Another Android Tablet PR Flop

Richard Fieldhouse (8 February2012)

The PR around the tablet version of Android has been something of a train wreck pretty much from the wordGo. And now there is a new milestone.

It's nearly four months now since the public launch of Ice Cream Sandwich - the version of Android that was billed as unifying the wildly successful phone variant of the platform with the rather less well received tablet version. Despite this, Christmas is long passed and still there is no proper flag carrying Ice Cream Sandwich tablet actually shipping in volume with the new Android installed.

An over-the-air update is promised for many tablets - and available for some;
The Asus Transformer Prime has been rather compromised by worries of wireless reception and
The Motorola Xoom is really last year's model

But nothing actually arrives with the shiny new Android straight out of the box. Real consumers are understandably a bit wary.

And now there is one available in the UK. It's called the Ainol Novo 7 Paladin.

What? Who? Yes, it's an unheard-of Chinese clone that's first across the finishing line. While this little tablet actually may well be a signpost for the future of computing, in the short term there's even more bad news.

But first for the positive. The Novo 7 is a step forward as it is the first to break away from the only established processor architecture for smart mobile devices. Yes, it's true, all the smartphones and tablets on the market, Apple's included, come with a chip design from the British firm Arm*.

But the Novo 7 has a MIPS processor instead... And it's cheap...

But there's a big price to pay. For starters, here's a screen grab of the Ainol website. Notice how it's been given a more immediate feel by adding the date AND TIME of the article about the iPod.

But more to the point, many, many Android apps have been designed for an Arm-based system. They just don't work on the new machine.

Effectively, this tablet is a development test bed for app design geeks. A curiosity - not a mass market product.

PR disaster? I think so.

[*And anybody thinking of mentioning all the Intel-based smart things there are out there, please check the number of fingers on one of your hands for a hint to my response.]

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