The official tablet (and other useless electronics) thread!

[G.Irish]

horseshit in implementation
android is nothing without android market and google apps. which google charges for. thats not open source.

there were some leaked internal emails floating around a few months ago with a bunch of great quotes from upper android management talking about how they use android market to get money out of device makers and manipulate them by threatening to pull access. motorola had put a competing map app on one of their devices, and google threatened to pull access if they didnt change it.

Yeah but that's add on stuff to the OS. If you don't like Google's price or policies with the market or Google Apps, you can build your own. No one is forcing you to use it.

Sure, you'd have a very hard time being successful if you're not on Android market but it's still a choice you can make. Amazon did. Again, the OS is open source and free. Open source doesn't mean that you can't charge for a value add like the Android market or Google Apps.

The problem is that the handset manufacturers by and large don't have the expertise, resources, or will to build a competing ecosystem. Amazon is apparently the only one with the balls and ability.

The thing about that article that strikes me as kind of silly, is he makes it sound like Amazon pulled this master stroke of outsmarting Google, like Google did not foresee that someone could fork off Android and do their own version with their own store.

As far as Honeycomb not being open-sourced I'm still not really sure what happened there. Honeycomb was meant as an interim release that only applied to tablets, so maybe the reason was that they didn't want to put out a sort of dead-end branch of the OS. Or maybe Google decided not to open source Honeycomb in order to slow Amazon down in their attempt to build a competing tablet (since it looks like Amazon is not interested in phones). Either way, Ice Cream Sandwich will be open source. If it's not, then you'll know for sure Google is abusing it's position.