Daughter is flying back to New York shortly and asks to borrow my iPad2 to watch some films inflight. The answer is not really, but I have a splendid loaned Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 she's welcome to try. I am sure it
will be easy to transfer movies on to the Google Android-powered tablet.
In many ways, the Samsung beats the iPad. I had used it
for web and email and liked it, but should have guessed that anything more complicated might be tricky. To iPad lovers, Android tablets are shaping up to be as messy and Windows-like as PCs, and the schism between supporters of iPad versus Android looks like becoming profound.
The initial problem was that you can't plug the Samsung into the Mac, see its contents on the Mac screen and drag and drop stuff each way as I'd hoped. But first, there was a more basic Android issue to deal with, the kind of thing that would make the late Steve Jobs spin (in mirth) in his grave.
On the home screen of the Samsung (Android tablets have five screens to shuffle between) was an attractive clock. I noticed that the alarm was set to go off at what would have been 3am New York time, so I thought I would turn it off. Two hours later, daughter had to leave for Heathrow, and neither I, nor any of my 600 Twitter and Facebook friends, could work out how to turn
the alarm off; we hadn't even started to try to transfer the films, so she left Samsung-less. Each time you reset this stupid alarm, it just reset itself back to where it started. A few surprisingly geeky, PC-ish kinds of folk sent (private) messages saying they, too, were having problems with the Android tablet operating system but were too embarrassed to admit it.
Even the Samsung customer service people were stumped, it seemed, but they were prepared to meet me at a coffee shop — there are benefits to this job — to look into the alarm issue and also to talk me through grappling with Android. First up, we learnt I hadn't discovered some fundamental flaw. The home page clock, it turned out, was a widget to control a separate alarm clock App. So the icon that appears on screen is merely there to change the alarm; it itself shows no sign of changing. To see the change, you need to go into the clumsily accessible Apps screen.
With me now giggling at
the complexity of this, we moved on. Why are there five screens? It's so you can have different types of stuff on each — documents, say, on one, videos on another and so on. This works once you get it, except I'm still baffled as to why the main, home screen is number three of the five.
What followed convinced me that while Apple's world, in which you are forced to buy everything from the — albeit luxury — company store, may not be as politically pure
as Google's more freeform ecosystem, I prefer Apple's gilded cage. Buying films for Android, for instance, is scary; there's a Samsung store, a bit of a Sainsbury's to Apple's Waitrose, but you can also buy from other sources, with no guarantee on price, quality
or legality. It's unsettling. Mess and confusion — even though it's freedom loving mess and confusion — seems
to me to be the principle throughout Android, which may be why a lot of people prefer it. There are task bars everywhere, some of which lead, for a Mac/iPad person,
to a world of pain - but must be like home to a PC lover.
Finally, we got on to the Android tablet's ability, or lack of it, to speak to Macs. The secret, my guys explained, is a five-stage process — go to Apps, then Settings, Applications, Development and finally 'USB debugging', since you ask. Not pretty. And to be fair, the situation should improve soon. There are prototypes around, the brother of a colleague says, of a Samsung tablet with... yay, a USB port. And the excellent new Sony Tablet has, yay again, an SD card slot for simple transfer of data. Nice.
So there's hope that the still cumbersome Android tablet may soon raise its game. By which time, of course, the iPad3 may well be out. But that will be a different story.
Follow Jonathan Margolis at twitter.com/SimplyBestTech
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