My personal recommendation would be to wait.  The gTablet ships with
Android 2.2 which was not designed with tablets in mind.  The first
Android OS version to be designed for tablets was Android 3.0 (aka
Honeycomb) and it often feels like a prolonged beta test.  Honeycomb
was a nasty hack to get a tablet out to compete with the iPad2 and
will never run on a cellphone.  Also Google intentionally never open
sourced the Android 3.x codebase.  Thus any third party replacement
ROMs for your tablet will either be based on Android 2.x (bad) or
horrible hacks of binary "ports" from a Honeycomb tablet (worse).

Android 4.0 (aka Ice Cream Sandwich) will be coming out in the next
couple months.  It has a new UI that is a more refined version of
ideas introduced into Honeycomb and is intended for both tablets and
cellphones.  It makes major changes to the Android UI and the videos
of it would seem to make Android feel much more polished than before.

A propaganda video showing off some of the new UI feel:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrYZDWuBptI

If you can afford to wait to buy your next tablet or smartphone I'd
wait and make sure it runs Android 4.0+ out of the box.  Plus Google
has announced that Android 4.0 will be open sourced much like Android
2.x is.  The tablet experience is all about the UI.  If you wait you
get a better device with a UI and API set that's had a good year to
bake in some new toys.

-- 
Bruce A. Locke
[email protected]
_______________________________________________
Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group                  http://mhvlug.org
http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug

Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm)                         MHVLS Auditorium
  Nov 2 - POV-Ray and The Relativity Train
  Dec 7 - An Intro to Chef
  Jan 4 - Recovering the Brownfield: Revitalizing Open Source Projects

Reply via email to