigation with in theory the latest update maps that stay updated as they kind of do on http://maps.google.com.

Can Google completely replace the need for a full blown SatNav? In my opinion no, not at this moment in time.  If you are someone that refuse to pay a penny for apps or won’t shell out up to £28 on a full blown SatNav like CoPilot (which isn’t going to break the bank) then you will probably persevere with Google and be somewhat happy with it.  If you want the full enhanced features or want an onboard system to ensure if you go out of cell coverage that you can still navigate then you will want to pay te money for a system lime CoPilot.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not bashing Google here.  What Google have done is great and is a good start for free navigation and for some it will be great to have.  I can see for some if you have traveled to another country and need maps quickly and don’t have maps on your full blown SatNav, then this would be a great addition.  However, although offboard navigation can be a huge plus to keep the maps current and up to date, one of the big drawbacks is that you are having to download maps over 3g. If you are in another country you can easily rack up a GPRS/3G bill of over £50 in 3g roaming charges which would see you paying double what a regular SatNav would cost on your phone for a single excursion.

For me, I will be using Google maps and testing it more, especially in hard to reach areas where I will have flakey 3G coverage to see how good/bad it performs but with the limitations it has, it’ll be more as a backup if I want to check something, I think I would become very stressed out with keep missing the turns I had to take.

Every time a push notification comes in, it creates a little icon on the top system bar. It’s good to see this because you know you have maybe unread emails or an unread tweet, or facebook post or even application updates that have been pushed out to the Android Market. The real downside is when these start to stack up you run out of space on the system bar.

I guess it’s a kind of love/hate relationship, almost similar to Marmite. You either love it or you don’t. I really do like the way Android has the notifications implemented that you can pull down the tray to open up all your notifications so you have everything listed in one area. However, I’m also seeing other bugs where applications say they’re still running in the OS but they’re not. If you don’t keep on top of clearing out the notifications it gets a little hectic in the pull down tray, along with the top system bar I do however like the Android implementation of push notifications better than the Apple implementation. I like the way Apple show you a full screen message, but if you have multiple push notifications come in, you only get to see the last one, which is a bit pointless and then have to start checking application badges to see if there are numbered updates against each application.