2560x1600... a bit higher than my dual monitors on my high-end-ish PC (2560x1440, along with one 1920x1200). But of course, less actually usable space. Even as a big tablet, a 12.2" screen has its limits.

This is a good tablet. I bought one a few weeks ago at Best Buy in Delaware. The last one at a Best Buy in Delaware -- they had sold out of the 64GB version, as well as all of the 32GB 10" Notes. The pen is a big advantage in using the tablet for real work... I had it on a loaner Note 8, and I can't really go without. I'm pretty good wiht the 12.2" size, but I can see smaller people getting tired with one this big, used for reading or note taking.

> Apple *DOES NOT BUILD ANYTHING* - they pay one of your white-label chinese manufacturers to build it for them as they are too incompetent to build it themselves.

Hon Hai Precision Industry Company, aka Foxconn. Of course, Foxconn makes about 40% of all of the consumer electronics on the planet. They also made some of Amazon's Kindle tablets.

> While Samsung, ASUS, Lenovo all build their own.

Samsung and Lenovo also make a large percentage of the components that go into their in-house manufacturered products; it's about 70% on the average Samsung tablet.

ASUSTeK Computer started out as a contract manufacturer for PCs, but they sold off some of their manufacturing business in 2008. The spinoff companies are Pegatron (PCs and components) and Unihan (casework and other mechanicals). They still do in-house manufacturing in several countries.

Of course, most of the other tablet makers also outsource their manufacturing or, like Google, the whole schmeggie.

Apple doesn't care that much about market share. And that's not a new thing.

Look at the Mac PC. I mean, just face it, there are only so many people who are willing to pay twice as much cash to buy a laptop-for-the-desktop (iMac) or overpriced laptop. And yeah, I mean feature for feature... I bought one for my daughter, for college, a year-and-a-half ago. I actually got less laptop (less RAM, fewer ports, lower screen resolution, older Intel i7 chipset) for not-quite-twice the money. It would have been more than twice, but I bought a refurb, from Apple themselves.

So Apple's got about 5% of the PC market, but over 80% of the $1000+ PC market. That's a very good example of how they work. They're making 30%+ margins on Mac PCs, versus say HP, at about 5%. If Apple really cared that much about numbers, they'd have to drop their margins significantly to increase sales. In the short term, sure, they'd sell lots of Macs. But the cachet of that as an exclusive platform would fail, once it were just as cheap as everyone else. They'd need to sell about 30% of all the PCs on the planet, just to break even selling at HP's margins. And HP actually has high margins, compared to the ubercheap Chinese PCs at the very bottom of the market.

They've done basically the same thing with iPhones and tablets. The iPhone's market share is kept artificially high by the US sales model -- the average consumer doesn't see what they're paying, so they don't see the iPhone as being more expensive than other smartphones. Of course, it's a different market, but still changing... I don't think we're anywhere near the point of stability that the Mac vs. PC hit. You'll know it, of course, when smartphone news is as boring as PC news.

There is only one thing that would really bother Apple: a significant drop in iTunes revenue. That could lead to diminished support for iOS applications, and that's not the way you sell a premium priced product.

As of late last year, iTunes was still bringing in nearly twice as much of the green stuff as Google Play, despite Play having eclipsed iTunes in terms of total downloads. Now, sure, Google Play isn't open in as many countries as iTunes, but it's still an accepted meme that iPhone buyers spend more money on apps and media than Android users. So developers are going to support iOS, and they're going to support Android. Even if Android keeps improving, there's no reason to expect iOS to become a problem, even at lower market shares.

About the only real thing that could be a problem would be the emergence of a really strong other platform, something strong enough to replace Apple as #2. Does anyone really see Windows Phone, now essentially a Nokia proprietary OS, doing that anytime soon? No one else in sight even has a change... most of the other mobile platforms (FirefoxOS, Sailfish, Tizen, Ubuntu for Phones) are pretty much expecting HTML5 apps to be the norm, not much OS-specific development beyond embedded applications.

So Apple's optimizing profit, not market share, for the near to medium future. As long as that formula works, I don't think they're going to do much about their installed base. That's different than their worrying about not being a player at all in major markets. They want to be popular in China and India, not an also-ran.

Samsung isn't making their own OS. Tizen is a Linux Foundation project. Yes, it's supported by Samsung and Intel. Samsung and Intel are also the two largest contributors to Android, aside from Google. Samsung's using Tizen as a replacement for BadaOS. In fact, there are two official Tizen APIs: the BadaOS API (the official NDK), which was ported last year, and HTML5/Javascript/JQuery. Samsung sold about 10 million low-end smartphones running BadaOS. Sometime this year, they're expected to release Tizen phones into that same market, but so far, they only have a developer unit available. They're also using it in the next generation smart watch, and a digital camera. Other companies are looking at Tizen as kind of a competitor to QNX in auto entertainment systems.

The point of Tizen is the same as the point of FirefoxOS: sub-Android smart devices.It's also not entirely open source: the SDK, for example, is published under a non-open-source license from Samsung. Some other non-GNU-compatible licenses cover other parts of the finished OS.

