Skytone's Alpha 680 tablet, Android interface gets underwhelming hands-on treatment
By Ross Miller 
posted Apr 27th 2009 7:24PM
posted Apr 27th 2009 7:24PM
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This is the FIRST time i did not care for a netbook
Your pun is neither ironic nor humorous.
What a freakin' joke. These netbooks are reaching new lows. Users are throwing sanity out the door just to get their hands on a cheap product.
Look at me, I just paid $150 for a computer I can barely use. I just got the bargain of the year. Big deal, I opened a box of Cracker Jacks and my prize was an almost useful netbook. Aw, man, that ain't nothing. I just bought a family meal of fried chicken and fixins and they threw in a netbook as a side-dish. It was a little greasy, but it almost worked for as long as it took for us to finish the chicken.
What the heck is the world of computing coming to. Crappily constructed, underpowered computers for the masses. America is starting to become a third-world country in a one-year economic turndown. Enjoy your Android-powered craputer. I need something more substantial. I'll stick with my MacBook Pro.
i don't think this is gonna be huge with this public ... i think they just wanted to be the one that yells FIRST
epic FAIL!
i'm prob get rated down for this :(
As for your first comment, I agree, they (as a company) wanted to yell FIRST, as in first to have an android netbook (So I'll be voting that comment up.) As for your second... I'm not even sure why you posed it. So downrank.
@Jinto: 'cause he was trying to do 'first' in a clever way and he didn't end up being first. Both get a downgrade as far as I'm concerned.
And THAT is why Android isn't ready for netbooks yet/
and it sounds like you're the tool murmermer
Will someone PLEASE customize that interface!
What's the deal? Why has anyone not done this yet?
@Look_Around_You
so you want it to look more "Window 7 ish?" Your a TOOL!
I didn't know there was such thing as an a tool - will look out for one.
Look_around_you makes a good point - They have simply transported the mobile skin / theme over to their netbook, which doesn't make much sense, icons are too widely spaced, buttons on bottom of browser are too big etc. What that has to do with W7 I don't know.
I agree , I DO want android to be more customisable with the skin
kinda like what you can do with WM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIVpRgKwWNs&feature=related
I can see people buying this, and then saying "Hey, why can't I run MSN over the top of a browser window?" simple things like that that you expect from a laptop, and just as much a netbook (day to day, I do exactly the same things on my NC10 as my MBP), and getting frustrated.
Oh, so Android is totally underwhelming on a completely ill-fitting device like a netbook.
Now, that's a real shocker, I'm sure nobody saw that coming....
Android can't support any resolutions higher than HVGA without major issues. We won't see any decent Android devices that offer WVGA or better resolutions for about 4 years.
4 years is bit of a stretch. http://source.android.com/roadmap says that it's highly probable that work on support for higher resolutions has already started. Q1 2009 is over and beyond Q1 2009, it's all about support for higher resolution. Fingers crossed to see android builds with support for higher resolution by the end of this year.
@Maddy
Good to hear. That was something I expected them to be working on next, since even though right now HVGA is all android supports, there are many devices with WVGA or QVGA. Having WVGA support is necessary for netbooks.
Ross Miller: Don't blame ARM for the lack of multitasking, blame Android. Just like an x86 processor, give the ARM enough RAM and a decent operating system and it'll be capable of anything. Pandora & Beagleboard are already demonstrating this. Future ARM netbooks will demonstrate it too.
Unfortunately an otherwise cool product like this is giving itself, ARM and Android a bad name. They need to get off the Android bandwagon and install a nice little Linux distro.
I can't quite see the thought process that would have lead to putting android on a device such as this - As you say I could see a well made linux distro offering so much more.
Exactly...
First of all, people should not just say "ARM" as if they are all the same. A 1000+ Mhz Cortex A8 core or (cortex-based) Qualcomm Snapdragon will be far faster a 400Mhz ARM11. Similarly, as the iPhone proved, advanced hardware is worthless without proper software and drivers to take advantage of on-chip SIMD units, DSPs, graphics chips, etc. Many smartphones have had better ARM SoCs than the iPhone, but the iPhone was the first to show off a high-performance, graphics accelerated interface and web browser.
To all those who are wondering WHY anybody would want to slap Android into anything and everything—I think I can answer why, (although I'm in no way defending the wisdom of doing it).
I think people feel safer going with a big name brand when forging into relatively new categories ("No one ever got fired going with IBM"— and later "Microsoft").
After Microsoft, no name is currently bigger than Google in the software world. By virtue of it's mindshare, and the fact that they've offered a 'fairly' complete FREE OS which everyone knows will be supported, developed and built upon, Android is easily perceived as the alpha dog in the Linux pack—even Ubuntu comes in a very very distant second.
All other arguments against it may be logical but ultimately irrelevant to manufacturers trying to get the biggest bang for their buck.
And in the long run, and I do mean long run, if enough manufacturers and developers DO get behind something like Android, it could reach a tipping point and become a true standard— and despite the bluster, that's what keeps Steve Ballmer awake at night.
who needs to multitask on a tablet? anyways someone made an app on the market that puts all of your running apps in your notification bar that you can easily slide down and toggle between them
Why is everyone jumping up and down around this bad attempt at engineering?
It's easy to tell right from the "logo" and Android splash screen (with flashing Android flashing all the way to the right) that this is a work by someone with much better engineering skills than design or marketing skills.
With all the respect for the time and effort of Skytone crew, this netbook is based on a free operating system and has been assembled by people whose time is cheaper than most of us commenting here. The fact that this can be done, similar to the fact it has been quickly ported to devices like Asus Eee is contrary to popular belief of everyone spoiled by Apple's track record actually a really good thing for the future of Android platform. Just imagine what can/will happen when someone more serious about their time/effort investment enters this space.
Cheers!
Shonzilla
$250!? Earlier today it was $150... a day or two ago it was $99. They need to make up their F'n minds about the price. (as for the comment about Jaunty, the Alpha 600 is a generic linux version of the 680, so it shouldn't be too hard to pursue)
What I want from this device before I'd pay $250 (Alpha 600 or Alpha 680):
1) options for 512MB, 1GB, adn 2GB of RAM
2) options for larger SSDs (8GB, 16GB, maybe 32 GB)
3) Alpha 600 supporting Ubuntu-ARM/UNR, and hopefully/optionally Mer
4) 3G option clearly defined, supported on both the 680 with Android, and on the 600 with Ubuntu/UNR
At $99 or $150, they can skip those, if they don't mind the fact that I'll just buy it to use as a housing for a beagleboard, and run Mer on that.
What I want on Android before I use it on a netbook is:
1) full gmail (send/reply as, create/edit filters, create labels)
2) full google reader (keyboard shortcuts, add/edit tags)
3) full google docs (read/write, all formats)
4) full IM (more than 1 identity per service, more than 1 service
active at a time, more jabber servers that just google talk)
5) better VNC viewer support, and better integration with ConnectBot
(not so much Google's fault, and not a big deal on an Android phone,
but still something that's necessary for me on a netbook).
Why doesn't Google just start offering Android for download so whoever wanted it could install it on their netbook?
by the way, i wouldn't want it except to play with it in a virtual machine
They do do that.
google up android x86. =]