IVAN SOTO

During the entire year I've been hearing about companies working on Android tablets, and while I'm really excited about it, I also think it's going to be a nightmare at the beginning.

After watching some videos and screenshots from the announced and upcoming tablets I can see the lack of UI consistency. Samsung did a good job at creating some nice interface designs for the Galaxy Tab, but they don't look like Android at all. And some apps seem to have a good landscape typing layout but others will use the full screen to display the text box, something that is useful in a phone, but useless in a tablet.

Some tablet prototype showing how the keyboard doesn't scale properly
on a bigger screen. Something I still see in tablets running 2.1/2.2

I just don't think Android is ready for tablets, and manufactures are just trying to sell tablets to gain some share in this market, something that I understand but I don't like.

I think before getting an Android tablet Google needs to address a list of things in the OS layer to make it appealing for a tablet. And specially if they plan to compete against the iPad:

• Better default keyboard, something that scales better on a tablet of any size and that supports multitouch.
• UI guidelines for building apps for bigger screen sizes. Apple did a good job showing multi-panel layouts that actually support multi-touch perfectly. You can drag 2 lists side by side and scroll them in different directions. Most iPad users like to play around with the UI, and the fact that multitouch is present even in simple apps, makes the experience much better. Just playing for a while with the Twitter app for iPad explains why this is important.
• Offer a better solution than the ugly tab container. It looked fine in Android 1.1, but now it's just ugly and most developers are avoiding it.
• Make a tablet layout for most Google apps: double panel Gmail, YouTube, Maps, etc.
• Make a tablet version of the Market and allow developers to target apps only for tablets and that require some sort of processing power.
• Tablet friendly home screen. Apple did very poorly on this, offering the exact same layout and controls than the iPhone. I think users want to do a little more on a tablet, so we need better ways to organize our home screen.
• Notifications adapted for tablets. I love the way Android notifications work but dragging that whole bar on 10" tablet I think it's unnecessary. The Dell Streak did a good job with this.
• Better UI elements and consistency. The news app on Android 2.1 is a good example, but it's completely different than anything else on the OS and most developers don't even know how to achieve the same.

Dell Streak notifications.

Galaxy Tab showing a nice UI, completely inconsistent to Android that looks like they just copied the
UI from the iPad. They have even more screenshots at thegadgets.net.

I'm really hoping that Android 3.0 will do most of these changes, but if they don't, we will have a lot of users calling their tablets "a cheaper iPad", which will be completely understandable.

And again, most manufactures will try to "improve" the UI by doing ugly home launchers, poor skinning and creating even more inconsistency between the OS, bundled apps and Market apps which will also delay OS upgrades.