Is All Hope Lost For Non-Android Linux Tablets?

[Kivada]

No mention of the ZaTab ZT2? https://zareason.com/shop/ZaTab-ZT2.html

All hope lost?

No. It was just too early for any of this, the problem being drivers, especially GPU drivers. Just hope that AMD's Seattle series Arm Cortex A57 server chips w/ Radeon GPUs get mobile variants not long after.

[Kivada]

No, but maybe all hope is lost for Phoronix? lol. Seriously? Firefox OS will rock your pants beginning in 2015.

There was never any hope for Phoronix, just look at this place.

[Kivada]

Seriously crowdfunding is for real innovation, not for me-too products. By the time those dudes have finished their dreamers' crowdfunding campaigns the specs are already 6 months behind the - tough, fierce and real - competition. And when they're eventually ready to deliver it's almost one full year, and the pricing sucks too. And that's not counting the quality setbacks.

Who wants another tablet? What's already on the market (be it Android or Surface) is just waiting to be tweaked for those geek enough to want more from state of the art hardware. Ok mods will not help launch the next billionnaire startup, but open-source is about bringing added-value to the user first, and then try to monetize it. Not the other way round.

True enough, the most interesting tablet/convertible I've ever seen was the stuff that https://www.alwaysinnovating.com/products/ put out years ago.

It has magnets built into the tablet so it can be mounted on the fridge, it had a removable folding docking keyboard containing an extra battery long before the Android tablets did, has the ability to push external monitors, has real USB and HDMI, removable pocket sized tablet for when the full size one is too big.

[Akka]

Of course I dont know anything about the tablet market.
But when a company like blackberry is failing, I can not see how canonical, sailfish whatever plan to be succeful. Blackberry is shipping more devices in a day when they have a new product than canonical could pre sell in a month in their campaign. And obiously they don't sell enough to be succeful.

[nitroflow]

Of course I dont know anything about the tablet market.
But when a company like blackberry is failing, I can not see how canonical, sailfish whatever plan to be succeful. Blackberry is shipping more devices in a day when they have a new product than canonical could pre sell in a month in their campaign. And obiously they don't sell enough to be succeful.

Jolla will have some success because they're only after the emergent Asian market and already have contracts with telcos. Sailfish OS devices will also run Android apps, just like MeeGo and Maemo could, with Alien Dalvik from Myriad. Tizen also keeps going strong and it's biggest appeal is that it's targeted every type of device, not just phnoes/tablets and have different UXs for different form factors.

[nitroflow]

Also, don't forget Jolla is made of ex-Nokia employees so they have the expertise and connections to pull it off and already have their own phone, which is more than I can say for Ubuntu. They also have been around much longer than Ubuntu touch. And since they build on top of Mer, it should be easy for the other projects that also build on top of it to port to their hardware going forward.

[liam]

Yeah, I was going to say -- Gnome3 is, by all reports, a fairly natural fit for tablets (and a better marriage of a "legacy" x86 desktop to a touch interface than Windows 8 is) and I've been eagerly waiting to read some successful reports of someone installing Manjaro or Fedora on the Dell Venue Pro.

Not by my account it isn't. Don't believe the hype.
While it is better than any other of the des for touch screens or is still absolutely awful to use that way. They need to have a fat better keyboard, it needs gestures, and window management is a nightmare. People say it is intended for touch screens but they obviously haven't tried using it that way. I have. Several times with different releases including the most current stable.
Fxos, however, should be brilliant. 1.3 is going to be a massive performance improvement.

[Delgarde]

People say it is intended for touch screens but they obviously haven't tried using it that way. I have. Several times with different releases including the most current stable.

Yeah, people keep saying it, but it's never been true. For my experience, Shell works best on a big screen, for a user who mostly uses keyboard shortcuts rather than the mouse. And I find it great in that role, but those aren't really the characteristics I associate with a tablet OS...

[dee.]

PengPod, also the Tizen tablet which was just published in Japan... also Vivaldi. Hope lost? Wtf? There are already non-Android Linux tablets available. There have been since 2005, the first non-Android Linux-based tablet was published way before Android was even a tinkle in Google's eye, it was published by Nokia in 2005 and ran Maemo, a Linux-based OS. It incidentally also predated the iPad by several years...

[dee.]

Jolla will have some success because they're only after the emergent Asian market

Not true. Jolla phones will be available in Europe, they just aren't available in the US because patents. Sure they target Asian markets too, but to imply they "only" target Asia is a gross exaggeration.