This is my favourite part: "we're excited about the upcoming wave of tablet computers and the possibilities they bring". Upcoming wave of tablet computers - hint, hint.
How long before the first really killer Android- or Chrome OS-powered tablet? I bet it won't take nearly as long as it took to launch compelling competitors to the iPhone.
Sadly, I think it will take just as long for the rest of the industry to really catch up to Apple's new product, at which point Apple will have moved ahead again. It took more than a year for other smartphone makers to have a serious answer to the iPod, and in my opinion more than two years (with phones like the Droid and Nexus One) to bring a product to market that surpasses the iPhone in some of its own strengths, without sacrificing too much in software or hardware polish.
Why do I think the same thing will happen with the iPad? Because Apple is still among the only companies even trying to do world-class software design and world-class hardware design, and treating the two as a single product. (Others, with varying levels of success: Nintendo, Palm, Tivo, Nokia, some divisions of Microsoft.)
Tell any other computer maker that they should introduce a new operating system, or a software maker that they need to make their own hardware, and they'll look at you like you're crazy. Sure, there's a big risk of failure, but it's the only way you'll be able to innovate as radically and successfully as Apple.
And this saddens me. I think Apple products are great - my first computer was a Macintosh SE/30 in 1989, and my first programs were written in HyperCard. My parents are still happy Mac users two decades later - but I am not. I value open platforms enough to give up the many benefits of Apple's platform for the very different benefits of open source platforms. (I'm a former Debian Developer and current Mozilla employee.)
Maybe Google will start designing and making its own Chrome OS hardware someday. (They already worked closely with HTC on the design of Android phones like the Dream and Nexus One.) Maybe a hardware maker like Intel will really go all-in on a new Linux-based product. Maybe I can convince Mozilla that we need to design our own hardware platform! But until that happens, I think many aspects of our consumer products will still be trudging along in Apple's footsteps.
Very well put. I don't even know how other comapanies can overtake apple when they are constantly playing catch up. Google and others are behind in mindshare, marketshare, app installs, usability, buzz...
The Archos 5 has been around a long time, but it was running outdated software for most of that time, and didn't have access to the Market or to Google's apps like GMail and Maps. These days the Archos is looking better and maybe worth promoting, but I can see why Google wants to concentrate its marketing on flagship devices where it has worked hard on a polished shipping product, like the Nexus One. (Which they are promoting quite heavily, at least to people with Adsense profiles like mine. I see almost nothing but Nexus One ads on every Adsense site I visit.)
Sigh, why do people give Google free passes on the UI left and right?
Scrolling has no momentum, there's no bounce-back, you can't select text in the email messages, you have to keep loading new messages cause they don't load nearly enough, etc etc
The fact that nobody here even brings it up says a lot about the quality of apps that Google fans accept
Does anyone know why the Gmail app won't run full-screen when you launch it from the home screen? It really annoys me that so much of my iPhone's small screen is taken up by Safari instead of the app.
It's an easy feature to implement (Just add an element to <head>: "<meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes" />").
The downside is that going to other domains/subdomains from a webapp launched that way forces a user into Safari anyways, through a somewhat jarring app-switch-transition. Since Google has an ecosystem of mobile apps they'd like you to switch between they don't want you to feel trapped in just one at a time.
Then you would open Safari on Gmail, select this bookmark, and then add it to your homescreen. Works on iPhone at least. I suppose iPad will work fine.
Note: on an iPhone 2G, a page set up like this loads very slowly compared to inside Safari. The iPad allegedly being much faster, it might not be a problem. You do have the issue with external links opening Safari, but with the iPhone, the difference in screen real-estate is fairly significant.
Good call! I was thinking that something like that could do it. (My default thought for that type of thing is a Greasemonkey script, which iPhone Safari doesn't support.)
Btw, an easier way is just to paste the code into the address bar.
The reason I mention a bookmark is to have it handy anytime you want to save a page to the homescreen, and because you can then create it from your Mac/PC and it can sync. Easier than typing it on an iPhone.
What BSeward said: The meta tag means the site launches full screen in its own instance of Safari – so any outside links clicked cause a switch to the main Safari app.
Google probably assumes email is closely tied with browsing.
I guess they might assume that, but I don't think it's true.
I think I click a link in ~5% of emails I read.
And even in that 5%, the time it seems to take for it to exit a full-screen HTML5 app and load Safari seems to be about the same as the time as it takes for a new tab to open when I open a link in the Gmail app (already in Safari).
Oh. That is true. They could get it to remember what page you were on by storing your location in the persistent key-value store whenever you navigate and then putting you back in that place when it starts up. But as it is, it even remembers your location on the page and zoom and such.
It is remarkably similar to the native email application. However, so was the iPhone one. Just had a few much needed upgrades like the hovering menu bar.
Oh, and did I mention the threading? I could probably never switch from Gmail simply because of the threading.
This is deeply mysterious to me. My email client (Forte Agent) has done email threading for about 15 years. It's much better than Gmail's web interface for email lists in particular, because it can make them look like newsgroups. You can watch threads, ignore threads (and subsequent replies), etc.
Outlook will do it to some extent. You can group your messages by conversation. I don't recall what annoyed me about it, but it wasn't ideal... I think it had something to do with the sorting.
I think Google is trying to position itself to have solid market share over mobile browsing. If you use gmail on the go instead of the Mail app, Google can give you targeted AdWords ads.
In what way? To initiate dialing, it's just an HTTP post request. Of course, the real question is what phone you expect to ring when you're on your iPad.
(Hint: go to the mobile site instead of the desktop site. Although the Desktop site works fine on my Android tablet.)
How long before the first really killer Android- or Chrome OS-powered tablet? I bet it won't take nearly as long as it took to launch compelling competitors to the iPhone.