The Android API/Java classes are properly termed "middleware", or alternately, an application framework (that's the term Google uses). And yes, it's a fairly portable application framework, which has been ported to run over QNX (Blackberry) and Windows (Bluestacks). You need Linux for anything written under the NDK, which is apparently less than 20% of the Android applications released.

The Android kernel was originally a fork of Linux, but it was merged back officially in Linux 3.3 I believe. Just that has made Linux a better platform for mobile devices. No to mention other mobile environments, like FirefoxOS, helping themselves to bits and pieces of Android as they see fit.

Except that DarwinOS isn't MacOS. You can't run MacOS applications on it.

AOSP is actually Android -- it runs Android applications. Yes, you will need to install the Google Play Library stuff to run many applications.

A 16GB system is hardly a "massive PC" by today's standards. Ok, maybe I'm weird, but the three-year-old PC I retired last summer was a 16GB system -- I have four times that in my new box. Even Microsoft considers 16GB a "home user" quantity of RAM.

Any company doing serious development is going to run a build server anyway. There's no reason to believe that Android -- or any other serious OS project -- would not be optimized for the people most likely to be using it, rather than scaled down for the occasional hobby user. Thing is, doing modern cross platform software, even as an Android developer, I'd consider 16GB a minimum.

> There is one manufacturer of iOS tablets
Hon Hai Precision Industry (Foxconn)

> butt loads of android tablet makers.
Hon Hai Precision Industry (Foxconn)
Compal
Quanta
Wistron
Pegatron
Inventec
Flextronics
Elitegroup
etc.

Don't know about audio on a Microsoft tablet, but it's broken on Android, too. They really need to adopt ALSA (better still, ALSA + Jack) or something modern in the underlying Linux layers. Latency today is unpredictable.

I've heard that said before, but that's not how Android actually works. Nothing happens at install time to fix the screen resolution, and in fact your app doesn't know the screen resolution until runtime. Android also supports a screen resize message, not the same as change of orientation. Apps don't have to handle screen resize. If you doesn't, Android will take down its UI, then restart with the new screen size.

In any case, Samsung isn't using a white list per se... inclusion in the multi window menu is base on your app being tagged (in the XML) for multiwindow ow support. Anyone can use this.

The Samsung home shell for Android, these days, has a window manager. Works pretty well, for launching either paneled apps (side by side, or quadrants on the 12" tablets).

Does it allow all apps? Nope. Only those chosen by Samsung? Not that either. It works with any app that sets a few Android XML variables that indicate the app is multi window safe, and that specify minimum and default window sizes. Android apps get the screen size handed to them on open, and can either respond to a resize message or let Android handle it... similar to going from landscape to portrait. But an unexpectedly small screen could confuse some apps. Hopefully, Google and Samsung get together on making this a standard. Given that it's a two minute process (well, plus testing of course), it should be well supported.

Yeah, that whole Sync thing is kind of funny. It was only a few months back that Google was showing off their Android for Cars tech, and a bunch of big names were apparently very interested. And one big reason cited was Ford. Ford had been working for years with Microsoft, and apparently, doing things the other guys just can't touch.

I'll admit being very skeptical. And since I'm in the market for a new car, I checked out Ford at the Philly auto show last month. I saw pretty much what I would have expected from Microsoft. .. nothing much. So I'm still thinking, maybe there's really something here, but you have to live with it to appreciate it.

And then, a couple of weeks ago, Ford announces they're dumping sync, while still selling all kinds of cars running sync, no replacement in the market, no real notion of what they do for 2015 models. And yet, somwhow, the world made sense again after that. And I'm pretty sure that, if car makers are looking to Google or Apple for help here, it's because they don't even really know what they want here, only that tech features are important. A recent study suggests Gen-Y buyers weigh the tech features really highly in their buying choice decisions. And these are not folks used to putting up with Microsoft quirks as much as we old farts.

The other question here: really, Apple? Cars? Apple sells more iThings in a good week or two than GM sells cars in a year. And they're showing this off as a premium feature, so that's 5-10% of cars from the fraction of automakers who want this option. Is that really big enough for Apple?

An article on Mashable late last year put the number of Google Maps users on iOS at 6-10 million, and the number of users of Apple Maps at 35 million. Which tells us one thing: most iOS users don't navigate with their phones, at least not anymore. No real proof of this being Apple Maps judged as better, versus the "Internet Explorer" factor (average users only replace included software with something better when that included software is absymal).

Actually, the dust up over maps wasn't Google Maps per se, but the bundled - with - iPhone version on Google Maps. Google wanted Google branding on it before they would offer full functionality (primarily turn by turn). Apple didn't want a core application branded by a competitor.

So Google will just have to suffer with those 10 million iOS users... In addition to a billion or so Android users.

Well, if it's wired via a Lightning connector, that sure helps keep it Apple proprietary.

That's the wrong approach, at least for any automaker that doesn't expect this to be an option among several infotainment systems. But that's not the real problem.

The fact that they're hosting at least some stand alone apps on this (at lea s t it looks that way) is the real problem. I rarely have a tablet or smartphone older than two years. My car, due for replacement probably this spring, is 11 years old. Do I really want to run an applications platform that spends most of its existence being obsolete?

Mirrorlink is the right idea, a standards based system that lets the smartphone extend to the infotainment system, via wires or wireless, upgraded with the phone. Not the car.