JamesBower
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Lemons to lemonade: how manufacturing and mechanical setbacks shrank the Wikipad
A smaller, cheaper gaming tablet? Wikipad President of sales Fraser Townley says it was always in the cards -- but it was supposed to be the company's second tablet, not its first. Business, of course, doesn't always go according to plan. Just before the Wikipad's planned October launch, the company stayed production to refine the product's gamepad element, Townley told us, addressing a technical hiccup that could have troubled customers. Not too long after that, the company's screen supplier told them the part they had hoped to use for the Wikipad's 10.1-inch display was being discontinued. Salt? Meet wound. Wikipad set out to make the best of a bad situation: it skipped a step. "The 7-inch was always in our roadmap and on our plan," Townley told us, "we just accelerated it." That decision was partly made to please the community, which was a little concerned about price. At $249, the new Wikipad is certainly easier on the pocket book, but the redesign delayed the product just long enough to leave it teetering on the edge of a new generation -- the next Tegra chip is right around the corner. Fortunately, so is another Wikipad -- Townley told us the tablet's original 10.1-inch form would be out by the end of the year. He couldn't say if the delayed slate would be using NVIDIA's latest, but he left the possibility wide open. "There would be no point in launching a Tegra 3 tablet just months before the launch of Tegra 4, would there?" he joked. "We'll keep up with the market." An admirable goal, to say the least.
Wikipad CEO James Bower defends his gaming tablet's $500 pricing, why one device beats two
No matter which way you cut it, the Android-based Wikipad gaming tablet -- dubbed as much despite not having any connection to Wikipedia -- is unusually expensive. As a 10.1-inch Android tablet, it's comparably priced with the leaders of the market (of the Apple and Samsung variety). The obvious problem comparatively with the big dogs: visibility. What is Wikipad, anyway? And who made it? "This is our first product into the market," consummate salesman and Wikipad CEO James Bower told us in an interview earlier this week -- yes, the company's name is shared with its first product. "We've self-funded the whole concept to this point with a couple of us founders. No VC money or anything," he said (the company did, however, just close its first round of venture capital funding for marketing costs, post-development). Bower's company took the idea of an Android-based gaming tablet with a proprietary, physical (and removable) gamepad from concept to reality in the last year, first revealing the tablet at CES 2012. "We've been able to accomplish a lot very efficiently and very effectively to this point," Bower said, in reference to the approximately 80 people who created the device. That said, despite our positive hands-on time with the Wikipad (even in its prototype state), $500 is a heck of a lot of money to plunk down on an unproven device from an unproven company. The argument gets harder when you remember Sony's PlayStation Vita -- an arguably much nicer device with a far larger library of gaming content that costs half the Wikipad's price at $249.99. Bower doesn't see the logic in this argument. "It's double the price, but it's also double the size," he pointed out. "If you buy a tablet that's seven inches, you can get a $199 tablet -- it's called a Google Nexus or a Kindle Fire. If you're gonna get a full 10-inch tablet, a tablet to this quality, you're gonna spend $499 to $749 ... if we were talking about a 7-inch device or a 5-inch device, and we were at this price point, then it'd be a different story." Admittedly, the tablet -- as a standalone device -- isn't too shabby. But will it woo consumers away from the likes of Apple and Samsung? Bower hopes as much, but we're not so sure.%Gallery-166636%
Hands-on with Wikipad, the $500 Android gaming tablet (video)
The Wikipad is an anomaly. It's a 10.1-inch, $500 Android tablet aimed squarely at gamers -- an expensive portal to a platform many mobile game developers have abandoned due to piracy. It's got an IPS display with 1,280 x 800 resolution, an NVIDIA Tegra 3 T30 quad-core 1.4GHz processor, 1GB of DDR2 RAM, and Android 4.1 Jelly Bean (at launch). So ... it's not quite as sharp in the graphics department as some other tablets on the market, nor is it as pretty as its main handheld gaming competition, the PlayStation Vita. On top of that, it's from an engineering firm that you've never heard of -- Wikipad is also the name of the business behind the tablet, and this is the company's first product launch. Oh, and did we mention that the main selling point is an attachable game controller that frames half the tablet in a mess of plastic buttons, joysticks, and speakers? And no, the controller won't be sold separately, nor will it work with any other tablet. Defying all logic, however, the Wikipad feels like a surprisingly solid piece of equipment (regardless of the fact that the prototype model we used was hand-built). From the light but solid construction of the tablet's chassis, to its grippy molded rear -- which helps both for gripping the tablet without the controller attached and assists sound amplification when the device is laid down -- nothing about the device feels cheap. As a tablet, it's speedy and responsive. Apps load quickly and smoothly, and it's got extra loud speakers for gaming without headphones (or for David Guetta, as was demonstrated to us). The custom skin it was running felt a bit rough -- the apps get reorganized with a gaming focus and slapped onto a flippable cube, which caused some visual stuttering from pane to pane. Another feature of the custom OS is a special 3D game launcher, which includes sections for Nvidia's Tegra Zone, PlayStation Mobile games, GameStop-suggested titles, and Google Play. There are some less than exciting ad banners attached to this launcher, but they're easily ignorable. Though Gaikai is still working with the Wikipad post-Sony buyout, CEO James Bower told us the game streaming service won't be there at launch -- he's hoping it'll arrive by year's end, "but that's up to Sony."%Gallery-166636%
