Ask Paul: March 13 (Premium)

Thanks no doubt to Coronavirus, this is a lighter-than-usual Ask Paul to kick off a weekend of hoarding toilet paper and not touching my face.

Android tablets

sabertooth920 asks:

Can you explain why no one can produce a truly excellent Android tablet?

This has always bothered me. I feel like there’s no one answer.

Some may recall that Google made an excellent Android mini-tablet, the Nexus 7, over two generations in 2012-2013, and I was a big fan of those tablets. Of course, as mini-tablets, app makers didn’t have to do anything for their apps to work; phone apps just worked normally on them. And the Nexus 7 certainly suffered from performance rot problems over time.

Moving to a full-sized tablet requires the platform maker, Google, to adapt the OS and developers to adapt their apps to the larger screen real estate. If you look at what Apple did with the iPad, you can see that they adapted iOS to behave somewhat differently on an iPad, and to accommodate both portrait and horizontal orientations. It adapted its own apps to showcase what was possible. And Apple’s developer base, which had seen great success on iPhone and iPod touch, embraced the iPad and its unique capabilities very quickly.

None of that really happened on Android. Part of it is Google’s problem, as it moved slowly to adapt Android and its own apps for tablets. And part of it was the developer base, which has never seemed as engaged to me on Android as is the case on iOS. Too many Android apps were/are phone apps just scaled up to fit the screen at whatever size. And then Google’s own Android tablets, the Nexus 10 and the Pixel C, were both failures.

Google’s eventual response to this was to adapt Chrome OS to run Android apps and to make touch-capable Chromebook convertibles and detachables the new Android tablets. This hasn’t worked too well, either, and Google’s Surface-like Chrome OS tablet/2-in-1, the Pixel Slate, was quickly killed. This past year, Google simply admitted to the reality of its situation and released a relatively inexpensive and mainstream clamshell Chromebook, the Pixelbook Go.

I don’t believe that Google has given up. But its inability to adapt Android to use cases beyond the phone—Android has failed or is failing on tablets, wearables, IoT, home entertainment set-top boxes, and more—is troubling. It’s also not unique: Microsoft suffered a similar problem trying to make Windows succeed over many years on non-PC devices.

I wish there was a great Android tablet (or 2-in-1). But right now, the iPad is the only truly great tablet. And I just don’t see that changing.

Galaxy S20 problems

wright_is asks:

I posted elsewhere my problem with the Galaxy S20+. Generally, it is a fine phone, but it hasn’t had that “wow” effect on me, like previous upgrades, I think the 2 problems I have with it, compared to my previous phone, are what blunts my enthusiasm for it. It is a great device, but only a small step forward compared to my previous upgrades.

I have the S20 Ultra, but I assume they’re close enough for a comparison to make sense. I sort of agree about the “wow” factor, though I think one’s impressions of the phone will vary based on what they were upgrading from. Compared to the S8+ that my wife is using, it’s a tremendous upgrade. And I like that the display is almost flat and lacks the fragile overly curved design from the past few years. The camera is fantastic, and it is the first Samsung I’d seriously consider using going forward.

Anyway, the two real problems I have are:

Signal strength, compared to the Huawei, it shows around a quarter of the signal strength and a speed test (0.3mbps down, 0.0 up) was a lot lower than my Huawei in the same location (15 down, 8 up). My wife’s S10 is the same, her old P-Smart had much better reception (and she is on a different network)

I saw your complaint about this, but I’m not sure what to make of it. I’ve never really benchmarked the cellular data speed, but then I’ve also never experienced any bandwidth issues. It’s been rock solid since I got it. I assume you only checked this because it seemed slower?

and the fingerprint reader – my S20+ reader works about 20% of the time (i.e. I often have to press my thumb on the screen 4 – 5 times before it registers, or I have to use the PIN, sometimes it will work straight away), my wife’s S10 works 0% of the time, 100% failure rate.

As I’ll be writing in my review, the S20 Ultra has two biometric sign-in choices, and while I like that you can use both, neither works very well. The in-display fingerprint reader is “good,” I guess, but not as good as the ones I’ve used with Huawei and OnePlus; it’s very similar (if not identical) to that in the Note 10+. And the facial recognition is likewise middling; it can’t recognize me when I’m wearing sunglasses even though I tried to train it for that. I wouldn’t put my success rate with either as low as 20 percent, but both are bad enough to be frustrating. It’s certainly nowhere close to being in the same class as iPhone.

So, have you noticed a signal difference between the Samsung and the other phones you have tested?

No.

And this is an area where I should notice problems because I’m on Google Fi and the S20 can’t switch between networks like a fully Fi-compatible phone can. But it’s been great in this regard. I even used it exclusively when I drove home from Boston over almost four hours last week. No issues.

And, is there a trick to getting the fingerprint reader to work reliably? (Could it be because of the SARS-COV-2 virus and all the extra hand washing that the fingerprint is not as easy to read through glass? The Huawei is still 100% accurate, with its rear sensor.)

Also, no. It’s just not very good, and I end up typing my PIN more than I want even though I have both facial and fingerprint recognition registered.

Sorry I don’t have better news in either case.